Science & Tech Quote by Sue Johanson

Sue Johanson’s genius is that she treats the most awkward conversation in a household like a logistics problem with a humane workaround. No grand sermon about “communication,” no moral panic about screens rotting brains. She starts from a plain observation - kids can type - and turns that supposed generational gap into a bridge. The move is slyly practical: when your throat locks up and your face burns, write. When you can’t say “sex” out loud, let the word sit on the page, doing the hard work for you.

The subtext is a corrective to the usual culture-war framing. Adults love to complain that technology isolates children; Johanson flips it. The computer isn’t a wall, it’s a mediating object, a way to lower the emotional temperature long enough for honesty to arrive. Even the phrase “tear it off and put it on their pillow” is doing quiet cultural work: it borrows the intimacy of a bedtime ritual, the private space where care happens, while sidestepping direct confrontation. You’re not ambushing your parents in the kitchen; you’re inviting them into a conversation they can enter calmly, on their own time.

Context matters: Johanson came up as a blunt, public-facing sex educator in an era when “sex talk” was either euphemism or scandal. Her intent here isn’t to make parents comfortable. It’s to make kids safer by giving them a script that acknowledges fear without shame, and by insisting that adults, if handed the truth plainly, will often meet it.