Beyond the Birds and Bees: Consent-Based Sex Ed

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha on kbr preserve that education in an internet age and why we need to focus more on teaching kids no means no and yeah i mean yeah i'm kate mcintyre on today's program we'll visit without their wives friends off at the lawrence psychologist who specializes in teens and young adults and the co author of the popular weekly column double take back your grandchild latest project is consent based sex education parenting teens in an internet age in just a minute we'll give that would not aware of the first letter that the mode with the facts confirm him by jack howard of the job it is not enough to you will it was like oh my god that again and believe in god i believe in him and that's the truth because the

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swear a cautionary tale that once you get spun my mind this most thai now's the time to set things right ten new patients this is really shouldn't happen in this day a nation is thomas diego county traditionally embrace them i tried it a lot nice nice nice nice nice

can fan camp them by jack howard and dean downs setting the mood for today's kbr presents on consent based sex education i'm with dr wes craven shot is a licensed psychologist who specializes in teens and young adults and the co author of the popular weekly column double take as always wears it's great to see you is nice to be here today to date myself here but i remember my own sex education but what i learned from my parents and in school and the lesson was beside the mechanics the lesson was wait till you're married period yeah this is of course the standard abstinence model and what is interesting about it is that it is the research done on this indicates that ninety five percent ninety five percent of all adults living today had premarital sex

and you played a new use but ninety five percent of all people living today in america had sex outside of marriage and that includes seventy year old people and so on and so on and end you we go back to the puritans remember them they were filled with abstinence most of them are pregnant when they got married yeah so this is somewhat of a mythology and i don't i was acid a very conservative show religiously they show a few years ago when the first book came out and i was dreading the question i knew it was coming and it was really a good interview team and she said to me as a husband wife and she said to me so have you completely given up on abstinence and i said no i just don't count on it anymore and that and it was funny because there was a pause and she said wow i never thought of it that way before and that's really what is for people

who will and who really have a code they wanna follow a religious code or personal code i think that is it great decision it's just a tiny minority instead we make our sex education trip for political reasons i think aimed towards this tiny minority that ignore all of the other people who will be sexually active smoking seventy five percent of them by the time they are or nineteen what's interesting is we think of this as a fairly new cultural phenomenon and the evidence isn't just isn't that ninety five percent statistic suggested but the and the thing for today for young people today that i think is important to understand i will get questions on the air in my office in email how do i know when my teen a sexually active and you can see some pretty funny responses to that i did it show in st louis a great day st louis get the the woman interviewing me said i just i always think i can't sing

and i know you can imagine the look i gave her on the air and i said well there's a there's an image and this isn't really the way to go and it is the truth is in high schools they're kind of three groups and people will see the statistics and they're fairly cut and dried and you may have to assume in the statistics that people are telling the truth i think that's probably not true i think most of the research on teenagers about things that are not socially acceptable you're pretty inaccurate results wait so you saying that teenagers under report or over report i sitting under report there were there was a steady and any good example recent study out of canada you know they do good research appears those canadians and it said that forty percent that they were that there'd been an increase in boys using pornography and that they had discovered that forty percent of boys now reported teenage boys now recorded using refused and this is just absurdly low heat ask any teenage

girl don't tell you how many boys use our fear of what the map by the women ever ever seen news provider that's just not something you're going to say yes to if the interviewer is sitting down on document is given your mother to say yes the drug literature is the same way the drug test the kids take i hear them they tell me oh we took the drug test this week and oh my gosh and everybody was laughing about it in half the people said they'd used every drug in the world and the other half said they'd never just trying it all and these years not good ways to gather data so if we start let's just pretend it is and go with the statistics we have another about half of kids by age sixteen have had that you sex than we know by the time the nineteen that goes up to about seventy five percent so was that ignores the real problem with that even if it's accurate is it ignores the group of people who have not said they fed veteran sex and we have to say woman ok what's going on with that group and what i see

