Man, my parents were cool as shit about this. And I think it had really good consequences for me later on, like in college.
Sex was positively viewed, but strict about protection (rightly so), and drugs were described as a spectrum with weed being very low, and the scary drugs (heroine) being very scary. They were honest about wanting me to wait for drugs and booze till I was more adult, but let me have a few parties with friends where everyone crashed at their house. It was super fun, and very badass feeling. I got to college and was like .... Meh? On partying.
Definitely not the only way to go about it, but the honesty helped me weigh consequences of it all a bit better, I think.
What you just described is the absolute dream I have for all adolescents everywhere.
Society (from my perspective) doesn't seem to realize that people grow way more by experience than they ever will by age.
You got your partying out of the way as an adolescent and were way less inclined towards it during college which it's easy to argue was a way more important phase of your life.
Drugs: Never mentioned. There were anti-drug ads on TV 24/7.
Sex: Never mentioned. Well, by the time they got around to having “the talk” we asked them if they needed to know anything. Mom laughed, dad looked embarrassed, and that was that.
Don't do drugs
Don't do sex
I'm indigenous Canadian and both my parents survived residential school in the 50s. Residential school for indigenous people back then was forced on us, especially for children where they were systematically abused by Christian missionaries. Mom was not so abused but dad was terribly traumatized to the point where sex and anything sexual or remotely sexual was forbidden. Just about everything in life to him meant burning in everlasting hell. Drugs were no different but less so.
So our indigenous Christian home just dealt with it all by forbidding everything.
How did it turn out?
I have seven siblings and we all ended up with alcohol and drug addiction by the time we were teenagers. I cleaned up early and I've been sober for 29 years, all my other siblings never fell off the deep end (thank God) but I'm the only one who got officially 'sober'.
I didn't have kids but everyone else in my family did before anyone was married. One of my younger brothers picked up the slack for me by having children with four women. I have over 40 nieces and nephews, some by the family, some brought in, some married in and others illegitimate.
We're all one big happy family .... but we're all gonna burn in hell. Lol
"I don't really get why people get so up in arms about discussing it, but Sex is fun. Be careful though, those swimmers are persistent little fuckers."
"Drugs feel good and you think everything is fine until one day you look up and realize it all went wrong years ago. I can't stop you, but I really hope you'll choose not to try them."
I think both worked out well. I'm sex positive and I generally avoid drugs because it just isn't worth the risk of finding that one substance that totally ruins my life.
Neither sex nor drugs were ever discussed...at least not by my parents.
Same here
My parents both openly smoked weed in front of my from a young age. I was told that as long as I was home by curfew and didn't come home in a cop car they were fine with me doing basically whatever cuz they knew I wasn't a complete moron (my dad worked in the school system and knew all the ACTUAL problem children really well, they hated me because of that so I never got to be a hoodlum lol), though my nugs WERE taken from me at 15 because "you were dumb enough to let us catch you with it" which is fair but I say they were out and bumming off of me without saying so lol
As for sex I got a quick talk about using a condom after my dad caught my GF and I doing it, but otherwise it was left mostly unsaid cuz my sex Ed wasnt trash
I was born in the 80s. Mom was a teacher, Dad worked in IT.
Both conversations were not especially made out to be a... ok listen carefully we're going to talk about this now. They were not made out to be a big deal, just happened naturally.
It was part of everyday life, if the subject arised it was not ignored, we were kept up to date on news and when we hadl questions about any subject, we always had an answer, we were encouraged to think critically about subjects being politics, sex or drugs, didn't matter.
At the time my country was going through a very serious drug crisis, so it was impossible to ignore.
Fortunately the decriminalisation of all drugs lowered the drug problem significantly, but I was in college at that point.
If you do this, invisible sky god will make your life terrible and you will rot in imaginary pain forever more after you die.
Me: so..... Just like now?
This was exactly my experience. Extreme repression of my sexuality via religion.
Shamed for every impulse. Shamed for masturbation (Not by them of course, they had someone from the church do it. I guess the idea of doing it themselves was just too fucking awkward for them). Shamed for porn (Back when porn was waiting 20 min for an image of tits to load).
