Birds And The Bees Talk Growing In Acceptance, But One Talk Isn't Enough
Today’s teens are more immersed in technology than perhaps any previous generation of teens ever was. Because of that, they’re also exposed to sexual content on a regular basis, whether it’s through social media, television, or the plain-old Internet. These days, they’re in so deep that scientists have found teens who sext won’t necessarily partake in risky sexual behavior — they’re saying it’s just a normal part of sexual development. Parents may find it hard to navigate all this know-how when it comes to talking to their kids about sexuality, but experts in the field believe it’s the perfect jumping-off point.
These experts come from Planned Parenthood and New York University’s Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health. They surveyed a group of 1,663 mothers and fathers about how they communicate with their children (ages 9 to 21) about sex and relationships. What they found was rather reassuring: 80 percent of kids had spoken to their parents about sex, with almost half saying they first mentioned it around age 10 and 80 percent around age 13.
“The great news is that parents and teens are talking about these topics,” Leslie Kantor, vice president of education at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told Time. “Most parents and their children report starting these conversations before the age of 14, and they are talking about the topics like peer pressure, puberty, and staying safe online. The bad news is that people don’t necessarily have a lot of conversations, so [it] doesn’t become ongoing.”
It’s almost as if parents know they have to talk about sex with their kids, so they get the basics out of the way — 80 percent spoke about the aforementioned topics — but later on, when it’s more appropriate to speak about topics like saying no to sex, birth control, and sexual health information, they don’t know how to approach the conversation. When it came to those topics, more than 20 percent said they hadn’t spoken to their kids about them. Over 30 percent said they hadn’t spoken to their kids about reproductive health services.
For these parents, talking about sex is much easier than they may expect, Kantor said. All they have to do is leverage the media their kids are using. “We are very committed to ensuring that parents are the primary sex educators of their own kids,” Kantor told Time. “Use TV as an opportunity. Even if the show is sending a terrible message, it gives you a chance to get in there with something else. For example, asking, ‘Is this what people look like at your school? Not everyone is a size two.”
Perhaps the most interesting finding from the survey was that 90 percent of parents said they wanted sex education in both middle and high school. That’s a huge departure from current sex education policies throughout the country, which often stress abstinence (26 states stress it, while 12 states require it be covered). Teaching abstinence, which often goes along with neglecting other key areas of education, simply doesn’t work. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health research center, this form of education not only fails to delay sex until marriage, but it also deters contraceptive use among teens, putting them at risk of unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
A 2013 survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 47 percent of high school teens had ever had sex at some point. Thirty-four percent said they’d had it within the past three months, with 41 percent of them saying they didn’t use a condom. These numbers show that it’s about time teens are properly educated about sex.