How Driver’s Ed Can Inspire the Way We Teach Consent to Middle School Boys
Artwork generated by AI
A few weeks ago, I was hanging out with a family friend who had recently turned 16. I asked how he had celebrated his birthday and teased him about procrastinating on getting his driver’s license. The conversation shifted to school and relationships, and he shared that he was worried less about exams and more about how to navigate Valentine’s Day with his first girlfriend.
“I wish there was a drivers ed course on relationships,” he said. “Like, not just ‘don’t fuck it up’ but here’s how you actually do it well and do it right.”
How to explain consent to boys is about more than just stop signs.
Consent is most often taught with a commitment to harm prevention. That’s how we ended up with resources like Emmline May’s consent is like a cup of tea or Planned Parenthood’s FRIES model. Parents and educators often focus on definitions, analogies and scenarios about red flags—teaching boys to pay attention to nonverbal body cues, for example, imbalances of power or levels of intoxication.
Let me be clear, harm prevention is a worthwhile priority. Research with high school students shows that there are still serious gaps in their understanding of what consent looks like.
However, we know there is a lot more to driving than learning to stop at the stop signs. Young drivers need to learn about rights of way and weather conditions, crosswalks and school zones, distractions and emotional regulation—and more.
Consent as a concept is simple, but real relationships are complex, particularly when they’re new in adolescence.
“My parents always told me, ‘Respect women!’ But that’s kind of like telling someone who’s learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies and then handing him the car keys. Well, of course, you think you’re not going to run over an old lady. But you still don’t know how to drive.”
We do young people a disservice by operating under the assumption that a list of warning signs or an affirmative acronym will be enough to help them effectively communicate within healthy relationships.
Instead, we need to engage boys in open and honest conversation about what is difficult, challenging or confusing for them with regard to consent—beyond just stop signs.
Film poster from Universal Pictures
We need to provide boys with resources that tackle how porn misrepresents sex and consent.
If a preteen boy stayed up late watching The Fast and the Furious, he could probably feel pretty comfortable coming downstairs in the morning, or showing up to class, and remarking, “Hey, I watched a really intense car chase last night…that’s not how you actually drive a car, is it?”
He probably couldn’t do the same to unpack the differences between pornography and healthy intimate relationships: “Hey, I watched an unexpectedly aggressive hookup on Pornhub last night…that’s not what’s really expected of guys, is it?”
That’s just not happening.
But porn literacy matters. Studies show that most young people have watched porn by age 13. Boys are more likely than girls to seek out porn, and teenage boys are among its biggest consumers.
Meanwhile, women make up 97% of the targets of violence and aggression in online porn—and the majority of boys believe that porn presents a realistic depiction of sex.
Learn more: Dive deeper into boys and porn in past Learnings & Unlearnings blog, What Should Parents of Boys Know About Porn?
Like risk-taking behind the wheel, sexual harassment and assault are not unrelated to the pressures and expectations surrounding boys’ and young men’s masculinity.
Let me put it like this. If we recognize that driving has such high stakes that we’re willing to consistently and thoughtfully challenge the harmful ways it’s represented in mainstream movies and TV shows, we should be willing to do the same for relationships, sex and consent.
“For adults to hand over responsibility for educating young people about romantic love—and sex—to popular culture is a dumbfounding abdication of responsibility.”
Just like driving, developing communication skills for healthy relationships takes practice.
What I’m getting at is that we often talk and teach about consent in too limited a way. Instead of where we’re headed, consent should be about how we move—in particular, how we move together.
Comparing consent to driver education is particularly apt because at the end of the day, you don’t learn to drive by memorizing a definition or an acronym. While there is value in discussing it with parents or covering it in class, you don’t learn to drive by just talking about it.
It takes practice.
You learn by observing the people you travel with, and ultimately by getting behind the wheel yourself—ideally with adults who are paying attention and helping you navigate new and challenging experiences safely.
Practice is what turns new skills into muscle memory.
We need to think about consent education in the same way. We need to provide young people with opportunities to observe and practice consent in everyday life, to check our own bad habits as role models, and to make ourselves available for non-judgmental discussion about how to sort out confusion and learn from mistakes.
Let’s teach young people that it’s about the journey, not the destination.