clinically and again i'm robin at this for twenty two years now what i see is there is the group of kids who are having sex in high school and there is the group of kids who want to be having sex in high school but they are in the dating pool yet and yes then you have the small group i've known and worked with him too we're choosing are actively choosing not to be sexually active and i am all for that that's the essence of consent is choosing to do what you need to get well if we assume instead that the half of the people at sixteen who haven't had sex chose not to wear deluding ourselves and return insulate ourselves from the reality that makes us think well you know my kid's probably immigrant if your child is in the dating pool actively in the dating pool you need to assume that there is a high much higher than average likelihood that they are or will be sexually active and if you accept that with those exceptions of

the abstinence code people then you have to really respond to that with a clearer message because his parents are not competing with the sexual messages in society right now they are putting their kids and a dramatic disadvantage let's talk about that competition that parents are under or teachers who teach sex education and what kind of competition do they face in getting their message across that this is what's so interesting the legislature and the committee has been in kansas has been trying to study the idea of making a sex crime to put up certain posters about sexuality and this is such a non issue most of the discussion of abstinence education are comprehensive sex education is just really political that we need all just accept comprehensive sex education the true comprehensive sex education has defined him the literature is never gonna happen in schools let me just interrupt you for a second what exactly do you mean when he's

a comprehensive sex education and that's a good question is so what we think that means as a society when people say well we need to teach comprehensive sex education in the schools we think that means learned to wear a condom or you know talk about how to say no or something or how to say yes it's much broader than that true comprehensive sex education has represented for example by the unitarian faith ever single howl our whole lives it stands for o w l that's comprehensive sex education they sit down and walk people through every aspect of sexuality as well as relationship building budgeting i mean it is comprehensive i had a young person kind of walking me through the process about that the other day they really take that seriously but that it's talking about being gay and lesbian and transgendered that's part of comprehensive sex education these are all things that cannot happen in the schools i don't know that i want them to happen in the schools because i think

that this is based on a lot of values that we need to teach his parents to her kids so the basic mechanics are about all you're ever going to get so that dialogue between these two sides is more political than it is practical and thus what falls back to us as parents to really figure out how to do this and as we all know that's not the easiest discussion for parents it's interesting you say that because i have three children who are eight young adults and while i feel pretty comfortable talking to them about sex they are extremely uncomfortable listening to me talk about it or or engaging in a conversation on how can you bridge that gulf of discomfort i think that's such a great point and has just recently we had on our website we have our consent based sex education project and one of the things that we did katie deal former co author and i did was to commission a film by

two teenagers in florida that i found on twitter there an actual dating couple there sixteen and they have the forty one thousand followers on instagram because people like to watch them being a couple i like to watch and being a couple i think it's delightful you didn't see enough of that and they actually go do things together which i think is needed steven mccord so we hadn't shoot this film in which we have been asked teenagers about sex and sex education it's about a seven minute film and the teenagers do pretty good with equations mccall told me that she was surprised how easily they responded to those questions good guess what the question was the state fell apart what the number one answer to this question was the question was what would you tell your parents about teen sexuality and the best dancer and that it was by a wistful young woman who happens to be in a dating relationship she's about fourteen or fifteen at the

best answer is that we got was i would tell them it is not valued anymore and that was moving and true and brought that it he will be surprised when you see the film how many people just couldn't answer the question one of them did actually one of the girls actually says well i'd tell him that fifty percent of kids are having sex which i love or she got that that's actually the right number shaffer courage or so kids you're correct it's what we seem to find is that even when parents get up the courage to have the conversation they maybe haven't laid the foundation for that over the years in which they can really talk with kids in the kid's immediately respond with oh yeah this is the same thing as talking about the you know the j hawks or whatever it is we talk what i had never been to the fed's target depends on how happy you are with the season so

if it hit an eye and i think it really can be if you eat the reason kids and i and i we could go back and analyze your life came with her life that ideally if you start out urine and you're talking about relationships age appropriate kinds of topics and you work your way up to it become the natural conversation and i know parents and kids who absolutely can do that and it's not in an uncomfortable situation we did a show a couple years ago with kendra schwartz and her mother hee and they had a very good conversation as did her debt with her about this topic and he was just as tex but perfect as it can be in the shorts is laid that foundation early in their lives so they really was like talking about the jerry cox a verse and there's baby jane can we talk about contraception this disc and natural progression or careless i just wish everyone could see case

