I was just commenting to Elle in her story about some of my own experiences encountering sex positive attitudes among parents in Germany when I lived there. I thought I was liberal at the time, but I was a little bit shocked to tell you the truth.

One of the problems about being sex positive like this, though, is that it’s not always possible.

As a foster parent in Montreal I could not just decide what my own values were for example. I’ve written before about how I worried about what my foster son’s social worker would have thought if she believed I was allowing him to have sex with his girlfriend under my roof.

I don’t know there would have been any seriously negative consequences but I’ll tell you it did impact my behavior. And I do know that in the United States and Canada both, the authorities can sometimes get involved if they believe parents are “encouraging” sexual activity among teenagers.

That’s probably more a problem in red states, but it is something to think about.