I was brought up in rural Florida in a Spanish-speaking household, so I already was very highly attuned to the idea of "culture". I had to deal with it every day, and learned quickly to jump back and forth from one to another--without giving myself away. I quickly realized the superstitions of my tribe were not the laws of physics. People who only know one culture find it very difficult to understand another. They think everybody in the world is just like everyone they know, so they are often disappointed.

In science fiction you travel to the far future, you go to other planets, you inhabit civilizations and cultures totally different from ours, some of them deliberately devised by their authors to be totally grotesque because they are trying to make a point. This only sharpened my sense of the arbitrary and artificial nature of the rules and regulations which we use to navigate social space. To me, a high school football game was pure tribal ritual, and no one else seemed to understand that. God does not make the rules, we do, even if we don't realize it.

I was culturally well prepared to understand and survive in the Vietnam-era military and hippy dippy college in the 1970s, two other counter-culture environments which clashed with the button-down 1950s of my childhood. Reading Sci-Fi helped me get through that relatively intact. I can't think of a better literature to educate a youth, except perhaps well-written historical novels.

Good luck with your kids, you're doing the right thing.