the sixth but it's theater of the mind just use your imagination and so yeah to date clearly have a much more casual of protest to sexual relationships then than perhaps we would like them to war and then we think we had in the past what you think are the long term implications of that for us as a society yeah i think this is really the question before us right now and it's super easy to be you know apocalyptic about everything if you go back and read things that parents were saying about kids in the twenties or the turn of the century or the fifties or any of that you know they're all going straight down the tubes that so i always i'm trying to be very careful about that but it's really your other things are kind of irrefutable marriage it's a tremendous irony that were sitting around talking about gay marriage right now that the straight people don't wanna get married at this age there they don't foresee that day in a way that is different than

it was twenty years ago and even kids and where this seems to come from and were just beginning to i think see the next turn of this is if kids are kind of afraid of relationships i change my thinking just this year and how to approach this and we're going to have a column called out now i think a week or two ago where we talk about this idea that it i'm kind of done with this we're gonna put a label on it or i don't want be in a relationship or whatever very real relationship i'm telling kids right now you are in a relationship with this person you're having sex with you just are having the rules set up and do what has happened in the dialogue is that despite saying we're not a relationship makes it ok dead not have any sense of obligation or ethics or roll system with each other and that is really a problem and young people are fit responding fairly well to this idea that i had

come across with now that we just need to say yes talk and is a relationship especially if you're talking exclusively which is part of the dating procedure and to say this isn't for real just cause we are calling ourselves the couple or that isn't important is just denying reality and i think if we don't help kids think of relationships differently they're going to have a really hard time down the road because this is practice this is how they're practicing for adulthood and if it's i don't wanna put a label on it ten years down the road we may wish of a mature and of that but that's not what the trends historically told us if we make some sense that at mt each relationship or young adult relationship is going to include a sexual relationship does that make at least some young people are much less willing to even enter the dating pool well this gets into the question of the people who

are having sex in the people who want to be there is a group of people who flock who are reluctant and do not want to feel compelled to be sexually active just to be in the dating pool and i'm with them that that isn't considered we talk about in the book that there's a and it's more than no means no and consent is and it's more than yes mean just that there's an idea of emotional consent and this is what do i need to do what is my choice and today if you are choosing to be absent if you for any reason if you just simply want to put that off for a couple years or you want to be in a relationship that you see has exclusive and longer term before you're sexually active which is my favorite in a way of looking at it to do then you may be taking yourself out of them dating pool and there may have to be a conscious decision to really just be friends not friends with benefits but that just friends with people during this period i do know people who are doing that

and i don't count those amongst the abstinence based people because they are not saying i'm not gonna have sex someday they're saying i have a plan for this but i'm gonna follow and if parents kids can learn from those kids and we'll be talking a lot about them in the boats then they have a better matchup because you can say it requires they're to be an authentic choice and if you are the parent of a child who is legally of age to have sex in the state that sixteen and fifteen ended the romeo and juliet statute and you're trying to control that you're trying to ground them if you catch them or you're trying to prevent them from doing these things one doesn't mean to do this but what they're doing is conveying to the child the idea of an other orientation in who controls that trout sexuality and the logical outgrowth of that and i've seen it in young adults all the time is to see your sexuality as controlled by the partner once

you're out in the dating pool it's a parent's wanna be careful how much they are asserting this idea that they are in charge of their child's actuality it backfires in some ways that even i have been surprised to say that what you mean people who even have a domineering partner dave van date someone who basically follows the family model and says your sexual expression belongs to me and if you instead teach your child well park a few good example there's this thing called the feminist rules of dating my daughter out now and it's a shirt and i don't know that include a perfectly that it's based on this idea of this sort of now down home jokey t shirt that says the euro until she the person if they touched the dakar something crazy that this shirt says the rules for dating my daughter i don't you don't make the rules

i don't make the rules she's innocent roles and that is both pragmatic and a good way to approach things now does that mean parents are just sit back and you know good luck kids no not in the slightest but if you become an adviser in that process and the core question you have which were in a way this all out in the book is are you doing what you mean to do it is this there are you intentionally your choice is recognizing us any choice and really working to teach a child how to say yes to sex which everybody take a deep breath it's not as bizarre as it sounds or teaching them how and when you might choose to have sex as a way of then giving them an authentic choice and only when you know you have that choice can you really say no because a whole lot of kids go and have sex cause they were told now or because they want to be in their dating pool or because they think that's the socially crippling to do or they were

