You're Teaching My Child What? (10 page)

I suggest that a “comprehensive and common sense” answer to the query would sound something like this:
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I endorse you for being proactive and seeking advice on protecting your daughter. Rest assured that at twelve, your influence on her is greater than you might imagine.
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What's critical for your daughter is the parenting she receives. She'll do best if you model good behavior, and you're warm, supportive, and hands-on. She needs you to establish firm rules and high expectations.
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Does your daughter's father live at home
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? Teens
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from two-parent families are more likely to delay sexual activity. The research findings are robust: the longer a girl lives without her father at home, the more likely she'll engage in early sexual activity and experience a teen pregnancy. According to one study, girls whose fathers lived outside the home from an early age
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were seven to eight times more likely to have a teen pregnancy.
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When it comes to your decisions about sex, who is most influential?
 
Percentage of teens who answered
Source: The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy,
www.teenpregnancy.org/September
2001
Even without dad in the home, your attitude toward teen sex and rules you make about dating can influence your daughter to delay sexual behavior.
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But before delving in to those issues, mom, know this: your daughter needs
you
. Instead of visits to the gynecologist, schedule special time together, just the two of you, and talk. Strengthen your connection with her. She wants a close and confidential relationship
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with you, not her health care provider.
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Ask your daughter about her life—how things are going at home, school, and with friends. Is there anything bothering her? What can you do to help? Find out what she's looking forward to—not years from now (for the next few years she's probably not planning so far in advance) but for her birthday, Christmas, or summer vacation. What does it mean to her to become a teenager? What does she think it will be like in 8th grade, or 11th? Every child wants to feel that their thoughts and dreams are important.
Speak about what you've learned from your own experiences, and communicate your values. It's at least as important as talking about contraceptives, if not more. Affirm that your daughter is precious to you, while explaining why it would have been smarter to give birth to her under different circumstances. It's not that you regret having her—to the contrary!—but if you could do it again, you'd have had her—the same daughter, not different in any way—when you were an adult, married to her father.
You could say something like:
I want to speak with you about something really important. When I was young, I made the biggest mistake in my life. I began having sex too early. I didn't think it out. I didn't know what I do now—that anytime you have intercourse, even if you are using contraception, you could get pregnant. Or maybe I knew it but
did it anyway. Having a baby when you're not ready is like falling off a cliff. I want you and my grandkids to have an easier time. So I'm going to keep reminding you: there's a cliff out there. And I'm going to do all I can to make sure you don't get near it.
Teens often misperceive what adults think and feel; make sure your daughter is certain about your values and expectations—these will impact her behavior. Yes—she may object vigorously, but studies show that high parental expectations are associated with postponing sex.
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If your daughter perceives her relationship with you is good, and your disapproval of teen sex is absolutely clear, it can have a powerful effect on her behavior. One study based on data from almost 8,000 mother-teen pairs
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found that the more liberal teens think their mothers' sexual opinions are, the more likely they are to have had sex and the more sexual partners they are likely to have.
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“Girls who reported closer relationships with their mothers were less likely to have had sexual intercourse. They were more likely to report a history of sexual intercourse when their mothers communicated frequently about sexual topics and when daughters perceived their mothers as being more approving of premarital sex. Daughters were less likely to be sexually active when their mothers reported more discussions related to the negative consequences of premarital sex and to delaying sexual intercourse for moral reasons.”
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,
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If you have religious beliefs about teen sex, mom, you must convey those to your daughter. Even more protective is your daughter's devoutness: religiousness in adolescence is associated not only with lower rates of teen sex, but also lower incidence of binge drinking, marijuana use, and cigarette smoking.
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Guilt is a powerful variable, in that if a teen believes teen sex is wrong, it limits their behavior significantly.
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Sex educators who are so big on removing sex from morality remove the guilt factor. But parents should not be afraid of it, as
long as the child understands it is the
timing
of sex, not sex itself, that is the issue. For every thing, there is a season.
Monitoring, knowing your daughter's whereabouts, activities, and friends, is critical. Know her friends—aside from you and her father, they have the greatest influence on her sexual decisions. Evidence is overwhelming that monitoring is protective, with benefits persisting into late adolescence.
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It should come across to her as evidence of your concern and care, not mistrust.
Factors Most Affecting Teens' Decisions About Whether to Have Sex
A perception of a low-level of monitoring is associated with sexual risk behaviors and, among low-income African American female teens, with getting pregnant, as well as gonorrhea, Chlamydia, and Trichomonas infections.
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Your daughter should know it's important to you to know where she is, who she's with, and what she's doing.
