Sharon Lamb

This book takes a close look at how girls of color think, talk, and learn about sex and sexual ethics, how they navigate their developing sexuality through cultural stereotypes about sex and body image, and how they negotiate their sexual learning within a co-ed sex education classroom. While girls of color are often pictured as at risk or engaged in risky behavior, the analyses of focus groups and classroom discussions, show not only girls’ vulnerabilities but their strengths as they work with integrating diverse identities, media messages, school policy and history into their understanding of the sexual world they are exposed to and a part of.

This book takes a close look at how girls of color think, talk, and learn about sex and sexual ethics, how they navigate their developing sexuality through cultural stereotypes about sex and body image, and how they negotiate their sexual learning within a co-ed sex education classroom. While girls of color are often pictured as at risk or engaged in risky behavior, the analyses of focus groups and classroom discussions, show not only girls’ vulnerabilities but their strengths as they work with integrating diverse identities, media messages, school policy and history into their understanding of the sexual world they are exposed to and a part of.

While arguments for and against teaching abstinence, the use of contraceptives, and sexual identity are becoming more and more polarised, most people agree that students must learn to navigate an increasingly sexual world. Sex Ed for Caring Schools presents a curriculum that goes beyond the typical health education most students receive today. As part of a critical pedagogy movement that connects education to social justice enterprises, this book and the corresponding online curriculum encourage students to talk, write, and think about the moral and relational issues underlying sex in society today. Addressing the real concerns of today s teens, this book includes lessons on pornography, prostitution, media objectification, religion, and stereotypes. Book Features: introduces readers to the controversies that have surrounded sex education curricula in recent decades; outlines a comprehensive sex education that includes character education, citizenship, and caring the three Cs and focuses on the education both girls and boys need to treat each other ethically.This book includes discussion questions and activities for future educators. The content corresponds to an interactive online curriculum hosted by the author that includes free readings, activities, and discussion questions.

While arguments for and against teaching abstinence, the use of contraceptives, and sexual identity are becoming more and more polarised, most people agree that students must learn to navigate an increasingly sexual world. Sex Ed for Caring Schools presents a curriculum that goes beyond the typical health education most students receive today. As part of a critical pedagogy movement that connects education to social justice enterprises, this book and the corresponding online curriculum encourage students to talk, write, and think about the moral and relational issues underlying sex in society today. Addressing the real concerns of today s teens, this book includes lessons on pornography, prostitution, media objectification, religion, and stereotypes. Book Features: introduces readers to the controversies that have surrounded sex education curricula in recent decades; outlines a comprehensive sex education that includes character education, citizenship, and caring the three Cs and focuses on the education both girls and boys need to treat each other ethically.This book includes discussion questions and activities for future educators. The content corresponds to an interactive online curriculum hosted by the author that includes free readings, activities, and discussion questions.

Winner of the Books for a Better Life Award Every parent who cares about empowering her daughter should own a copy."- Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls "...a must-read for parents and teachers who want to steer girls away from marketing schemes that distort female power and authority and toward true self-acceptance and authentic empowerment." -- Polly Young Eisendrath, author of Women and Desire and The Resilient Spirit The image of girls and girlhood that is being packaged and sold to your daughter isn't pretty in pink. It is stereotypical, demeaning, limiting, and alarming. Girls are besieged by images in the media that encourage accessorizing over academics; sex appeal over sports; fashion over friendship.Packaging Girlhood exposes these stereotypes and gives you guidance on how to talk with your daughters about these negative images and provides you with tools and information on how to help your girls make more positive choices. "A tour de force of excellent scholarship put in a very readable context and chockfull of practical suggestions for parents for change "-- William S. Pollack, Ph.D., author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood "Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown have that rare gift of translating cutting-edge research and analysis into strategies and information that every parent (and every girl) can use in daily life."-- Joe Kelly, president of Dads and Daughters (DADs) "With compassion, insight, and humor Lamb and Brown] unravel and demystify the messages girls confront throughout their development, and they offer adults useful tools to help girls resist their powerful pull."-- Lynn M. Phillips, Ph.D., Department of Communications, University of Massachusetts, Amherst "Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown's sharp analysis and patiently pragmatic advice is just what we need to sustain our daughter's quests for healthy identities."-Michael Kimmel, author Manhood in America, Professor, SUNY Stony Brook Sharon Lamb, author of The Secret Lives of Girls, is professor of Psychology at Saint Michael's College in Vermont. Her research on girls' and teens' development is widely cited. Additionally, she listens to their struggles and strengths in her private practice. Lyn Mikel Brown, professor of Education at Colby College in Maine, is the author of three books on girls' development, including Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (with Carol Gilligan). She creates programs for girls at her nonprofit Hardy Girls Healthy Women (www.hghw.org).