they were being pressured into it right and ann what's funny is parrot we all can i have this idea that kids are pressured into sacks and i think that is a that is a nineteen eighty seven it and it's much more complex than that but few this think of ourselves as parents pressuring our kids into sex and the best thing you can do to pressure a kid into sex is tall and you can't do that and i wish i had a buck for every kid who's gone straight out just to say i'm different than you are i'm gonna do what i want to do and be and regretful of it later i we we would have a bagel pizza in here we would have sung the piles of bucks because it is a very common problem and that's not consent that's not emotional consent to just do the opposite of what somebody wants you to do let's talk about consent based education what exactly does that mean for you as a parent or for you as a teacher will we have really come to this parallel with a lot of other educators around the country in the campuses or were

clique right now we have concerns this one and many others with concerns about the consent and this is the most literal meaning of consent is that people weren't or saying i've been sexually assaulted and so that's the old no means no well that just gets us about an inch into a thousand mile journey because the next line of that is only yes means yes and of course we support that idea to this is the eddie of enthusiastic consent that you need to have someone who's claire clearly able to consent and fuel is happily doing so but we see this going much further it's it's become apparent to me it's a bigger issue than that and that's this issue of emotional to accept the idea that kids are not thinking through that decision in part to be rebellious in part to join the crowd in part to be a part of the dating pool and my least favorite one of all kinds are super drunk dating in lake high school and college is as alcohol

fueled as an indie race car and a great analogy they have more rocks than in the two and this is it throws everything into have a mess i can give many examples of young women who have not attained consent to be sexually active with a partner and halved overtly done that to undercut the dating pool and of course i can give you terrible examples of young men who have overridden partners consent or not taken into account that she is not capable of consent and so on so we know that but we think it's gonna start very young like the other day we were talking about this and somebody asked me how do you teach this to young kids and i said you don't teach it as a central issue you teach it in how are people are involved with each other where they're animals like we have cats and if the cap with a singer we say the cancer saying no you mean in a wannabe hell and the cats and give their consent

or say doubt and we've done that since her kids were three years old or the ideas it each unit kids don't wanna be heard don't hound of people have a hard time with it in the sink that some sort of antisocial behavior it isn't and how many times have you heard oh good and gladys the kerosene un when you know your child doesn't want to give a lot of the kiss exactly and this is creating and other orientation about one's body and one of the best examples of this i ever have it and it's quite a story that her client who had on this blue kind of mini boyfriend relationship an eighth grade he was a couple years older than her or you're older than her and debt when away to college and she was said jr and he came back to judge a forensics turner and saw her sitting there and friends that they came over gleefully and threw his arms around her and is hanging inside her garner well she doesn't like to be touched that what fearsome sensory issues and she courageously asked him not to do that

and that and i know from young women that takes a lot of courage and he said why not she said i just don't like to be touched that when he said whoa did something happened to you as a child she said no he says what this is something wrong with that she said was as she was crying but this time in telling me the story and she said i ended up in the bathroom sobbing so i set to work quite an understatement because i didn't at the time and i said you knew he wasn't trying to be sexual when you knew was trying to hurt you what bothered you that much about it and she said i just felt like wow i know didn't count for anything that is not the story about sex at all but it sure is a story about consent and what's tough in that story as she does everything right she's says now she says as she explains know and

young men have a tendency to be hurt when their friendship is rebuffed and he defended his ego he could fix that in ten seconds and said i'm so sorry i didn't realize that forgive me and she'd been his best friend chip or biology she'd get in it but he didn't he started picking at her and try to find what's wrong with her that she doesn't want to be touched that way and that's a metaphor for a lot of dating relationships and we have to really teach kids at that level what consent is about and how to get it and when not to what advice do you give to young people about about consent and how to assert their concern really the first thing you gotta do is to help them figure out what they mean to do and on one hand this seems obvious and on the other hand it seemed calm radical because if you're asking someone ok what you really mean to do in this situation you're saying the choice is up to you and as we talked about earlier that's hard for some parents to realize

