A recent study showed the unsurprising fact that most parents either don't talk to their kids about sex, or do so far later than they should. Maybe it's denial that their kids are even thinking about sex, but by the end of the study, reported in Time:
...more than half of the parents reported that they had not discussed 14 of the 24 sex-related topics by the time their adolescents had begun genital touching or oral sex with partners.So parents remembered having 'the talk' but the kids didn't? Were the parents so uncomfortable or vague about the nitty gritty that the kids didn't actually notice it happening? Or does handing your kid a book and walking away count as discussing birth control and STDs?
Forty-two percent of girls reported that they had not discussed the effectiveness of birth control and 40% admitted they had not talked with their parents about how to refuse sex before engaging in genital touching.
Nearly 70% of boys said they had not discussed how to use a condom or other birth-control methods with their parents before having intercourse. Yet only half of the boys' parents, by contrast, said they had not discussed condom use or birth control with their sons.
The Frisky put out a request for stories on how people learned about sex, and although the majority of commenters blamed their parents for not doing a good job talk-wise, there was this:
I find it kind of hard to blame all the teenage pregnancies and STDs on parent's lack of skill in giving "the talk" I blame it more on teenagers being dumb. I never got I flipping talk and I sure as hell knew how to get a guy off me if he was trying to stick things where he shouldn't. And when I was okay with certain body parts being placed in other body parts (ha) I wasn't dumb enough to 1. not bag it and 2. have my ass on birth control. Simple. Effective. Maybe I was just smarter than the average teenager.
Not that my own experiences were any more useful. I barely remember getting any information from my parents. And school health class was mostly about showering and not exercising too hard when I had my period. So, my sex education ended up consisting of equal parts:
1. Judy Blume’s “Are You There, God…” which was passed from girl to girl in sixth grade.
2. Reading “The Joy of Sex” while I babysat for my neighbors (ewww re: the woman's hairy armpits)
3. The song ‘Sodomy’ from the stage musical “Hair” (I looked up all the words in the dictionary with mixed success.)
4. “Letters to Penthouse Forum,” which a friend stole from her brother. I remember reading a story in Forum that included the line ‘he came into my mouth’ and all of us being completely baffled at what that meant. You mean, he crawled into her mouth? It made no sense at all.
I was the unpopular, I mean, studious kid, learning about sex in reference books. Hot. How did you learn about the Birds and the Bees?
9 comments:
my education:
1. high school health class, in which I spent most of my time wondering just how anyone could be having trouble resisting sex. Turns out I was the only one not expirencing lust.
2. my mum, when I was trapped in the car with her for a long trip reminded me I could ask her anything. She told me to wait for a spark, that she loves me no matter what, that sex is freakin great and "you'll figure it out... that's half the fun."
3. I learned everything important from my best friend at college; a dedicated, proud pervert.
I've seen a few posts about stuff like this floating around and have been thinking about it. Quite a bit actually. I'm not sure how serious you want this shit to get, so I'll just be brief and such. I learned about sex when I was about 6 or 7 from older girlfriends on my street who often molsted me. I didn't know what exactly was going on, but my one friend was more than happy to tell me what she was doing with her "boy parts" on my girl parts. My parents never talked to me about this, even when my mom caught my friend and I dropping our pants in the front yard one day. Health class in my high school was a joke. So I knew about sex far before my parents enrolled my brother and I into sex education classes sponsored by our church. The first was heavily guilt and abstinence based while the second was much more informative about things like birth control and how to properly use it. And only until I got a serious boyfriend did my mom vaguely talk to me about condoms which was "If you're going to do it with your boyfriend just make sure you're safe." Which was funny because when she and my dad found out I was actually having sex they flipped shit, despite my mom sounding okay with it. That was the extent of my sex education. That and slash fan fiction I read in middle school and eventually free porn sites I looked at once or twice in college.
Maybe if parents in my parents' generation wouldn't be so afraid to talk to their kids about sex and rape and sexual assault things like what happened to me wouldn't happen so often. I can only hope that the next generation of parents are more open minded and willing to discuss sex because it can become an important part of a person's life and has so much potential to be so damaging if someone doesn't know what is going on. Guess I wasn't all that brief, huh? Lol. Thank you for this post and a place to vent and talk. :)
I can not remember that there was the "big talk" with my parents but they always told me anything i wanted to know (my daddy used to say "do what you want but use a condom!"). Now I´m 18 and I have no problem about talking bout sex with my parents, but when I started having sex with 16 I felt like my mother felt a bit uncomfortable about this topic.
