That’s pretty much the whole question, but if you want some background on why I’m asking, here it is: we live as expatriates in Indonesia, and it would not be easy for my son to purchase condoms here. So I was thinking we might pick up an economy-size box or two in the US and give them to him to keep until when/if he needs them. He is only 13, and not sexually active yet … but as a parent I have found that it works very well to deal with stuff like sex ed/condoms BEFORE they are an embarrassingly relevant issue.
He’s definitely very interested in girls and I wouldn’t be surprised if condoms became relevant to him in 2-3 years. So: if we get him some now and tell him to hide them somewhere for the far distant future when they could come in handy … will they still be good when that “distant future” arrives?
What is the shelf life of the condoms?
All quality condoms should have an expiration date, and all LifeStyles® Brand condoms have the lot # and expiration date printed on the back of the foil package for easy identification. LifeStyles Brand Lubricated Condoms have a five-year expiration date from the time they were manufactured and our Spermicidal Lubricated Condoms have a three year expiration from the date they were manufactured. Condoms are individually packaged in sealed, air-tight packets and should not be opened until the condom is to be used.
In many places, you can get them, but manufacturing standards leave something to be desired. And a condom of questionable quality is basically the same as no condom. Perhaps that’s part of the issue the OP faces.
Thanks for your answers! To answer questions about getting condoms here - no, condoms aren’t illegal (far from it - Indonesia has been very good about encouraging family planning), but life here is very different. My underage, foreign, clearly unmarried kid can’t just stroll into a CVS and buy some condoms like he might in America. Without language skills and a LOT of local savvy, there is no way he could access birth control.
Further, as Hello Again noted, manufacturing standards could certainly be an issue (I don’t actually know for sure that the condoms available here are substandard, but they could easily be, and my son ain’t gonna be a guinea pig on this).
Also, I’ve had Caucasian friends say that local condoms don’t fit properly. Purely hearsay, but again, I don’t want my kid to be the guinea pig on this.
As a post-menopause, long-married woman, I probably shouldn’t admit to knowing this. But let’s just say that I keep my ear to the ground and I hear…things…from friends whose sex lives are far more intertwined with the local culture than mine is. Absolutely EVERYTHING I hear is consistent with what **Fiendish Astronaut **says.
Size and quality issues aside…I don’t really see why this is necessarily a problem, since your alternative plan is to buy them for him anyways, overseas, which isn’t really something he can do on his own. Why can’t you buy a regular stock of condoms - maybe a 3 or 6 pack - and leave them somewhere where he can find them? If you ever notice them disappearing, simply buy more and replace them. He’ll have to accept that his parents know that he’s using them, but as long as you are discreet and he’s being responsible otherwise, it doesn’t seem like that would be much of a problem given your openness on these issues.
One is “does item X have an official expiration date?” Condoms do. So do soda cans, paint cans, cans of beans… and often the dates printed are highly conservative (seriously, anybody ever seen expired soda? not “above its sale by date” but actually “gone bad”)
The other one is “how believable is it?” Well, in the case of condoms, and specially for people who live in a hot climate or store the condoms way close to the heater (heat favors the kind of reaction that makes condoms go bad), I’d rather believe it than experiment, you know?
(One of my many temp jobs was at a factory which mixed raw rubber and rubber-like substances into something called “mother mixes” which our customers would, in turn, use to make rubber things - the RnD guys spent a lot of time doing nasty things to finished and unfinished rubber items in order to determine expiration dates under different conditions)
And I didn’t even begin to describe the things they did! Is there an organization with a daily “evil deeds” quota, or are us evildoers supposed to be autonomous?
Hot bleach was one of the things involved, but I don’t think we had brain bleach in the factory.
Actually, yes, I have. Aspartame (aka NutraSweet) has a definite shelf life, which is why the big soda companies began putting “best before dates” on their packages. On several different occasions, I’ve had a can of Diet Coke at my parents’ house (the only reason they buy the stuff is for me, and I’m only there a few times a year), and discovered that it had little or no sweetness at all…upon further examination, I’d find that the can was several months past its date.