ultimately they don't practically have control over at fifteen year old's body what they can do what we try to do in our office is to get them thinking about that choice and saying you know it is an authentic choice and the more that kids feel him empowered to make the choice the more likely the choice will be a wise one now have i seen kids plow ahead and i've said hey is this which really means yes i can see it in their eyes that it's not but in the end sometimes the learning that comes from that is more valuable long term than just getting him not to do this thing i've had many examples so we talk about what does it mean to do and then once you're clear about that you also want be clear about going into your encounter with somebody the worst time to make a decision about whether you want to do something a sexual with someone is in the middle of doing some sexual with someone

and not only does that get people's signals crossed up it that causes hurt feelings and it causes incidents to occur that people are they're not satisfied with later and so we talk about all that and communication one of the good things that kids are denied now is this whole thing we care about talk and talk and is this is a new interview for the date and you maybe talk and finance and then you're talking exclusively which means you're only talking romantically to one person and i like the idea behind this because it's a lot of that goes on over text messaging are now snap chat and people think that's terrible well it really isn't getting to know somebody refer billy or in written form has a long tradition in our country people and in our human civilization people rope to each other and this forces people to actually ask some questions and to get to know each other and it is a common question it's almost a hundred percent the time someone and it doesn't always have to be the guy is gonna say

free to have sex with me and the guy says that very early in the conversation i know people who asked that is that my calling card washed are you a sexual person which is such a dumb question because who isn't a sexual person but in that discussion they're asking do i have a chance to succeed on the road now that sounds pretty rude when you just hear it this way but isn't it better to get a clear up for and that's really my main interest in you and it's that gives someone authentic choice to say well you know you're going to have to wait and find out or i don't really reveal that information five minutes into our relationship so the clarity of communication is a big part of consent and it's also part of the next step in teaching kids is that you rarely have consent when alcohol is involved and i don't mean they had a beer that's not how anybody seems drink around these parts so the more alcohol that gets into these things the less clear

that choice can be and the less we do what we mean to do and that's pretty much every day of the week in my office some version of that story appears wes in developing this model of consent based education gifted up something you call the plus model was that about yes we really i came to understand that we're going to have to make this easy inaccessible for parents and having done this now undone media for several years trying to come up with a way to communicate that we see that you do get everybody needs a decorative end we also realized we were going have to script things out for people so they could really just read the script and put themselves into it so that something else were working on but all the scripts are based on this plus model and it stands for paws listen understand and be sex positive and the pause is harder to achieve anything because

we're using this plus model in response to what we call difficult teen situation is particularly sexual situations and so today those situations are many and varied historically it's been you found out they were having sex all that's just one of the myriad of possibilities of a child may come out as gay or transgender or lesbian they made be using online explicit content pornography which is a the heavy amount of use nowadays it may find in posting essentially explicit pictures out whether those are what we would call beach pictures or whether they're more so than we've seen more of this so these kinds of difficult situations are our kind of knew they're not something we were looking at when we were younger and so the plus more works with all these things and the first thing you have to do is really take a big old deep breath and if you can't say something constructive in response to the situation by all means graciously excuse yourself and go

pull it together or variation on that if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all exactly just distance yourself for a minute well and i've even say nice isn't necessarily it's constructive because there may be good reasons if your child is posting his or her parts new parts on the internet there's no one nice to say about that but there are some constructive things to say about it in you've got to figure out what those are before you say anything the less she say the less shifted back and it's very easy one of the things we must understand and working with are kids that i have come to understand now doing more work with adults around such a way she's is it is easy to do harm sexually to your kid by saying surprisingly few things that sticks with a kid and treat sexual dysfunction later in her life so the problem isn't just keep it from having sex or don't get pregnant those could be important issues but it's also how i wanna support this kid's developments actually and so you want a pause and think through how is this

going come across and then the lesson they i was listening and that's kind of self explanatory detective listening you're saying ok so help me understand why pornography is interesting to you and the world what what does it mean to you to be a hand sector i thought i'd throw a neutral matches have heard that and that's one that may pop up quite a bit so listen to what the young person is to say them understand the eu isn't just understanding them it's understanding yourself you go to really step back and think why is the street hearing now catching your child in bed with a partner in your house at three thirty in the morning you know it's pretty easy to understand why are upset that once you get done with a pause in the listen and think about what's really my biggest worry here what is happening to me my embarrassed to be scared so that that parent what's happening so

