Not All Middle Schoolers Are Worldly

Had an interesting interaction with some tweens at the pool yesterday. During adult swim I took CootieBoy over to the playground to pass the time. There were about half a dozen boys and half a dozen girls there. Segregated, on either side of the large swingset structure. As I approached, I could see the boys looking over something in the grass. I saw it was a used condom. Gross. But the boys were fascinated by it and I could hear them asking questions of each other about it. I continued walking to put CootieBoy on a swing, only to hear the girls talking about something as well. Turns out, there was ANOTHER condom under one of the swings. The girls had no idea what it was, but knew it was gross.

“What IS that?” one of them asked me.

Without thinking twice about getting involved, I said, “It’s a condom.”

“What’s THAT?” one of the girls shrieked.

“Um…that’s not for me to talk about,” I replied, not wanting some irate parent coming to find me for teaching sex ed on the playground.

“Don’t touch it!” one of the other girls piped up, “You can get AIDS from that!”

“AIDS?” the first girl shrieked.

“Yeah, and STDs,” the second girl said.

“What’s an STD?” the first girl asked, getting freaked out.

“A sexually transmitted disease,” the second girl answered. “If you touch it you could get sores all over your body and get really sick and die.”

The first girl freaked again, and just then, my intrepid CootieBoy decided that the condom swing is just the one he wants to get on.

All the girls let out a collective scream as I lurched forward to take CootieBoy’s hand and lead him over to another, condom-free, swing.

And like true middle-schoolers, their attention shifted entirely as I moved through their huddle.

“Do you have a nosering?” one of them asked me.

“I do,” I answered.

“That’s so COOL!” they all gushed, then moved away to go back to the pool area, talking of piercings that they want to get when they are older.

I came away with two thoughts from that exchange.

1) Not all tweens and teens are subscribing to the “friends with benefits” mode of dating, which is a relief.
2) Despite that fact, it seems that parents in this country might need to wake up if there are young teens out there who don’t know what “STD” means.

And all this leads me to the last point – I need to contact the HOA to see if the pool area is part of the neighborhood watch patrol because it seems to me that used condoms in the children’s playground is NOT what they want as part of their legacy.