GIVE ME A BREAK:REMEMBER BACK when the big media stories were driven by "it"? You know – sex, divorce, teen pregnancy. How delightful it was to debate morality rather than the economy. How thrilling to be outraged at the close-minded ignorance of our parents. Isn't it great that we are so open now?
We don’t need to talk about “it” much any more, not because we’re too stressed out to be having “it”, but because – according to a new study by the Crisis Pregnancy Agency – we don’t think our teenagers are having “it” either.
“Parents know that teenagers are starting sexual activity earlier than they did at their age, but everybody says ‘I don’t think my child is having sex’,” says Abbey Hyde, who conducted the research.
Parents think that if teenagers’ social lives revolve around going out with a group of friends, rather than boyfriends and girlfriends in the romantic sense, this means they’re not doing it. Parents also think that adolescents know a lot more about it than they did at their age, because they gave them “the talk” when they were barely out of national school, which is more information than a lot of parents got in a time when girls were still being put into mother-and-baby homes without knowing where the baby came from.
In reality, things have changed very little. Parents tell their teenagers they can talk to them about it at any time, but when teenagers don’t bring up the subject, they don’t either. If parents do bring it up, the study found, teenagers leave the room, get irritated or say “there’s nothing you can tell me that I haven’t already learned”. Parents comfort themselves with the belief that schools are telling adolescents all they need to know, when actually school programmes are haphazard.
Being faced with unsettling evidence may provoke a parent to say something, but usually in a covert and even sarcastic way. One mother gave her daughter the talk about contraception when the girl was 9½ and had hardly brought the subject up since, believing that her daughter was “bright and sensible”. Then, when she was 16, the daughter organised a “furtive” alcohol-fuelled party in the family home when the parents were away. The mother responded to this wake-up call: “When I saw the condoms, I said to her, ‘Cheap friends and cheap drink’.”
Another mother believed that TV shows provided the opportunity to deliver covert moral messages. She said to her five kids in their late teens and early 20s as they gathered around the box, “I hope to God you are behaving yourselves when you are out.” Seeing a love bite on her 17-year-old son’s neck, one mother merely conveyed to him the view that she “was not impressed”. For her, love bites were a sign of “cheap” sexual intimacy, but she never told her son how she felt and her son was too embarrassed to discuss it.
Many parents pride themselves on their openness, when the generation of parents that grew up with revelations of sexual hypocrisy in the Catholic church is not as open as it would like to think. Parents don’t talk to teenagers about sexual feelings, about alternatives to penetrative sex, about how to interact with a partner as intimacy evolves, about how to establish sexual boundaries and about insecurity or feelings of inadequacy that teenagers may feel.
When was the last time any of us had a parenting class on how to talk to our teenagers about sex? And if one was available, would we even attend? The whole thing is too cringe-inducing, so most parents turn a blind eye. The mother of a 14-year-old boy who was bringing a girl up to his room regularly, and even spending the day there when the mother was out, was allowed this freedom because the mother assumed that they weren’t doing “it”. Maybe they weren’t, but how was she to know if she didn’t ask?
The father of a teenage boy who brought a girl home to spend the night at the house after a social event because it was too far home to the girl’s townland, wordlessly told his son “no humping” by having his wife bring extra blankets and pillows into the front room so that the girl would sleep on the floor. Not quite what you’d call open communication.
Reading the 149 pages of this report, you get the impression of parents communicating shambolically, and teenagers pulling the wool over their eyes.
Little has changed. Our open-minded liberalness is an illusion. No wonder teen pregnancy rates are, with small variations year on year, about the same as they were 30 years ago.
kholmquist@irishtimes.com
Parents’ Approaches to Educating Their Pre-adolescent and Adolescent Children About Sexuality is available at www.crisispregnancy.ie