What rights do parents have in determining their children’s education? That question has been at the forefront of widely publicized debates in Virginia, Florida, and a public school near you. Political analyst Madeleine Kearns believes those rights come with a lot of responsibility.

As Governor Ron DeSantis argued in defense of [his state’s parental rights] law, schools should not “be a playground for ideological disputes.” Let kids be kids — shielded from such disputes — and ensure that teachers teach only the approved curriculum. This is sound thinking. The trouble is that parental rights also demand responsibilities, and when it comes to sex education, many parents have already outsourced the imparting of values and moral guidance to schools. Content to trundle along with the status quo, such parents have disempowered themselves and given radical activists a foothold.

It is no coincidence that states with the greatest respect for parental rights have the least interventionist approaches to sex education. Florida, for instance, has no requirement for sex education but does require its health education in grades six through twelve to emphasize “awareness of the benefits of sexual abstinence as the expected standard and the consequences of teenage pregnancy.” In 2021, before the Parental Rights in Education Act, DeSantis signed a law requiring schools to notify parents of their right to have their child opt out of any sex education offered and to inform them of the curriculum and materials on the district’s website homepage.

To say that schools have a role to play in sex education isn’t controversial. But since the 1980s, there have been two competing visions about when and how schools ought to go about it. One view is that schools should play only a supporting role, sticking to the biological and physiological facts. First, what puberty is, later, how babies are made. And that anything beyond that ought to be about sexual risk avoidance, warnings about unintended pregnancy and disease, and the promotion of abstinence in youth as the only certain way of avoiding these outcomes.

Another view is that sex education ought to be more comprehensive. In addition to basic biology and abstinence, topics include contraception, abortion, consent, sexual orientation, pleasure, masturbation, and, most recently, transgender identity. The progressive Guttmacher Institute calls this “a rights-based approach” that “recognizes that information alone is not enough,” asserting that “young people need to be given the opportunity to acquire essential life skills and develop positive attitudes and values.” But whose values are these?

Naturally, most of the time both approaches get mushed together in practice, and the result is a lot of confusion — especially when parents are left having to undo things they didn’t want done. And yet, Kearns argues:

What’s so depressing is that parents don’t seem to realize that if they only try, they really can make all the difference in setting standards. Stammers, the bioethicist, summarized a 1999 study of over 400 adolescents that “clearly showed that where parents, especially mothers, were the major source of sexual information, their adolescents’ sexual behaviour was less risky.” Indeed, “those adolescents who reported discussing a greater number of sex-based topics with their mothers were more likely to express conservative attitudes about sex and were less likely to have engaged in it.”

Abstinence before marriage is a high standard, one that most Americans appear to have abandoned. But at the very least, abstinence while young is a value that parents could encourage in their own kids. According to a 2014 study by the abortion provider Planned Parenthood, 61 percent of parents reported wanting young people to wait to have sex until they were ready to handle the responsibilities that come from having a sexual relationship, and 45 percent supported waiting until marriage. And yet only 52 percent reported ever talking about these values with their child.

Most school-aged children don’t have sex. Most parents don’t think that they should. And yet we’re supposed to believe it necessary that parents resign themselves to the idea that adolescent sex is “inevitable” and then hand over their children to be formed by progressive activists at school. As we’ve seen with transgenderism, this is a dangerous move. If parents don’t take ownership of their responsibilities, they risk losing their rights as well.

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.