self understanding as well as understanding the trial and then that last letter s sex positive and again that means it doesn't mean anything goes and it's you know what's all buyer kids fifty shades of grey don't worry if their girls they've already read it actually it means to us and say ok i'm not going to judge your choice here or your personhood that and i'm just wanting to know did you mean to do that and you can you kind of have a good dialogue with the kid to have that discussion but honestly take it in my office where people talk to me about things they don't talk in wales about that half the time when i say did you mean to be that the answer is no the young person i saw recently he told me i actually don't know most of the people within sex with and i said i believe you she said no no you don't understand who they were that's how much our coal consumption had been in her

she had had sex over so she didn't mean to do any hair and we had to have some pretty deep conversation about how she got to that point so that's really the core question of sex positive that you know she's had plenty of sex i don't think she would say was positive so that's that's the plus model and we're going to build off of that to really teach how to interact with kids around all of those scenarios and more i'm wondering if part of the reason as parents we're so devoted to this abstinence only model is because that's what we were taught and you just hit on something really important that that be the change pretty rapidly just within the last couple years in terms of education and how we try to educate an express values as well as information to arcades the essence a huge change in its i think it's interesting you bring us up to that we're really in the age group of people who were brought up in a game post sexual revolution here and you would think that we

would really kind of have gotten it together cause i i agree that the absence of models been with us always but likewise there were landmark books written you know the early seventies our bodies ourselves that none of them i think everybody i knew in college have that but absolutely and then there were books like everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask this was a number one bestseller or because it did exactly what the title set and so and yet we have not done a very good job of advancing what was a more enlightened wii u n r yun days to the next generation an old part of what has change so rapidly is absolutely the internet that reason that the subtitle of this book is parenting teens and internet age is because the area is that is the watershed moment and it brings tremendous good to kids it is very they are able to get on there and one some really good

facts and information and decision no models for such wealthy and they're able to get on there and seeing the most extreme that has sexual content in mansion and it would take this approximately four seconds were we to go to click and right now to get on to that material maternal it makes fifty shades of grey look like something for kindergartners kids have this they see it many of them use it many young people expect that kind of behavior in central relationships now and if we're back in the birds and the bees or somebody asked me that whatever happened the birds and the bees and i think i was making twenty seven if what we have to really crafted message that response we as an understanding of what kids are exposed to and for worried about a poster in high school or even what's on hbo right now we're not realizing what kids are tempted to follow up on that

comedy dismayed about fifty shades of grey and what kids are exposed to how do you think material like that and that expectation that this is amusing air quotes here normal sexual behavior and how does that affect our young women and young men okay so we will go and we're going to have to go on another to resume give me the short version so the first thing one has to sort of let go of his society of normal because normal in any psychological study is whatever falls under the bell curve and what is portrayed in fifty shades and i only know this because i'm i have a friend he's friends with your boss or so that she's briefed mammal book has no man in north america this is a field that's not very unusual settle our behavior at this point what is bad and proper what's problematic in the book why the people who were practitioners of of that kind of sexual relationship or do not like the book is because there is no evidence of consent in the book there's apparently a scene where he

violates the say four and she accuses the safe word and he doesn't abide by and this is the scene of great to see him in that community so it and that's the first offering a kind of understand that but in terms of how teenagers can seem any of this material the problem lies in that they are regardless of their perceived sophistication new consumers there people who are just being tossed into the toy store and looking around and seeing all these bright shiny objects and what they're seeing is this kind of content and so they adopt the idea that anything is open and young man particularly at this point are making requests of young women and i will say that it certainly goes the other way around believing that our porch or portrayed in online video content whether that's designed really to work well at this age