I´m living in germany and here you get your first sec education in elementary school (this is more like "when mum and daddy loves each other ..." it was actually very nice), than in 5th grade (it was more detailed, how you use a tampon, how it looks inside of you and so on ... i really had a good biology teacher) and sometimes you talk about sex in higher grades. so all in all you have this topic 2/3 times in your school time.
and of course when you are a teenager you learn a lot from your friends or any kind of teen magazine (we have a very popular on called "Bravo")
Thanks for mentioning the German teen magazine Bravo. I'm about to do a post on a particularly informative photo gallery they ran recently. Stand by...
I got the most clinical convo from my dad. All about DNA, chromosomes. Very scientific. I was 8. I asked. He's a doctor.
When *my* daughter asked me? Let's just say the info involved condoms and cucumbers. :-)
Ha! Shira - How did your daughter react?
Fellow unpop ... err, studious kid here. Never had 'the talk' with the parents (too squeamish? )and the only mention in school was part of 7th grade health (don't have sex before you're married or THIS will happen to you).
My sex education came from hands-on experience and a 14.4 kb/s dial-up modem. That's not to say it was all that useful, but it certainly beat anything I got from the places where you're "supposed" to learn about such things.
Damn, this'll date me. I got the first talk when I was 8 and we were watching "White Shadow" and the characters kept saying this guy had gotten a girl "in trouble". I tried for the whole hour but couldn't figure out what they meant. My mom told me she would tell me later and she did wake me up early the next morning and told me what that meant and how women got "in trouble". And though the characters in the show weren't married, she got around that by saying "mommies" and "daddies" without ever mentioning marriage. Then when I was 10, I bought "Forever" by Judy Blume which was subsequently taken away from me at school because it was "inappropriate" for my age. The great thing was watching my mother threaten to make the administrator sorry if she ever took another book from me. A lot of it was over my head at the time but as I got older things started falling into place. So a good part of my information came from young adult and adult novels.
I attended high school in the mid-80's and we had a good sex ed teacher who was able to cover all topics without embarrassment and even managed to tell the truth. At the end of the class we had to view a childbirth film. In this teacher's class, the girls could watch or go to the library but it was mandatory for the boys to watch (her theory was the girls would eventually find out anyway). I stayed for the viewing, mostly to tweak the boys but I have to admit, after watching it I went home and insisted on going on the Pill.
After I became a mom, my first huge fight with my mom was when she told my daughter that storks brought babies. I totally flipped my lid, immediately corrected that wacky notion and that's when I began to give her age appropriate information. Menarche comes very early in our family and my daughter was no exception so she had complete and accurate information by the time she was 10 and after that I used TV shows to build upon her knowledge and introduce various subtopics. I joke that I am one of those mothers that has WAY more information than I really want but I marvel at my daughter's complete ease in discussing sex even with her parents and I'm glad knowing that we created that.
I know this post was *quite* a while ago, but I'm looking through older posts and have a response to this. Apparently, when I was seven, I asked the general "Where did I come from?" question, and my mom gave an adequate answer- honest, but not detailed. Much to her chagrin, I continued asking pointed questions and eventually got the whole story! She went up to her room and hyperventilated while I went and played outside.
We never talked about it again. In fifth grade, they split up the boys and the girls- the boys learned about erections and the girls learned about periods. Does that sound even and reasonable? :P At this point, I was completely unaware of sexual feelings.
In tenth grade at my Catholic high school, we all took a class called- wait for it.... "Morality." We essentially learned that 'every sperm is sacred' (as in that Monty Python movie whose name escapes me). We also learned that having sex outside of marriage would leave us feeling used and worthless, and that we'll get pregnant and/or horrible infections. Being the impressionable, naive, and accepting girl I was, by the end of the course, sex outside of marriage was simply unthinkable!
Thankfully, I have recovered from those notions. A few years back in high school, my mom said "God forbid should you decide to have sex before marriage, I hope you'll use birth control." A couple years later, I went on the pill on the premise that I had painful cramps (I do, but I could've taken ibuprofen... but ibuprofen doesn't stop babies from forming). We spent a weekend emailing each other back and forth (yes, we lived in the same house). She was very upset about the implications this had for my relationship with a wonderful guy. I essentially said 'this is my life and my body, butt out.' We've silently agreed not to talk about it, and things are good now.
I hope I can be like Pockysmama someday for my kids and make them comfortable talking about sex. I wish I could with my mom, but it just won't work.
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