Guest Blog Post #1 – From Dave S.
First in a series of guest blog posts about parenting.
This is a request for advice: I am discussing Modern Love with my teen boys. Any input from the 11D peanut gallery about things I am missing would be appreciated. I’ve been trying to cover the stuff I think they may not have heard otherwise. The local schools have been doing their bit on the Birds and Bees: sperms! eggs! a condom over a wooden penis! vigorous discussion of STDs! Abstinence! Be scared, be very scared. This is all very well, but as near as I can tell, there has been no moral discussion, nor any sense of romance or excitement.
So I’ve made the following points, in no particular order – usually when driving, since the last thing they want is to hear their old Dad talking about girls, and sex, and desire, and romance. When we are going 25, and there are no available screens, they can't escape.
1. We have gotten you guys Gardasil. Okay, but this protects against only two of the four strains of HPV. HPV can lead to throat or anal cancer for you in thirty years, and it can make you the mechanism by which a girl for whom you care has gotten vaginal warts and a risk of later cancer. Don’t be silly, wrap your willy.
2. Average age at death in the Roman Empire was 30. By which time people had had and raised their children. Mostly they paired up well before 20. You could learn to be a tanner or a farmer or a soldier right quick. It’s not surprising that people were and are romantically excited at a young age, we’re built for it and it has worked for our ancestors for millenia. Well, now we live to 75 or 90 and we need to get training for years to be accountants and engineers and podiatrists: hard to do while you are in a romance, harder if you are raising littles. Our emotional life and urge to pair up early is out of joint with what the culture demands. Have to live with it: you are going to have romantic connections with people before you find the Love of Your Life. Try and do it right and not do harm.3. You think you are having a romance with some particular girl. You are actually having a romance with her and a committee of her six closest friends. Your every action will be critiqued and discussed. If you misbehave, it will be everywhere. So be polite and kind. And by the way, it is really not okay to lie to a girl to get her to let you into her pants. Not only is it wrong, but if you do it it will get around and your name will be mud.
4. More STDs: there is drug resistant gonorrhea on the horizon. Syphilis. Chancroid. AIDS. And you can catch a whole lot of ‘regular’ diseases, from rubbing your mucus membranes up against hers. Don’t be a fool, cover your tool.
5. You know the old line, ‘smile, and you will feel happy’? Well, sex is a lot like that. You go to a party in somebody’s parents’ basement and you have sex on a couch in a quiet corner, and before you know it, you are infatuated, you think you are in love. Or she is. Or both of you. Well, now what? In a couple of months the glow wears off, and you figure out you can barely talk to each other, your interests are so different. Or you are unsuitable because you’re not a Catholic, or something.
6. Romance is wonderful and exciting and I want you to find a way to a nourishing and growing connection with someone. You can get ahead of yourselves. Then later there’s unhappiness. So start out by going to a museum in daytime, or biking by the river, or something. See if you like spending time with each other. Unlike in The Old Days, there is no consensus on what the mommy does and what the daddy does. Mitt and Ann, they had an idea of proper roles that they could slot into. Barack and Michele, not so much – they had to figure out for themselves what they wanted, in a marriage. And you have to figure out even whether you want a marriage at all, though it has been very good for your mother and me, and we hope for it for you. The social context you are going into, you are more like Barack than Mitt.
7. You get some girl pregnant. And by the way seven per cent of high school girls get pregnant every year. Well, now you have totally lost control. She decides: does she decide she wants to keep it? Congratulations, you are a dad, you are on the hook for twenty years of child care. Several hundred dollars a month on top of everything else. Does she want you in this kid’s life? If not, you don’t have a chance to be a dad to the kid. So there’s a kid you have obligations to and no way you can fulfil them. Do you want this kid and she decides not to keep it? You have no rights, it is wholly her choice, she hooks up the Hoover and it’s gone. Or maybe she adopts the kid out and you know there is a kid of yours who you will never see. And by the way, the actual girl of your dreams, who you meet later, flees you because you have this prior child. Cover your stump before you hump.