as many of those things require tremendous partnership an understanding of each other and their bodies and this is not something kids are necessarily trained to do so that's why it's a problem is kids are really prepared well to respond to a lot of amateur are now when you say that to them and they go like this so they're not they're not open discussion until you say to them i'm not going to be deadly about this you know that i'm not going to tell you it isn't normal to want to do some of these things and when she can get into that kind of sex positive discussion than you can say i'm not sure you meant to do this tell me how you did and there are more stories i can tell you there are allowed on the ear about how that play out wes by your own record you've lived twenty four thousand hours of

face to face counseling with young people how have your own views changed over over the years and years if you have experience autoimmune one man smell like stuff it's a lot of hours now getting it it it is very interesting is like my undergrad degrees in sociology political science and history and so this is like a journey of watching the evolution of the culture from where was in nineteen ninety four where it is in twenty fifteen and it in one sense it is it's great because kids are talking openly about these issues when i started out it just wasn't that common to have this kind of dialogue things were going on and they would pop up and be a surprise today that level of openness is helpful because it gives us an opening to really discuss these kinds of issues that's been great the downside of that is that i don't think we have a vault that you know thats not fair parents have evolved in

one area and very specifically that parents are much better today and dealing with contraception and teenagers protect specifically teenage girls frankly are better contraception this is why the pregnancy rate has dramatically reduced i had four pregnant teenage girls on my caseload at one time in nineteen ninety seven and that has never happened again and it's rare at this point so that has evolved interest in other areas it's been we haven't kept pace with these changes and so that's that's what i've kind of seen is the world changes more rapidly than the adults can hang onto it one of the big changes that i know i've seen over the last couple decades is society's views of gays lesbians transgender especially among young people how does that figure into this equation so it's a big change it i don't know if it's a symptom or a driving force to be honest with you but it is the it is the next big thing and has

been really for the last couple three years today it is just in the time it's taken for one class of students to me through high school it is considered in most communities extremely offensive to bully on the street a person who is in their queer community that is wong and i have so many amusing stories of people like getting together and retaliating against the bully the idleness of the passe issue now and that it's just not correct it's much more socially interesting to to say that you are bisexual were panned sexual or gay lesbian and transgendered it's way more interesting to come out in that way now than it is to be mean to those people and so i think that has been a great change for folks now i'm sure there are listeners to think that's the end of that the civilization as we know it this is an area that still is contentious but for the under thirty crowd isn't contagious anymore this is just these are our friends and our dating

partners and i think we're headed more and more in that direction so that's been a big change because it one cannot make an assumption anymore that their child is just clearly better settle down there or there's an openness now that allows people to make more of a decision about that than just to be kind of automatically assigned who you are how does that figure into consent based education that yes means yes regardless of where your orientation it's quite a significant point historic lee the ag blt key community has has that here or people in my age group and down to about the twenty five year old has really care to this idea that this is kind of preordained and i understand where that came from and i'm not going to dispute it but i know people as adolescents and young adults who are or are saying this is fluid for me this is this organization when tension even gender and

i think one of the best in some people will hate this and sunday all of it i had i think of the best dancers in the day i now ask every young person are you have you identified gay straight you name it and some and one young person of eighteen years of age said to me of the day and on the troubled enough to figure that out yet and on what i think is a great dancer on one hand that does reinforce this idea going through a stage and boy that's the worst thing that's that's not one of the things we suggest you say bigger job of sheer he comes out as gay is well maybe you're going to state each is that at the same time this person recognized i am in the process of figuring this out to myself about how identify and that's where that term is another common term how do i how do you identify so it were moving away from europe or this is pre ordained and into an era where people are exploring and figuring out how they fit in

you know we may see that the majority people continue on to be very straight very vanilla folks and that's just a okay but we're much more accepting now for those who are finding a different path it's a rapidly changing world out there how can we help iran's who are over thirty years old and not part of this age bracket how can we help them adjust to what they need to know to help their keds yes it's if your child is fifteen and you're thirty you very young parent and those do exist but the majority of people who have teenagers are over that age and so this as we know from the statistics the further you get from thirty in the wrong direction the more you are heard that i have a hard time with this and we see this kind of surprised actually that how often i see parents way is a gay or lesbian on a conceptual it's utter a teenager or young adult coming in and they're kind of already he handling it pretty well