Newsflash: More unsupervised time, with groups of peers or with a member of the opposite sex, is associated with sexual behavior.
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Do we really need studies to confirm the obvious? Mom, reduce your daughter's opportunities for sexual encounters. You may want to consider enrolling your daughter in a program for teens that encourages abstinence; some have a proven track record. For example, junior high and middle school-aged girls in the Best Friends program are six and a half times less likely to have sex compared to their peers in D.C. Public Schools .
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Dr. Cullins, your advice is contradicted by twenty-five years of research on the teen brain and on parenting. You instruct this mom to step back, but one study after the next tells her to step in. You say you respect your daughter's decisions; they say make your expectations clear and enforce them. You emphasize her relationship with a health provider, but it's her relationship with her mother and her father that's critical. Your approach is based on the notion that parents thwart a child's development—that if kids were left alone, free of our rules and expectations, they'd thrive. But the opposite is true.
The “Facts” of Life
Do you see how this racket works? The experts tell your daughter: If you can answer “yes” to these questions, you may be “ready.” They tell you: you may want her to wait, but be realistic: your daughter will probably have sex before she graduates from high school.
When you wince and groan, they reply: Trust us. We've studied adolescent sexuality, and understand your daughter's biological, psychological,
and social development. Sure, it's hard for you to see her growing up so fast. But it will be harder to see her pregnant. Your job, mom and dad—even if adolescent sexual behavior conflicts with your values—is to share that with her, and then make sure she knows about obtaining and using “protection.”
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“Children are sexual and think sexual thoughts and do sexual things,” Mom and Dad must “accept and honor [their] child's erotic potential.”
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—
Talking With Your Child
About Sex: Questions and
Answers for Children from
Birth to Puberty
by sex ed
matriarch and SIECUS
founder Mary Calderone
We're not talking only condoms. In her book
Beyond the Big Talk: Every Parent's Guide to Raising Sexually Healthy Teens—From Middle School to High School and Beyond
, former SIECUS president Debra Haffner writes that teens need to know “that they cannot swallow ejaculate or have oral sex during menstruation. If these topics seem too embarrassing to discuss, consider how awkward it would be helping your teen with oral gonorrhea or, worse, HIV.”
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Uh . . . okay. . . thanks for sharing! And parents, take note of something else: if you can't stay cool and calm during these explicit talks, aside from the risk to your child of disease and pregnancy, the experts warn, you'll pay a hefty price: your child will go elsewhere for help. That's right, she'll turn to a friend, teacher, or online stranger with her questions and concerns, and it will be completely beyond your control. Well, that's what you get for foisting your hang-ups on your child's healthy sexual curiosity.
Wait ... what was that they were saying about scare tactics?
What should parents do? Have they no choice but to defer to the “experts”? Are they really the bumbling morons described by educators, the greatest obstacle to their child's healthy sexuality? Is there no
other option but to take a deep breath, squelch their gut feelings, whisper a prayer, and try to speak “openly” with their thirteen-year-old about “sex play” and its accompanying risks?
Yes, parents have a choice. They can reject this madness. They can listen to their gut feelings, because their intuition is correct: No way! This is too much, too soon! We know our daughter, and she's not the self-aware, perfectly rational, disciplined person your model assumes, who already knows who she is and what she wants. She's not a mini adult
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who can fully analyze a complex decision and consider the risks and consequences. The answer is not “information,” it's giving her a chance to grow up. Our obligation is to teach and guide and, yes, sometimes judge her, not to stand by and watch as she determines her own “readiness”! Thanks for your opinions, “experts,” but no thanks.
Parents can make that choice and share it with their child. They can calmly but firmly put up a big red light for their sons and daughters regarding sexual behavior during adolescence. And they can rest easy, because they—and not SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, or Advocates for Youth—have the up-to-date, medically-accurate facts on their side.
Newsflash: Teens Are Not Miniature Adults, in Mind or Body
In September 2003, some of the nation's most accomplished developmental neuroscientists gathered in New York City. They met for two days to share their research in a field that did not exist a decade earlier. The conference title: “Adolescent Brain Development: A Period of Vulnerabilities and Opportunities.”
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Until the mid-1990s, the study of brain development focused on the fetus, infant, and toddler. By age two, the brain reaches close to 80 percent of its adult weight,
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and so those years were considered the critical periods of development; future maturation was considered
almost insignificant. But research was limited, because healthy children could not be ethically examined with x-rays or CT scans, techniques that use radiation.
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Investigators had to rely on animal studies and cadavers.
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