Last week, Darius turned in his first assignment for World History class, a project requiring him to assemble top news stories from the year he was born.

In newspaper format, my son listed 1997’s hottest film (“Titanic”), the price of gas ($1.22 a gallon!) and the fact that William Jefferson Clinton took his second oath of office as President of United States.

The secondary stories included personal facts about Darius, such as his 5:50am birth, greedily sucking his fist after that first cry and being the oldest of three children and ten cousins on his mother’s side of the family. “It’s a lot of work and responsibility,” he wrote, “but it teaches me how to take care of myself and will help me to do big things in the world.”

Firstborn is a position that his mother, father and stepfather know all too well. While our parents worked or shopped, we cooked, had chores and kept the younger siblings from wrecking the house. Darius certainly doesn’t enjoy the extra work load and higher level of accountability we hold him to, but it’s never too early for boys to learn that there’s more to manhood than achieving puberty: dues are required and eventually, children need to “pay the cost to be the boss” or risk remaining mired in a suspended state of childishness.

But some parents are reluctant, for whatever reasons, to share this important lesson. Kimberly Hall, a director of women’s ministry at a church in Austin and mother of four, decided to use her platform and her position to chastise random girls for sharing suggestive photos of themselves with her three sons.

It’s an understandable concern that any conscientious parent would have, no doubt. But when Hall took started to scold the girls and solely blame their actions for her sons’ hormonal impulses, she crossed the line.

“If you want to stay friendly with the Hall men, you’ll have to keep your clothes on, and your posts decent,” Hall stated in “FYI (If you’re a teenaged girl).” If you try to post a sexy selfie (we all know the kind), or an inappropriate YouTube video – even once – it’s curtains…..We hope to raise men with a strong moral compass, and men of integrity don’t linger over pictures of scantily clad high-school girls.”

Yeah okay, the young ‘men of integrity’ who are coincidentally photographed in the same post flexing shirt-free. But I digress.

Hall continued by putting the allegedly amoral future hoochies on blast by declaring their content off-limits and instant grounds for dismissal. “If you are friends with a Hall boy on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, then you are friends with the whole Hall family,” Hall continues. “We had to cringe and wonder “what you were trying to do? Who are you trying to reach? What are you trying to say?”

Wow. Seriously, Mama Hall? Maybe we should check your message, which is that your sons have no duty to police their focus or impulses when it comes to the opposite sex. Do you want them believing that their sexuality is uncontrollable while a woman’s is calculated and evil—including your own? How can we expect boys to be leaders when we make everyone except themselves responsible for the decisions they make?

Maybe deflect and deny works in The House of Hall, But at the Jackson Residence, Darius has been taught that real men (and women) are responsible for their choices and that if anything sexual goes down, he has to pay the band or leave the dance: after all, adult actions have adult consequences and it definitely takes two to tango.