Sex education can be one of the more sensitive aspects of parenting.  Parents all know it’s important, but don’t all know how to do it.  Even when your children are in sexuality education programs that you like and think are effective, there is still a lot of support that can and should be provided in [...]

Tonight I am preparing for a class tomorrow morning on gender.  I start all my college classes with a song that is relevant to the topic, and my dear partner and I were playing around with music for tomorrow, including The Kink’s Lola, Vitamin C’s Girls Against Boys, Beyonce’s If I Were a Boy, and [...]

Dear Friends,
I’ll be frank: I understand that the young people in your family are probably very busy, far too busy to enroll in another class.  I know your kids are going to be tapped-to-the-extreme this year.  I also know that most - not all, but most - young people have an absolute need to have [...]

Some weeks ago, I wrote a little post where I outlined three topics I wanted to revisit in longer posts, but didn’t have the time at that exact moment to write about.  This weekend, someone called me on it and demanded that I write about sexual harassment in middle schools.  (Okay, demanded is extremely harsh [...]

I also, as many of you know, teach human sexuality at the college level.  Many of these students come into my classroom with vast misunderstandings of the reproductive system (”Isn’t it true that every time you jump or sit down hard you kill one of the eggs in your ovaries?”) and barely any experience with [...]

I have a Middle School class starting next week, and still have a few open spaces.
This class covers a comprehensive sexuality program, and will focus on thinking deeply about sexual decision making.  We will start with some basics, including language, anatomy, gender, and the reproductive process and move into appropriate Internet interactions, contraceptives, STDs, and [...]

My Ph.D. is in Educational Psychology.  My time in graduate school was relatively evenly split between researching, reading, and talking about (1) how teenagers grow and develop, particularly around issues of sex and sexuality, and (2) how people learn, and how to support their learning in the most effective ways possible.  This prepared me pretty [...]

On of the activities I do with my middle school students is have them role-play saying “No” to sexual advances and requests for a date.  I do this not because I think they are in the thick of needing to say no to would-be-suitors and would-be-sexual partners, but because they will eventually be in the [...]

Last weekend I took 10 middle school students to buy condoms.
None of the students wanted to come to class, which was unusual for them.  Their parents pushed them, made them come.  The students told me and my co-teacher: No way.  We’re not going to buy condoms.  The students asked me what they should say if [...]

Hello Friends!
Fall is fast approaching, and mornings are finally getting a little cooler here in Austin.  That means my newest parenting class on adolescent sexuality will be starting up soon!  (More on the specifics towards the end of this e-mail.)
Adolescent sexuality has loomed large in the news this last week, with the announcement of rabid-anti-comprehensive-sex-education [...]