Do you tell your kids about your life in the 1970’s? I mean: the drugs, free sex, the gay rights movement, the communes, and drinking under the age of 21? Kent State? Anti-war protests and still loving Merle Haggard? Do you go back further, and tell them of watching the Watts riots on TV (or live, if you happened to be there)? (I grew up WASP: White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant)
WHAT do you tell your kids? Or blog about, to your present audience, who may be rather settled and conservative? A lot has happened since those days. You’ve changed.
But you changing doesn’t change that you lived through that stuff. My Lai and the subsequent government cover-up (think “Ben Ghazi”).
McGovern vs. Nixon.
Where you stood in the anti-war stance.
Marijuana, Oregon, NORML, and the beginning of a movement to decriminalize a drug that should never have been criminalized?
Your father cursing your sister for the pot seeds she planted over the fence that never grew?
What do you tell your kids about the Seventies? Michael Jackson? Sit ins? Nuclear power protests?
Earth Day?
I grew up in a Leave-it-to-Beaver home, but we were surrounded with child abductions. I had my own close call. Or two. I remember a movie and a “lost” couple asking for directions. Hell, I remember a pimp in Nashville.
Gay rights.
LSD dreams (not mine, sorry, but I know peeps from my gen who had those).
How much do you share?
For me, it is full disclosure. It happened. This is where my head was at during that time period. And, yes, I sang “Give Peace A Chance” on the college FM station at midnight (before FM was commercialized). I just wonder what other peeps share.
And, of course, what my kids would like me to share. My life is public. Full disclosure. Just let me know if you want to know why the following song has great meaning to me (other than the death of Jimmy Van Zant).
Jaci Dawn 
I think honesty is the best policy accompanied with a filter for age appropriateness. How do we expect teenagers to learn to navigate a challenging world without equipping them with insight?
Thanks for that perspective, Johanna. I’m at an age now where “full disclosure” is akin to my Great Uncle Frank telling me that my father drove a car upside-down for 300 feet. With passengers in it. I was a mother of preteens when I learned that Dad had flipped a car onto its roof and skidded that far. My own kids are now parents, so I guess my “full disclosure” really is a moot point. Besides, I think two of them have led wilder lives than I ever did… 😉