It is an overall tenet of my advocacy that this cannot possibly be right. We all hit puberty, all we want to do is fuck as we are driven towards it directly by nature.
Maybe there is a societal need to curate that impulse, I can accept that. But not like this. Not through guilt, shame, and fear.
Non-existent
Mine was WASPy, so pretend it doesn't exist.
I'm Italian. School explains all there is to know about sex and stuff, so I never needed the "talk" with my parents. I also had a bigger brother that would tell me everything way before the time lol
About drugs, I think I already got everything from TV? I certainly didn't need my parents explaining to me that drugs are bad.
EDIT: For those curious about how/when SexEd is taught in school in Italy: I had SexEd in my 5th year of elementary school (10yo), 3rd year of middle school (13 yo) and again in high school (I think it was the second year, so 15 yo, and then in my fourth year as well, when I was 17 yo). My parents were required to consent to the school teaching us SexEd only in elementary school; no consent form was required from middle school onwards, it was mandatory.
And I think that drugs were discussed in school as well. I think in middle and high school, around the same time as SexEd.
Basically Mr Mackey's "drugs are bad mkay" speech.
As for sex, it was never talked about at all.
Just say no
Drugs: anything not prescribed by a doctor will lead a person to being a homeless crack addict. Marijuana is such a powerful gateway drug, don't try it even once.
Sex: is for reproduction within the bounds of marriage. And even then, women won't enjoy it unless they're promiscuous sinners.
My folks were hippies. Did the woodstock thing and all. I grew up around them smoking pot at parties and stuff. When Nancy Reagan told us all it was bad my parents told me she was full of shit, that smoking dope sometimes was as ok as drinking a few beers and that when I moved out of the house I was free to do what I wanted.
As for sex, pretty much the same thing. Wrap your willie, wait till you're an adult, and don't do it here.
I'm as honest with my kids about drugs now.
don't do it here.
You mean they told you you could fuck but just not in the home? How on earth is that productive?
Sure, go fuck in your car and risk catching shit from the cops or go get blown behind the library at school and risk getting expelled (real story that actually happened to a friend of an old gf).
I agree. We let the kids have privacy in the house, there is nothing wrong with having a sexual relationship with your boyfriend/girlfriend, you don't need to be embarrassed by that, it just needs to be private. They also know to KNOCK if our door is closed.
It was more like when you move out and are on your own.
I have the same experience as the first few commenters. These things were never talked about in my home.
How can we as a society justify refusing to educate the youth about these things and leaving them to haphazardly stumble through the same mistakes that we all made?
My mum at least asked 'do you learn about this stuff in school?', to which i awkwardly said yeah. We did get some pretty good classes on bodies, the biology of reproduction, and contraception. I even remember having a test on contraceptives in biology class.
Unfortunately, it was very cis-het only. I had to figure out by myself that I should be using protection during sex even if both participants had a vulva.
As for drugs, it never occurred to my mum that anything other than alcohol and nicotine could be relevant to us. She did well on keeping me from smoking just by telling me about her experience as a smoker and how hard it was to quit. I kept my drinking and weed smoking from her pretty well because even a mention would make her angry. To be fair, as an adult I understand she had some trauma from her mum being an alcoholic.
Never really had one, figured everything out over the Internet which was a ride. My school has a health class but half of it was DARE and the other half was STDs and surface level nutrition.
Don't do drugs, don't do sex, only bad people going to hell do that. Even the part about us being their biological children was framed as "can you believe what we had to go through?", because evangelical Christianity is a hell of a drug itself.
Presumably, the teenage talks would have been different, if they hadn't totally checked out of parenting at that point.
I was told, by my mother who smokes nicotine, to never smoke nicotine
Not discussed, they assumed I knew, they were correct.
I still remember what my mother said to me when I got a girlfriend. "Use a condom." That was it. No pretending it wasn't going to happen.
As for drugs, my family never liked them. They never told us kids, but my father had an issue with opiates that's cost him his job and medical license. My older brother also had an issue with opiates.
I used to do a lot of research on erowid on drugs. Between my brother and I it was a lot of don't be stupid, do your research on what's safe and what interacts with each other, and stay away from opiates.