In Sex, Therapy, and Kids, Lamb demonstrates how to be sex-positive in a way that’s responsive to the developmental stage of the child or teen and thus promotes honest conversations and successful therapy. Over the course of the book, she guides therapists through such core issues as recognizing and responding to the sexual play of children who have not been abused, distinguishing sexual abuse from normal play, understanding common worries of adolescent boys and girls, and helping gay and lesbian youth who are grappling with their sexual identity. There are also chapters on working with youth who have been abused, helping developmentally delayed teens, and collaborating with parents and families around the themes of sexuality and sexual behavior. From Sex, Therapy, and Kids Because I have been trained in humanistic, existential, psychoanalytic, family systems, and cognitive-behavioral strategies, my work represents a combination of these modalities. But an underlying focus of mine when working with children and adolescents is attending to the affect and affective sense surrounding a topic or play activity. This is particularly useful when working with sexual material in that sexual material in therapy can be overstimulating. . . . It is good to train oneself to observe this affective sense underlying talk or play, because if such overstimulating play is happening in the therapy session, you can bet it’s happening outside the room. Therapy is the place in which these emotions, even bodily feelings, can be experienced in the safe presence of another who will protect and allow the time and space to process them and get some reflective distance. But how do therapists make stimulating material unstimulating to the child without simply pushing the child to leave the material alone and move on to more pleasant things, more manageable topics and emotions? This is crucial to my approach. Therapists can model a neutral, distanced reflective process with their clients that allows them to stay with the material. And therapists can help clients to distance themselves from it in order to talk about it and continue playing in a way that is productive. . . . [O]ver time it is good to develop a sense of what question will bring teens or children to a place where they can recover a therapeutic attitude toward these events and acts I’ve called approach displacement, but it means very literally displacing one’s feelings from one’s mind and body into the play.

Blame society. Blame a bad upbringing. Blame the circumstances. Blame the victim--she may even blame herself. But what about the perpetrator? When the blame is all assigned, will anyone be left to take responsibility?This powerful book takes up the disturbing topic of victimization and blame as a pathology of our time and its consequences for personal responsibility. By probing the psychological dynamics of victims and perpetrators of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, Sharon Lamb seeks to answer some crucial questions: How do victims become victims and sometimes perpetrators? How can we break the psychological circle of perpetrators blaming others and victims blaming themselves? How do victims and perpetrators view their actions and reactions? And how does our social response to them facilitate patterns of excuse?With clarity and compassion, Lamb examines the theories, excuses, and psychotherapies that strip both victims of their power and perpetrators of their agency--and thus deprive them of the means to human dignity, healing, and reparation. She shows how the current practice of painting victims as pure innocents may actually help perpetrators of abuse to shirk responsibility for their actions; they too can claim to be victims in their own right, passive and will-less in their wrongdoing.The Trouble with Blame clarifies the social cost (quickly becoming so apparent) of letting perpetrators off too easily, and points out the dangers of over-emphasizing victimization, two problems which eclipse our dire need for accountability and recovery.