The Right To Say No Is The Right To Say Yes
Responsible parenting in the 21st century? I’m sure it’s not easy. But I’ve got a lot of respect for this mother who wrote Why I Want My Teenage Daughter To Have Sex. At least she’s trying!
From the article:
I heard a radio call-in show recently in which a 17-year-old girl wanted support to stay over at her boyfriend’s house even though her parents forbade it. The almost unanimous response sounded like this: “When you are financially independent then you can sleep wherever you want. Until then you are under you parents’ roof and your parents’ rules.”
I understood the logic and I support parents to act in alignment with their values. As a psychotherapist, Parenting Coach and mother of two teen daughters, however, I had a very different response.
We give our children–and especially our daughters–a double message. We tell them that their bodies are their own and that they get to say “no” when it doesn’t feel right, but we don’t tell them that they also gets to say “yes” when it does feel right.
When our kids have a love interest, crush or sexual feelings we may want to protect them from their natural impulses and desires–and especially from the perils and complications they might cause. What if we just supported them instead?
For example, here is the statement I want my daughter to hear, loud and clear: Your body belongs to you, and you can do anything with it that you want. You get to say “no” when you don’t want to do something, and you get to say “yes” when you do.
Indeed.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=16584
It’s too complicated to be a simple yes or no. Parents who let their children decide have to deal with those children when things go wrong. Teenaged children/ young adults, that age range, tend to have very big emotional highs and lows. A break up isn’t just sad it’s devastating. Sleeping with someone who doesn’t return your calls, or pretends you don’t exist, or spreads gossip about you, is something which has caused young people to take drastic action. Parents have to deal with all of that and this is why parents can not be too liberal. It is the parent who has to be the voice of caution, at least until the young people are able to deal with things better themselves, when the ages of high drama are over.
Desparately lonely, horny young people take drastic actions too. At least if the parents know what is going on they can guide them emotionally. If it is kept a secret because the parents are siding with the repressive majority who think some emotions should only be expressed after 18 or 21 year of age it may fester into a terrible misery where Romeo and Juliet are the only rôle models. Or the Phantom of the Opera.
It is precisely because adolescents are risk-blind and hormone-driven that we must accept that and give them the choice to find legitimate outlets for their desires.
Science says that having one relationship per year on average balances out the positive effects of being in a relationship vs the negative effects of a breakup. Teenage girls tend to handle breakups better, because they talk about them with friends more than teenage boys. I think the reason we’re so concerned generally about teenage girls being in relationships is more about pregnancy, and we’ve got much better methods of preventing it when it’s not wanted than ever before. We’ve also got paternity tests, STD tests, etc., we need to update our morals and habits to go with our tech.
I think “be safe” is better advice than “you’re not allowed to see that boy/girl/person”. Fully informed teens apparently tend to wait longer to experience the various levels of intimacy (on average) than uninformed ones, so the best advice seems to be to give your kids a Lot of talks about sex, all the information in the world, so they’re not as curious and wait a bit longer until they’re more emotionally mature.
Another reality is that teenagers tend to push boundaries, so no matter where the boundaries are, they tend to push past them to establish their own identities, but again, that’s a pattern, which may not hold true for each person. But the children of parents who have a few drinks might try a few more when testing boundaries, similar patterns with drugs and other ‘risky’ activities. Whatever is seen as rebellious. Which is why making pot legal reduces its use amongst teenagers, because it’s now less ‘sexy’, and somewhat boring. Whether that’s a good thing or not (whether harder drugs will be tried in an urge to ‘properly rebel’) is yet to be seen, but I think overall it’s a good thing, even for teens wanting to rebel. Sometimes we need relatively ‘safe’ ways to rebel.
It’s the duty of the parents to attempt to educate and prepare their children for virtually every forseeable unpleasant sexual eventuality. I can’t readily see anything wrong with advising against a heavy sex life early on, but generally I’m opposed to forbidding sexual exploration past the point of natural sexual curiosity and desire. Surely it’s safer for them to satisfy their normal curiosity in a parent’s home rather than the common alternative environments where preditors may lurk or there may be other dangers.