For the most part, it wasn't talked about much in my family, other than my older brother my younger brother and I didn't gravitate to them too much or hang with people who did. I ended up getting really into weed for a short time, because that's where my ADHD hyper focus hobby was for a few months. Then I realized I didn't like not being sober that much.
One simple word. Dont.
Was never a major topic because I have yet to show any interest in starting a relationship :p
My initial plan was to do it after starting a career but more due to social peer pressure which I couldnt care less about. So I havent done anything so far. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Drugs were bad. Really no exceptions to any drugs but alcohol was OK if over a certain age. Sex was never talked about
I had a DARE tee from school that I never wore. That was about as far as I got. At home... wearing a dare tee... once.
Sex... never discussed. Ingress path unknown. From the periphery of what I picked up from kids at school and music it sounded like confusing nonsense to me with chocolate starfish, cherries, flowers, and cat memes
Both things that were highly forbidden even to talk about.
Ended up having lots of bad risky sex in uni.
I have an Aunt who ruined her life with drug usage, so that pretty much ensured I had no interest. She had gone sober long before I was born, but her life was and is still a mess, unfortunately.
Sex talk didn't happen until I had already bought my first pack of condoms and had used most of them. My parents seemed relieved to be able to avoid talking about it.
I remember frequently telling my mother to stop smoking, hiding her cigarettes and the like (that was in elementary school). She still smokes, I never started.
I wonder where I got that from. I don't think we talked about that in school so early, and I didn't have like The Talk about drugs at home.
Mom: go get on birth control. Dad: if you do drugs, you won't be able to get a job.
Despite this, they were actually good parents.
Lmao, conversation.
I was unschooled and wasn't allowed to watch anything that wasn't aimed at actual children. Even when I was an adult living at home. I don't think my parents wanted me to know what sex and drugs are.
When I was 5, and I asked the question of where babies come from, my parents explained to me that when a man and a woman love each other very much, they produce "seeds" and "eggs" which then seed a baby in the mother, and these "seeds" are transfered through a special kind of cuddle. I found it amusing and asked, "so, people are like flowers? 🥺" (I had a phase back then where I was obsessed with flowers...)
There were anti-drug ads on TV and I asked my parents what they were about. They said that there are "bad pills which aren't medicine", that a doctor would say are very bad, which will make you act in a way that isn't yourself and also ruin your health.
Catholic, so not much.
My mom did pick me up some condoms when she knew I was banging though. Not much talk except be safe.
Nonexistent, except for a comment from my mom once that she didn't understand why drugs were illegal, didn't care what people did in their own homes.
With my kids just an open door communication style, they ask I answer - so like when one got a boyfriend and both were first timers, she asked about STI, was it safe if she had birth control, and we talked about the HPV, HIV, Hepatitis, things you could possibly get from being born or nonsexual contact, but also about relative risk, and how there is always going to be some, but that shouldn't stop you from living, being open and talking with your sex partners. And talked about enthusiasm rather than consent, that you should not push anyone for consent, wait until both of you feel enthusiastic about sex to do it.
I had to teach them :/
My mother and father were separated by the time I started asking questions about sex. My mother was super open and cool about it. I got boxes of condoms from “Santa” every year between 12 and 18. My father found out I was ready for “the talk” when an unused condom fell from my pocket during the laundry. I had already been active for six months. Thankfully, I grew up in a very progressive school district, so our sex ed course was comprehensive.
Drugs were a very Regean-era “just say no” from both of them. Interestingly, my best education about drugs came from listening to Blood, Sugar Sex, Magic with my father. He used to wax romantic about the tortured artists that languished under the weight of their addiction; robbing the world of more music while inspiring such remarkable lamentations.
We pushed “the guide to getting it on” on our children at a relatively early age and invited them to discuss, which ensured they would never, ever, ever ask us anything about sex.
Lmao my dad did the same. Showed me how to use protection and explained how sex worked in a technical sense when I was about 11-12 I think. Never had to and never wanted to ask anything when I hit puberty
Use protection and don't do drugs or nicotine. It would be nice if you abstained alcohol as well. That's about it
You will burn in hell for eternity and always as demons bite and eat your flesh from your body.
My mom found out I had mushrooms and asked if I was gonna do heroin
