Nov. 21, 2005 issue - Alayne-we'll leave her last name out of this-is the 40-year-old mother of a middle-schooler in Richmond, Mich., and her daughter, Carol, has come to her with a problem. "My best friend's boyfriend tells her she's ugly and that if she won't have sex with him, he'll dump her," Carol says. "What should I tell her?" It's a no-brainer, of course, but Alayne bites her tongue. "How do you feel about this boy," she counters, "about what he's saying to her?" Typical American mother-daughter talk, circa 2005-except that Carol is actually 52, the mother of two middle-schoolers, and she and Alayne are role-playing. This workshop, at the Richmond High School library, is a part of a pilot program called Talk Early & Talk Often. TETO is designed to help parents talk with today's low-rise-jeans generation about... what parents and kids have always had trouble talking about.

TETO was launched at the beginning of this school year by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm in hopes of reducing the number of teen pregnancies in her state. (Michigan is below the national average, but Granholm says even one is too many.) The program, primarily funded by the Michigan Department of Community Health, aims to get parents talking to their kids before the media and their peers get to them. Good luck. A study released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the number of sexual scenes on TV has doubled in the last seven years, with such uber-cool kids as Ryan and Marissa of "The O.C." rutting like NC-17 Romeos and Juliets. Meanwhile, TETO "facilitators" tell parents, one in five real-life kids has sex before turning 15. For Granholm, though, it's not just about the numbers: she has two teenage daughters of her own. "Every single parent I know is concerned about this issue," she says. "To arm and respect parents, and give them the tools to be able to talk to their kids, is one of the strategies that I think can have a great impact." Similar workshops such as Family Talk in Rochester, N.Y., have been stressing the importance of parents as primary sex educators for years. But TETO is the first such program to be initiated by a governor and marketed directly to parents.

You'd think that both Democrats like Granholm and cultural conservatives could get behind empowering parents and reaching kids. Not these days. Leslee Unruh, president and founder of the Abstinence Clearinghouse-whose advisory board includes people from the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation-accuses TETO of bad faith and of surreptitiously pushing what she calls the "if they're going to do it anyway" line. "They need to stop treating parents like they know nothing," Unruh says. "They're sneaky, they're not upfront and they don't tell you what their agenda is. It's another way that the people who are not teaching abstinence until marriage are duping people into thinking that parents don't know how to talk to their children."

Yet last week, the Archdiocese of Anchorage, Alaska-no hotbed of permissiveness-called Barb Flis, who spearheaded TETO's workshops, to ask if the curriculum was available for purchase. Not yet. But after the 60-plus workshops are finished (in December) and evaluated, TETO hopes to broaden its program within Michigan-if politics don't succeed in making it radioactive. "I fully expect that this will work," says Granholm, "because the data shows that kids listen to their parents, though sometimes they say they don't." Compared with getting the political right and left on the same page, even getting parents and kids to communicate should be a piece of cake.

This is cache, read story here