My mom was the opposite of a helicopter parent.
I’ve heard terms like free-range parenting and no-rescue parenting, all of which sound like my mom. Though she expected me to excel in school and respect my elders, she left it to me to figure out much of how to live my life.
I often went out to play for hours unsupervised, and as I got older, that morphed into taking off on my bike with little more than the instruction to be home when the streetlights came on. She wasn’t disinterested, she just didn’t think I needed 24/7 monitoring.
Perhaps the greatest example of my mother’s approach to self-empowerment parenting was my high school sex talk.
Bear in mind, my mom had always shared as much as I wanted to know (and then some) about where babies came. Before I started kindergarten, I had a mental picture I described as a boy peeing in you.

So when I was a high school freshman, we didn’t need to talk mechanics. This was about responsibility.
My mom sat me down at the dining room table and told me she’d given our family doctor permission to prescribe birth control pills for me.
She explained that having sex with someone is a big decision and she hoped I would wait, and if I thought I was ready, that I would talk to her first. In case I wouldn’t, though, she didn’t want to stand between me and birth control. She wanted me to finish high school and go to college, and she didn’t want an unplanned pregnancy to limit my life choices.
I had not yet kissed a boy at this point. The conversation felt both completely hypothetical and profoundly awkward.
It’s also entertaining, since she’d sent me to a Catholic high school out of concern our public high school wasn’t good enough, so she was foisting birth control, which the church opposes, on a girl with no need for it. But my outspoken mom had also told a group of my Catholic school girlfriends that when the pope sent her child support, she’d go off birth control. She was Catholic but only followed the church teachings so far.
Recently I’ve heard from several friends how vague and unhelpful their sex talks were with their parents, if it happened at all, I’m grateful my mom didn’t shy away from frank talk. It was both a move of empowering me to achieve my dreams and more direct advice than most parents seem to muster.
As more of our friends have kids in middle school and older, I see from the adult perspective how uncomfortable sex talk is for parents. Just as no one likes imagining their parents having sex, it seems cringeworthy for parents recall what they were doing as teenagers and picture their kids facing those same choices.
Shortly after the birth control talk, my mom and I had a related conversation at the dining room table. She told me she felt she’d taught me everything she could about right and wrong, and from that point forward, her job was to house and feed me but I was responsible for making my life choices.
That wasn’t totally true, since I got myself severely grounded for some life choices she didn’t agree with, and she was still strict about enforcing my curfew, but philosophically she was handing me the reins. I’d already had a lot of free rein to begin with.
In case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t go to Dr. Underhill for birth control pills. My health insurance was through my dad, who I’m quite sure was not as liberal about my sexual empowerment, and I wasn’t sure how much detail he got about what was getting billed to his Blue Cross card.
But the message about not letting pregnancy derail me came through loud and clear.
Did your parents talk to you about sex in a way that was direct or helpful?