EXPONENTS of family-life education generally defend their field against its critics by pointing out the great urgency of equipping young people to cope intelligently with the many challenges which choosing a mate and establishing a family will shortly press upon them. By giving students more accurate information and by helping them to explore the value of various alternatives, the family-living teacher hopes to give them a more realistic and mature approach to the important decisions that lie ahead. In view of these aims, the author has been disturbed by what seems to be a serious gap between the materials covered in high-school family-living classes and the realities of teen-age life. For the past six years the author has been engaged in a study of the normal course of social development in children and adolescents. This project has involved interviews with hundreds of children of all ages and with many of their parents and teachers. The strong impression emerges that young people increasingly bring more heterosexual experience and sophistication to family-life classes than is assumed by most textbooks and course outlines. The findings of the study indicate that for many children a interest in members of the opposite sex begins in kindergarten or before. Crushes on classmates, teachers, and admired adults of the opposite sex are common throughout grade school. Kissing games are normative at third to sixth-grade levels, and some kissing it means something special occurs at these ages also. In some communities, dating begins for a substantial number of children in the fifth and sixth grades, and going steady is common at the junior highschool level. By the junior or senior year of high school, when the students are most likely to encounter a family-living course, many have had five or more years of romantic interest in and romantic interaction with members of the opposite sex. Theoretically, these students should be offered: 1) information based on reliable research which will augment their own experience, 2) concepts according to which they can analyze and interpret both their own experience and the newly learned information, and 3) opportunities to apply this information and these concepts to their own situation through roleplay ng, discussion, and papers. Such a program could reasonably be construed as training in decision-making. Instead, as a survey of highschool texts will quickly show, what students g t in the chapters on boy-girl relations is advice-advice illustrated with case studies, advice illustrated with cartoons, even, occasionally, advice illustrated with data from some study. The problem with advice is that, unlike the threepoint program suggested above, it does not recognize or make use of the students' own experience nd insights. These are often extensiv . Neither does advice-giving open the way to ffective communication between the teacher and the students. Assum , however, that the teacher wishes to venture beyond the safe role of the advice-giver and deal with her students and their problems in a way that has meaning for them. Suppose, in other words, that she recognizes and deplores a gap between the materials she deals with in class and the genuine circumstances of her students. It is the author's observation that she