Television Reviews : ‘Teach Your Children Well<i> ‘</i> Stresses Straight Talk

Ah, that good old double standard: We accept the overtly sexual messages in our entertainment and advertising, yet we are curiously reticent to discuss sexual issues with our children. If teen pregnancy rates and rampant venereal disease haven’t made us more forthright, what about the threat of AIDS?

“Teach Your Children Well,” KTTV’s special about AIDS and young people (8 tonight on Channel 11), wants us to know that we need to start talking to our kids--now.

Basketball great Julius Erving hosts this low-key, unsensational hour that stresses straight talk and responsibility as a first-line defense against the disease.

Bill Cosby, Mike Farrell and Surgeon General C. Everett Koop make appearances along with reports from medical professionals, teachers and a religious group caring for babies with AIDS.

With tragic credibility, two young adults with AIDS make forceful arguments for honest dialogue. One, a 24-year-old man who was diagnosed at 22 with the disease, talks of his confusion at contracting something that he thought “decent people” didn’t get. He pleads for children to be given the facts and taught “sexual, moral and behavioral responsibility.”

His eloquence is a contrast to interviews with teen-agers who say, “They’re trying to scare us” with AIDS education in school, that AIDS is just “the chance you take” and that there’s never been a case of “strictly heterosexual transmission,” so teens don’t have to worry.

Information is offered about AIDS awareness programs, testing centers and hot lines and about a Red Cross film, “Beyond Fear,” loaned out locally at no charge.

The show’s strength, however, is the simple guidelines it gives parents to help get a dialogue going with children of any age.