Talking About Sex With Your Adolescent

Source: Courtesy of Carl Pickhardt, Ph.D.

Over the counseling years, I have seen young people and parents wrestle with how sexual experience can complicate young lives. So, what follows are just some impressions, opinions, and suggestions intended to help encourage parent–teenager communication about this sensitive topic.

Sensitivity is where parents have to start since there is wide variation in the degree of comfort parents have in starting to talk about this topic and honoring the value positions they bring to the discussion. These beliefs vary from family to family.

However, like it or not, agree with it or not, youthful interest in matters sexual increases with the onset of adolescence.

Discomfort and value differences when discussing this sensitive topic are OK; authenticity is what counts: “I would like us to be able to talk about the growing importance of sexual feelings in your life and relationships, about how you think about sex, sexuality, and sexual activity, and how you may want to manage sexual decision-making, and why.”

When to Begin Discussion

Around ages 9 to 13 is when parents can helpfully begin this conversation. In early adolescence, children reject old definitions and activities and explore more worldly experiences. Pulling away from the simpler, secure shelter of family, there is a growing focus on acting older with peers, which is where interest in sex starts to come in. Since sex is already more of a topic when talking with peers, parents need to weigh in to counter a lot of what their daughter or son is being told that isn’t so, for instance, “Having it one time can’t hurt and shows you’re more grown up!” Say what?

Intensifying sexual interest around this time is puberty, the onset of sexual maturity, when stirring hormones create physical changes (menstruation in girls, ejaculation in boys, for example) and arouse more personal concern about how to ideally look, how to attractively dress, and how to socially act.

Thus, when adolescence begins is probably the time when sex needs to be part of the ongoing parent–teenager conversation.

Approaches

At this point, four parental beliefs that don’t work for the best tend to be the following:

• “If we ignore it, our adolescent will, too.”
• “If we don’t talk about sex, it won’t happen.”
• “If we do talk about it, we will just encourage it.”
• “If we just have ‘the talk’ one time, that is enough.”

No, no, no, and no: Such parental denial offers no preparation or protection.

The conversation needs to be normalized and ongoing, and there are actually three conversations that need to begin:

1. About sex as biology,
2. About sex as sexuality,
3. About sex as activity.

Consider these one at a time.

Sex as Biology

Maybe parents can talk about sex as a fundamental drive to serve two basic human functions: for human reproduction and interpersonal intimacy. When male sperm and female egg meet in the woman’s womb, pregnancy can occur and human reproduction can begin. Survival of the human species depends on sex differences and sexual drive. And when physical attraction encourages social association, sexual arousal can provoke physical affection, intensify caring, and create emotional intimacy. Because sex is alluring, young people need to know the risks of pregnancy, disease, and possible mistreatment that come with becoming sexually active, so they don’t get harmed.

Sex as Sexuality

Consider talking about sex as sexuality, as conferring identity and energizing attraction. Parents can explain how sexuality is not simply binary, where one identifies either as female or male, and each is only sexually attracted to the other. This is the dominant pattern, but it is not the only human case. Instead, there is a spectrum of variation. For example, there are individuals assigned to one sex at birth based on how they present biologically who come to identify as a different gender. When it comes to attraction, there are females who are sexually attracted to other women and males who are sexually attracted to other men. And there are those who are attracted both ways.

Young people who vary from the dominant norm need to find and receive acceptance, not censure, in defining who and how they are sexually self-identified and attracted. As explained too me, "it's important not to conflate biological sex (male/female) with the social construction of gender (man/woman). Transgender and gender diverse people experience a disconnect between sex and gender. A transgender woman, for example, is assigned male at birth based on her body, but her gender identity is that of a woman.”

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Parents need to provide assurance: "Whatever you discover your sexuality to be, as always, you will always have our love."

Sex as activity

Maybe talk about sexual behavior as a maelstrom of complicated choices where misunderstanding, social pressure, and heightened arousal can make responsible decision-making very complicated to do.

So: what to advise their adolescent about managing sexual behavior? A few possibilities come to mind.

• Sexual feelings are OK.
• Thinking about sex is OK.
• Sexual self-pleasuring is OK.
• Physically forced sex is not OK.
• Emotionally pressured sex is not OK.
• Drunken or other drugged sex is not OK.
• Sex needs to be planned, not left to impulse.
• Waiting to have sex until older is a good idea.
• Sex needs to be had safely and not unprotected.
• If you have love, you’re not obliged to have sex.
• If you have sex, you haven’t necessarily found love.
• If the sexual behavior feels uncomfortable, don’t do it.
• Having sex doesn’t prove a boy a "man" or a girl a "woman."
• If sex feels right for one but not for the other it is wrong for both.
• When sex is sought for conquest, the person conquered can feel used.
• Physical intimacy of sex often arouses some need for emotional intimacy, too.
• Impersonal sex can gratify curiosity and desire but can feel sad without caring.

As for "sexting," daring to send sexual information about oneself in words or pictures wirelessly or over the internet, just remind the young person that such sexual self-exposure (through messaging and posting) has been given lasting value. It is now out of personal control, beyond recall. And this includes whatever sexual information about others one passes along. So, maybe ask yourself: "Might I regret later what I am impulsively tempted to do now?"

I believe most parents understand that sexual matters are of increasing adolescent interest as their daughter or son grows, while they differ widely in beliefs about how this topic should be presented. According to whatever values they hold, I believe sex as biology, sex as sexuality, and sex as activity are all topics that need to be addressed.

In our culture, sex is not a sensible topic but a socially loaded and distorted one. At an impressionable age, young people are under constant commercial assault, as sex is popularly glamorized, romanticized, idealized, sensationalized, eroticized, and exploited for economic gain.

Thus, adolescents are imprinted with aspirational sexual images through advertising, fashion, and entertainment from an early age. In our popular media, the common message seems to be that nothing can empower, is more pleasureful, ensures happiness, and leads to success like sexual image, sexual appeal, and sexual activity.

Maybe one job parents have when talking with their adolescent about sex is appreciating its importance while keeping it in realistic human terms.