Strollerderby

Hennessey and Daoussi have made a film that follows their daughters around the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto. The girls, ages 6 and 4, ask various health experts questions such as "How does AIDS get into your body?" This leads to discussions of condoms (one girl "thought the bright packages were candy") and also homosexuality ("A man can do it with a man if you like it.")

I have so many problems with this. First of all, why are the filmmakers bringing their young children to an AIDS conference in the first place? According to the Times, the focus of the documentary shifted to the girls during an "unplanned stop at the Condom Project's table," and that "a volunteer's struggle to turn her boilerplate spiel into words simpler than "destigmatize" made it clear that a child's innocence would elicit good interviews." So they used the kids as props to make their movie more interesting. Nice.

I'm not a prude, and I realize that children grow up faster than they used to. But in order to talk about AIDS, you first have to talk about sex. What age do you want to do that? Is a 4-year-old emotionally mature enough to process this information?

Then there's the notion that only the young are in need of being educated about this topic. When I was in high school, I had a part-time job at a health care center, working primarily in the lab. One day we got a phone call that a "Blue Dot" patient was coming down for a test. "Blue Dot" was the code the center gave to AIDS patients. I was the youngest worker there by about 15 years, but I was quickly told that I would be the one to sit out front and check him in. I was also told that I had to wear gloves (I didn't want to, since we never did that at the front desk, but I was told it was "too dangerous"), and that everyone else at the lab would be hiding in the back room. The man came downstairs, looking thin and rather sad. I looked at his form and started to write him into the lab record. Then my supervisor popped out, looked over my shoulder - never acknowledging the patient - and told me that this particular test could only be done in the morning. Then she scurried away, leaving me to explain the situation. In other words, if anyone had thought for a second to look at the test the doctor was ordering, the entire scene would have been avoided.

In other words, the person who was most aware of the lack of danger of being in the same room as an AIDS patient was also the youngest person there. Yes, this was in the 80's, and many people didn't understand anything about AIDS, just as many people didn't understand that wearing leg warmers in public was a bad idea. But it is absolutely true to say that there are still many people in the world of all ages who lack important knowledge about this disease. (The leg warmer problem has pretty much been solved, however.)

So what do the folks here think? How old were you when you first had "the talk" with your parents? What is the right age to hear about this stuff? Should we add "condoms and STDs" to "the birds and the bees"?

photo: eztakes.com