i have i've had a few really tough ones but a lot of times this coming out process is much less dramatic than it has been in the past nevertheless the best thing we can do for parents in my view is to prepare them for a wide variety of contingencies that kind of a goal in the book were and hopefully do some videos to that really illustrate this plus model so that parents can go in front of the bureau for driving to work in morning or whatever they need to do you just talk to themselves and cano walked through ok mike trout comes to me and says fine gay big breath com i got it right and you do this ahead of time do it when their cameras on them had a fifth grader the other day disclosed to the family that this individual was gay we're seeing this earlier than you think how am i going to respond that and really you suggest to parents maybe you won't have to deal with that issue or maybe

your kid will never be interested in pornography or any of these things in what we're about it that it's better that you think about it as if it could have been kosher issued in one of those some of those is going to appear if it's nothing other than i am sexually active or i'm planning to be and i'll tell you what the best thing i ever see honestly and this issue is why and if a parent comes in and the trial has come to them and said i am planning to be sexually active i want to go and be on birth control or whatever that parents may feel like they have failed or something that they are a successful parent because they have a child who has faith in them to know the plus model without ever having seen it better west it's always great to talk to you know what's always fun to be here you you were just one of my favorite enough the first for us and such good things to talk

about thank you so much better with the religion out if people to find out more especially parents wanna find out more what resources do you have for that we have we are very interested in this topic right now and so our website is full of programs we've done for four years our kickstarter is near our a plus mom was there at a little slideshow all of that you could find that dr west the comets dr hyphen west dot com a person could sit there for hours listening to all the stuff we have online and we're looking forward to your forthcoming consent based sex education book any idea how soon that will be as we would hope to have it out in the fall that is the plan right now at least the paperback form and then we'll have an audiobook kindle and hardcover we've really have done well in the library sales the sheer with iowa's one to be worried not so we definitely one have that market available let's talk about that but for just a minute you were on this show

last year talking about your previous book i was wanna be where i'm not successful living with add and adhd and how are things going at that great we have been so happy it's that the audiobook has done better since he ever imagined i think people with add like audiobooks because it is the number one selling a book about adhd on audible dot com and has been for a number of weeks and then top originally a book about adhd on amazon but if you don't like audiobooks there's a paperback and a kindle two and it's done very well we've had wonderful exposure across the country and that it's gone better than we ever could have expected and just a disclaimer i read about it up and i didn't know if you were going to tell him i'm pretty sure that your forward is why it had sold so i'm sure that began with friends i have great stuff here for the rest of this hour the

story of the kansas city doctor who rose from a hardscrabble childhood to become a pioneer in the field of heart surgery along with his wife dr william reid is the namesake of the cardiovascular surgery center at the university of kansas medical center he was on the team that performed the first open heart surgery a k u mad back in the nineteen fifties that to reid has just ridden the polls of hope as surgeons memoirs from poverty to prosperity he joins us by telephone from his home in kansas city missouri back to read thank you for joining me today you became a cardiologist in the nineteen fifties when a heart surgery was still in its earliest days by your decision to specialize in cardiac surgery and and what it was like to be in the field developing about on the thing that it changed completely when gollum other ways to maintaining

the body vital functions were working on with the heart and soul the heart lung machines were being to go that's a lot to go to them a team of people publishing and the technology that goes without and memory and the various repair procedures without replacement in the player and your problem developed in the fifties so we are going to be voting on the factory's let me jump forward a couple decades in nineteen eighty five you performed the first heart transplant at st luke's hospital in kansas city talking about that that was one of the most exciting thing that there was a patient that had been in our killer and the

previous were operations there is nothing there to like experience of taking fishing in really critical situation and taking out the heart of the person and then watched that there are hard and the tape for a moment and we're hoping and praying that it starts and then the water started to go home and say i can do this for this wonderful gift that hiv from one person to another with the high note what we do together in the hole so that everyone where we got the girl about what was in the morning and pamela new

employment and he was able to have that feeling of having a patient come in the world but one that was only identity with actor william e reed the pulse of hope as surgeons memoirs from poverty to prosperity reid thank you so much for getting with me today pick a bookstore is hosting a reading and books i mean by dr william reid on thursday april thirtieth in the kansas union i'm j mcintyre kbr presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas