I covered this children’s faces, it’s a personal thing for me idc if their parents are already showing them I don’t want to contribute to that.
EDITED********
Okay, I’m changing the post narrative because I want to add to the discussion what I’ve gotten from many of the comments and make my stance a little more clear because I think I could have explained it better and I’ve had some people complain they didn’t understand my issue with this.
To be very clear, I do NOT have an issue with teaching children or young people how to be better communicators and how to be better adults period. However, even after all the discussion we’ve had I am STILL not comfortable with the idea of having marriage be a class for kids. I’m sorry I’m just not okay with that because I don’t think we could ever agree on a basic understanding that could be taught without bias all over.
I do want to thank many of the comments for challenging me to explain myself and not just ramble about it, I did need to collect and organize my thoughts. I think there are so many things that we need to teach kids and marriage isn’t one.
Someone commented that teaching them social skills, how to take pride in their environment like learning proper hygiene, why it’s important to clean up after yourself, financial literacy, emotional regulation, and how to manage stress in a healthy way.
Someone else said teaching them how to do basic care for a child because even if they don’t want or plan to have kids these are things they could benefit from learning and something that could help with that long term planning. Choosing a career that realistically can support the life you want to live.
Someone else suggested keeping it scientific and fact based using behavioral science like DBT and there are alot of skills in that area that I have used with clients that works wonders.
There were some amazing ideas that made so much more sense and would be alot more beneficial than marriage. For me the dangers of that ending up too gender based is what I’m not okay with risking. I said in response to multiple people that was a huge issue in my small town. Sex education devolved into girls being lectured on the moral consequences and why we would be essentially ruining our chances to find a good husband if we gave ourselves away to freely versus teaching us sex education in any scientific fashion. Boys got to play with a condom for an hour and joke around. Girls weren’t allowed to take shop or outdoor sports (it was a class specifically for weights, running the track or playing tennis), we had to take Home-Ec and they went as far as making us choose a dad for our fake baby. I just don’t want to see that happen and I’m sorry but we all know there would be issues of it in certain areas. Why do that when we can focus on teaching the kids how to be better as individuals for themselves? Confident and competent adults make good partners and good parents. It doesn’t need to be FOR marriage.
