This post is taken from the weekly newsletter “Darons Daronnes” on parenting, sent every Wednesday at 6 p.m. To receive it, you can register for free here.
Where does the parenting “job” end? In this age of hyperparenthood, we can have the impression that our mission has no end or boundaries. This is how many of us get into knots in our brains about our teenagers’ entry into sexuality. How to inform them, protect them? How to discuss it with them? Answer their existential questions?
To all those who hesitate to knock on the door of their teen with a trembling hand, Professor Israel Nisand’s perspective provides a refreshing perspective − and perhaps a last-minute escape! The obstetrician-gynecologist, who publishes Talk about sex. How to inform our teenagers (Grasset, 136 pages, 16 euros), considers that it is not the responsibility of parents to discuss sex with their children, that they are even “the worst placed” to talk about sexual practices.
He, on the other hand, talks with your teenagers. For twenty-five years, he has been working with middle and high school students to answer all their questions, even the most disturbing. And he considers that sex education is poorly done in France. This is what he explained to me in this interview collected on Monday February 12, which I share with you here.
In the early 1990s, you were head of department at Poissy hospital, in Yvelines. Why do you decide to intervene in colleges?
What initially decides me is the number of teenage pregnancies that I see passing through the maternity ward. Every month, a 15 or 16 year old schoolgirl comes to give birth. I am very surprised to see these very young women with a baby in their arms. When I make them talk, they answer me: “But my mom had me at the same age! »
These young girls come from poor backgrounds, have failed at school, and have no access to information on contraception. I tell myself that we must try to put an end to this infernal cycle of poverty which hinders their autonomy, their ambitions. I go to meet the principal of Les Grands Champs college, just opposite the hospital, and I ask him to speak in his third year classes.
What motivates me, then as today, is a feminist approach. We still haven’t made the decision to educate our children, and it’s the girls who are to blame. Unwanted pregnancies, school harassment, sexual assault… A boy must never go through the difficult process of requesting an abortion. So, for me, all feminist actions are nothing without educating our children.
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