8. Statutory rape. You are 18 and you have a fling with a girl who is 17. The law says you are raping her. Her parents get pissed off at you, and they complain to the prosecutor, and the prosecutor for some reason thinks this is worth prosecutor resources (more likely if you are 18 and she is 16, even more likely if she is 15, nearly a sure thing if she is 14) and you get convicted. Then you are a felon, you can’t vote, lots of people won’t hire you, and you pop up on the Internet searches people can make for sex criminals in their neighborhoods, forever. Her parents are most likely to get pissed at you if you get her pregnant. When in doubt, shroud your spout. Other ways to anger parents are to break her heart, lie to her, dump her cruelly – all those things you ought not to do anyhow. What is this about? We have revulsion at sex relationships where the guy has a lot more power – violent rape, the rich old fat guy who marries a young poor beauty, the 20 year old who brings his excitement to a fifteen year old and sweeps her off her feet. Bill Clinton and the intern. Donald Trump dumping Ivana and taking up with Melania. There’s a whole continuum of things here, and social response ranges from impotent disapproval to sending the guy to jail. Message for you: watch out for relationships with power imbalances. Watch out particularly if the power has to do with your age, and you are in something with a girl who is less than 18.
Apt. 11d 
When we were fostering teens, I always made the biggest point enthusiastic consent. If you’re intimately involved with someone, you want that person to be enjoying himself or herself and it should be pretty darn obvious that he or she is doing so. If you can’t tell, find a way to get to what’s comfortable and enjoyable for both of you rather than just blundering along. Beyond understanding that “no” means “no,” realize that “hell yes!” is for many reasons better than “yes.”
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Steve, I think this is a good start: You think you are having a romance with some particular girl. You are actually having a romance with her and a committee of her six closest friends. Your every action will be critiqued and discussed. If you misbehave, it will be everywhere. So be polite and kind.
I would extend it. With social media, it isn’t her six closest friends. It’s the entire high school, anyone she’s met at summer camp, her friends through volunteering, and her entire extended family. If you’re a jerk, it will follow you for the rest of your life. (no pressure)
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It’s difficult, but sex education of our sons should include some aspect of what it takes to provide female pleasure.
Not about sex, but a great parenting talk, and a difficult one, is responsible driving habits: your child tuned out the boring driver ed instructor, but we need to talk frankly with them about driving speed, control, showing off, others in the car, adolescent traffic deaths, and of course, alcohol/drug impairment. That reminds me, intoxication needs to be wrapped around the sex talk as well.
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Maybe I’m naive (my oldest is 7) but I think integrity should ideally be slipped in as a part of the discussion. I don’t mean a particular moral view of sex but that a quality person conducts his relationships in alignment with his values. That goes from the “hell, yes” thing Thorn mentioned above to how to deal with a drunk hookup or not lying.
I think a discussion about sexting, pictures and recording devices, and porn would be kinda of good too.
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A local parenting class points out that the “sex conversation”is a continuing one. When I read this list, and the additions in the comments and the additions in my head, and then, for a brief moment regressed back into being a teen, I realized that my eyes would have rolled all the way around my head. It would have been way too much information for me at 12, or at 16, and potentially even at 18. I, myself, was a very innocent and risk-averse teen; much of this information would have been irrelevant to me. But, a continuing conversation, in which the issues of the time are discussed openly, in small paragraphs and not long lectures, would have been worthwhile.
I like a few points you made here, which don’t get made in the sex-ed lectures for boys: I’ve seen enough “innocent” boys get confused, especially when they are young, that sex means the girl loves them. Sex can be emotionally entangling for boys; girls know it, and know that sex/physical affection can give them power in a relationship. There are girls who use that power to hurt boys, sometimes innocently, but sometimes on purpose or for the power. A boy knowing to protect himself, that it’s not just a score to score, that they can end up hurt and confused too seems like a worthwhile lesson for them to think about.
