Man, my parents were cool as shit about this. And I think it had really good consequences for me later on, like in college.
Sex was positively viewed, but strict about protection (rightly so), and drugs were described as a spectrum with weed being very low, and the scary drugs (heroine) being very scary. They were honest about wanting me to wait for drugs and booze till I was more adult, but let me have a few parties with friends where everyone crashed at their house. It was super fun, and very badass feeling. I got to college and was like … Meh? On partying.
Definitely not the only way to go about it, but the honesty helped me weigh consequences of it all a bit better, I think.
What you just described is the absolute dream I have for all adolescents everywhere.
Society (from my perspective) doesn’t seem to realize that people grow way more by experience than they ever will by age.
You got your partying out of the way as an adolescent and were way less inclined towards it during college which it’s easy to argue was a way more important phase of your life.
Drugs: Never mentioned. There were anti-drug ads on TV 24/7.
Sex: Never mentioned. Well, by the time they got around to having “the talk” we asked them if they needed to know anything. Mom laughed, dad looked embarrassed, and that was that.
Don’t do drugs
Don’t do sex
I’m indigenous Canadian and both my parents survived residential school in the 50s. Residential school for indigenous people back then was forced on us, especially for children where they were systematically abused by Christian missionaries. Mom was not so abused but dad was terribly traumatized to the point where sex and anything sexual or remotely sexual was forbidden. Just about everything in life to him meant burning in everlasting hell. Drugs were no different but less so.
So our indigenous Christian home just dealt with it all by forbidding everything.
How did it turn out?
I have seven siblings and we all ended up with alcohol and drug addiction by the time we were teenagers. I cleaned up early and I’ve been sober for 29 years, all my other siblings never fell off the deep end (thank God) but I’m the only one who got officially ‘sober’.
I didn’t have kids but everyone else in my family did before anyone was married. One of my younger brothers picked up the slack for me by having children with four women. I have over 40 nieces and nephews, some by the family, some brought in, some married in and others illegitimate.
We’re all one big happy family … but we’re all gonna burn in hell. Lol
“I don’t really get why people get so up in arms about discussing it, but Sex is fun. Be careful though, those swimmers are persistent little fuckers.”
“Drugs feel good and you think everything is fine until one day you look up and realize it all went wrong years ago. I can’t stop you, but I really hope you’ll choose not to try them.”
I think both worked out well. I’m sex positive and I generally avoid drugs because it just isn’t worth the risk of finding that one substance that totally ruins my life.
Neither sex nor drugs were ever discussed…at least not by my parents.
Same here
My parents both openly smoked weed in front of my from a young age. I was told that as long as I was home by curfew and didn’t come home in a cop car they were fine with me doing basically whatever cuz they knew I wasn’t a complete moron (my dad worked in the school system and knew all the ACTUAL problem children really well, they hated me because of that so I never got to be a hoodlum lol), though my nugs WERE taken from me at 15 because “you were dumb enough to let us catch you with it” which is fair but I say they were out and bumming off of me without saying so lol
As for sex I got a quick talk about using a condom after my dad caught my GF and I doing it, but otherwise it was left mostly unsaid cuz my sex Ed wasnt trash
If you do this, invisible sky god will make your life terrible and you will rot in imaginary pain forever more after you die.
Me: so… Just like now?
This was exactly my experience. Extreme repression of my sexuality via religion.
Shamed for every impulse. Shamed for masturbation (Not by them of course, they had someone from the church do it. I guess the idea of doing it themselves was just too fucking awkward for them). Shamed for porn (Back when porn was waiting 20 min for an image of tits to load).
It is an overall tenet of my advocacy that this cannot possibly be right. We all hit puberty, all we want to do is fuck as we are driven towards it directly by nature.
Maybe there is a societal need to curate that impulse, I can accept that. But not like this. Not through guilt, shame, and fear.
I was born in the 80s. Mom was a teacher, Dad worked in IT.
Both conversations were not especially made out to be a… ok listen carefully we’re going to talk about this now. They were not made out to be a big deal, just happened naturally.
It was part of everyday life, if the subject arised it was not ignored, we were kept up to date on news and when we hadl questions about any subject, we always had an answer, we were encouraged to think critically about subjects being politics, sex or drugs, didn’t matter.
At the time my country was going through a very serious drug crisis, so it was impossible to ignore.
Fortunately the decriminalisation of all drugs lowered the drug problem significantly, but I was in college at that point.
Non-existent
Mine was WASPy, so pretend it doesn’t exist.
I’m Italian. School explains all there is to know about sex and stuff, so I never needed the “talk” with my parents. I also had a bigger brother that would tell me everything way before the time lol
About drugs, I think I already got everything from TV? I certainly didn’t need my parents explaining to me that drugs are bad.
EDIT: For those curious about how/when SexEd is taught in school in Italy: I had SexEd in my 5th year of elementary school (10yo), 3rd year of middle school (13 yo) and again in high school (I think it was the second year, so 15 yo, and then in my fourth year as well, when I was 17 yo). My parents were required to consent to the school teaching us SexEd only in elementary school; no consent form was required from middle school onwards, it was mandatory.
And I think that drugs were discussed in school as well. I think in middle and high school, around the same time as SexEd.
Basically Mr Mackey’s “drugs are bad mkay” speech.
As for sex, it was never talked about at all.
Just say no
My folks were hippies. Did the woodstock thing and all. I grew up around them smoking pot at parties and stuff. When Nancy Reagan told us all it was bad my parents told me she was full of shit, that smoking dope sometimes was as ok as drinking a few beers and that when I moved out of the house I was free to do what I wanted.
As for sex, pretty much the same thing. Wrap your willie, wait till you’re an adult, and don’t do it here.
I’m as honest with my kids about drugs now.
don’t do it here.
You mean they told you you could fuck but just not in the home? How on earth is that productive?
Sure, go fuck in your car and risk catching shit from the cops or go get blown behind the library at school and risk getting expelled (real story that actually happened to a friend of an old gf).
I agree. We let the kids have privacy in the house, there is nothing wrong with having a sexual relationship with your boyfriend/girlfriend, you don’t need to be embarrassed by that, it just needs to be private. They also know to KNOCK if our door is closed.
It was more like when you move out and are on your own.
I have the same experience as the first few commenters. These things were never talked about in my home.
How can we as a society justify refusing to educate the youth about these things and leaving them to haphazardly stumble through the same mistakes that we all made?
My mum at least asked ‘do you learn about this stuff in school?’, to which i awkwardly said yeah. We did get some pretty good classes on bodies, the biology of reproduction, and contraception. I even remember having a test on contraceptives in biology class.
Unfortunately, it was very cis-het only. I had to figure out by myself that I should be using protection during sex even if both participants had a vulva.
As for drugs, it never occurred to my mum that anything other than alcohol and nicotine could be relevant to us. She did well on keeping me from smoking just by telling me about her experience as a smoker and how hard it was to quit. I kept my drinking and weed smoking from her pretty well because even a mention would make her angry. To be fair, as an adult I understand she had some trauma from her mum being an alcoholic.
