In my piece on sex education in the latest issue of the magazine, I argue that parents can successfully encourage their school-aged children to be abstinent. According to a Planned Parenthood poll, 45 percent of parents support not only abstinence in youth but abstinence until marriage. Impressing this value upon one’s college-aged children is more difficult, but it is not impossible. Helen Andrews, writing for First Things in 2013, made an interesting point:
There is still the problem that most college-educated Americans don’t marry until their late twenties or early thirties. It is much more difficult to ask an average eighteen-year-old to remain celibate for the entirety of his twenties than just the first half of them. But to convince Yale students to start marrying earlier, it is necessary to know their objections to early marriage. One is the fear that a romantic commitment will limit their post-graduation plans by forcing them to factor another person’s needs into their career choices. This is immaturity, and they should be told to get over it. Accommodating another person’s desires is an important part of being an adult, and if people don’t learn that skill before they marry, they are going to get an unpleasant crash course in it when they have kids. It is foolish to think that, with careful planning, one can construct a marriage — or, for that matter, a happy life — that does not involve sacrifices, and the sooner this is learned, the better.