In recent years, disturbing reports have emerged of children undergoing gender transitions at school behind their parents’ backs. In one instance, a 13-year-old Florida girl met secretly with school personnel to discuss her gender transition, how she’d like to be addressed, whether she’d prefer to bunk with the boys on overnight trips, and so on. In another, also in Florida, a twelve-year-old girl met secretly with a school counselor over four months to discuss her gender identity and her religious family (whom the counselor deemed “unsupportive”); the girl twice tried to commit suicide at school. Understandably, stories like these are making parents increasingly sensitive about their rights regarding their own children.

Florida’s recently passed Parental Rights in Education bill reinforces parents’ “fundamental rights to make decisions regarding the upbringing of their children.” The bill requires the school to inform parents in cases where children “come out” at school as trans and prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, requiring any instruction thereafter to be “age appropriate.” Despite opponents’ efforts to frame this as an attack on gay and transgender people, a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, in a national poll it was supported by 61 percent of registered voters: 70 percent of Republicans, 58 percent of independents, and 55 percent of Democrats.

As Governor Ron DeSantis argued in defense of the law, schools should not “be a playground for ideological disputes.” Let kids be kids — shielded from such disputes — and ensure that teachers teach only the approved curriculum. This is sound thinking. The trouble is that parental rights also demand responsibilities, and when it comes to sex education, many parents have already outsourced the imparting of values and moral guidance to schools. Content to trundle along with the status quo, such parents have disempowered themselves and given radical activists a foothold.

It is no coincidence that states with the greatest respect for parental rights have the least interventionist approaches to sex education. Florida, for instance, has no requirement for sex education but does require its health education in grades six through twelve to emphasize “awareness of the benefits of sexual abstinence as the expected standard and the consequences of teenage pregnancy.” In 2021, before the Parental Rights in Education Act, DeSantis signed a law requiring schools to notify parents of their right to have their child opt out of any sex education offered and to inform them of the curriculum and materials on the district’s website homepage.

To say that schools have a role to play in sex education isn’t controversial. But since the 1980s, there have been two competing visions about when and how schools ought to go about it. One view is that schools should play only a supporting role, sticking to the biological and physiological facts. First, what puberty is, later, how babies are made. And that anything beyond that ought to be about sexual risk avoidance, warnings about unintended pregnancy and disease, and the promotion of abstinence in youth as the only certain way of avoiding these outcomes.

Another view is that sex education ought to be more comprehensive. In addition to basic biology and abstinence, topics include contraception, abortion, consent, sexual orientation, pleasure, masturbation, and, most recently, transgender identity. The progressive Guttmacher Institute calls this “a rights-based approach” that “recognizes that information alone is not enough,” asserting that “young people need to be given the opportunity to acquire essential life skills and develop positive attitudes and values.” But whose values are these?

The approach of some states, and the preferred approach of American parents, appears to be some incoherent blend of the two. This approach is satirized in the movie Mean Girls when the gym teacher, Coach Carr, offers a sex-ed lesson in which he says, “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die!” and then, passing around a box of condoms, adds, “Now everyone take some rubbers.” But if abstinence truly is the preferred result, such an approach is manifestly self-defeating. First, instructing teenagers in contraception encourages them to disassociate sex from its natural consequences and removes it from the context of adult commitment. Second, it encourages parents to neglect their role as mentors, offering the false reassurance that the stakes have been lowered by a state-sponsored program of harm reduction.

Of course, parents, who tend to know their children best, will have their own views about the appropriate age and circumstances for a sexual relationship. But it is their role, and not the school’s, to decide what these are and then guide their children. For parental-led sex education, abstinence promotion is the superior school model, since it is easier for parents to add their own information and values to it than it is for them to subtract unwanted information and values from comprehensive sexuality education.

A common complaint is that abstinence education “doesn’t work.” While it’s true that states with abstinence-only sex education have some of the highest rates of teen births, states with comprehensive sex education have some of the highest rates of teen abortions. Besides, as Trevor Stammers, a British medical doctor and bioethicist writing 20 years ago, explained:

Any total abstinence programme will be at a disadvantage when compared with “safer sex” education because abstinence, unlike condom use, runs against the tide of peer pressure. Much, if not most, adolescent sexual activity is about the expression of non-sexual needs. First intercourse is rarely about love; it is often about peer pressure and the need to conform to it. The strongest predictor of frequency of sexual intercourse among teenagers is the influence of peers. Effective promotion of abstinence involves equipping teenagers to resist such pressure.

Beyond imparting the basic facts and discouraging sexual risk-taking, it is not the school’s job to intervene in the sex lives of adolescents, which presumably develop outside of school, on their parents’ watch.

Ours is a culture of low expectations. The conventional wisdom tells us that it’s inevitable that teenagers won’t wait. But is that true? Today, fewer high schoolers are having sex as compared with previous generations. According to the 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Study, fewer than 40 percent of American high schoolers have ever had sexual intercourse, a decline of more than 15 percentage points since the 1990s. Not only are high schoolers having less sex, but they are having it later and accruing fewer lifetime sexual partners than was true of earlier generations. Generation Z appears to be moving away from the values and assumptions of “sex positivity” (the idea that anything consensual is good).

The fall of Roe v. Wade, and the end to the notion of constitutionally guaranteed abortion, presents a renewed opportunity to connect the dots between sexual behavior and consequences. Guy Shepherd, writing in Spectator World, suggested that parents talk to their “sons and daughters about the need for shared sexual responsibility.” So far, so good — but what Shepherd had in mind was that “men should get reversible vasectomies . . . early, as a form of male birth control.” Are we so despairing of the human capacity for self-mastery that we would surgically impair young men’s reproductive systems?

What’s so depressing is that parents don’t seem to realize that if they only try, they really can make all the difference in setting standards. Stammers, the bioethicist, summarized a 1999 study of over 400 adolescents that “clearly showed that where parents, especially mothers, were the major source of sexual information, their adolescents’ sexual behaviour was less risky.” Indeed, “those adolescents who reported discussing a greater number of sex-based topics with their mothers were more likely to express conservative attitudes about sex and were less likely to have engaged in it.”

Abstinence before marriage is a high standard, one that most Americans appear to have abandoned. But at the very least, abstinence while young is a value that parents could encourage in their own kids. According to a 2014 study by the abortion provider Planned Parenthood, 61 percent of parents reported wanting young people to wait to have sex until they were ready to handle the responsibilities that come from having a sexual relationship, and 45 percent supported waiting until marriage. And yet only 52 percent reported ever talking about these values with their child.

Most school-aged children don’t have sex. Most parents don’t think that they should. And yet we’re supposed to believe it necessary that parents resign themselves to the idea that adolescent sex is “inevitable” and then hand over their children to be formed by progressive activists at school. As we’ve seen with transgenderism, this is a dangerous move. If parents don’t take ownership of their responsibilities, they risk losing their rights as well.