And, I really like the “hell yes” as an expression of what your partner should be saying. Indeed, we can move away from the interaction where girls need to be pushed into physical relationships. There will be girls who will be enthusiastic partners. Even if other pursuits will be valuable later on, teen boys are not well designed to pursue, and run the danger of harassing when they try to implement the romantic comedy of pursuit.
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Ok — what do people think about talking about porn? and at what age? and masturbation — is that a talk or a ‘work it out on your own’?? In terms of my reaction to this sex talk — two things: 1) friendship — because our kids are largely thrown together with a group of people they did not choose — at school, in sports or religious school — I think they are not always great about what friendship can mean. So I have been trying to talk to my kids about being friends with someone — I think that is the context for #6 — you should be friends with people you are contemplating sexual interaction with. And 2) I think it helps to keep open whether it be a boy or a girl they are potentially interested in — mine are both 12, twins, and I would guess heterosexual, but really, who can say and I want them to know that their choices are ok — that enthusiastic consent matters way more than the sex/gender of their potential sex partner.
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A boyfriend’s dad told him “friendship, respect and lust” and he told me. And I told my kids.
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kris, We take advantage of current events and Terrible Examples That Happened to Friends. We adjust the discussion to the ages of our children. Some years ago, there was a nationwide media panic around “rainbow parties.” At the time our children were too young to discuss the issue.
So, the popularity of 50 Shades of Gray led to a discussion of porn. And masturbation? Well, we’re not religious, so I guess the answer is, not in public? We’re more likely to roll our eyes, and state something’s “not good style” or “how tacky,” than try to invoke authority. Or we point out logical, predictable bad consequences for bad behavior such as being intimate with two girls in the same geometry class.
Well, now that I think of it, the publication of Twilight let to my delivering a maternal lecture to my middle-school aged daughter about how terrible abusive relationships are.
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“Terrible Examples That Happened to Friends”
I don’t know how common this was nationally, but back in the 90s, there was a bit of a fad among girls for semi-platonic bed-sharing with male friends. One of these days, I’m going to have to work up a talk on why this is a bad idea.
I need to work up another short talk on how being an at least moderately attractive young woman is like operating a liquor store in a bad neighborhood.
Currently, I have very strong feelings about Young People Today and their driving and walking skills. We live and drive near a large campus, and a lot of students seem not to understand the concept of turn-taking at the four-way stop (we recently had a particularly harrowing day with three different drivers lurching into the intersection out of turn). Also, a lot of students cross streets and parking lots while totally engrossed in their phones or with the back of their heads turned toward traffic. Combine that with all the people who use their phones while driving, and I’m surprised there aren’t a lot more fatalities. I’ve been pointing out offenders to my big kids and encouraging them to face traffic and pay attention to what cars are doing when attempting to cross a street. We do not read books when walking through parking garages! (Or we shouldn’t.)
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“…an at least moderately attractive young woman is like operating a liquor store in a bad neighborhood..”
Sure was when I was in high school. And my wife has a swell line, ‘Men are like street cars. Wait ten minutes, there’ll be another one along’. My understanding is that things are radically different now, that the young women show a great deal more interest and guys get pursued.
Why? Don’t know: colleges are far more female than before, and the mores trickle down to college? I’ve read that Russia underwent something similar, with the huge number of men dead in the Great Patriotic War, and those who came back drunk and out of action.
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“back in the 90s, there was a bit of a fad among girls for semi-platonic bed-sharing with male friends. One of these days, I’m going to have to work up a talk on why this is a bad idea.”
OMG, I got into such a fight with people on one of the Buffy boards about one of the 7th-season episodes where Buffy does this. I *hated* it and thought she was being selfish. Note: never call Buffy selfish on a Buffy fan board. 🙂
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It’s also an ideal situation for aspiring rapists (and the girl would probably feel so stupid about it afterward that prosecution would be even less likely than usual). So, a bad idea all-around.
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dave s.,
You need to work in something about the efficacy of condoms and the near-certainty of paternity over the course of 10 years of use.
Also, adoption doesn’t mean never seeing the kid. In fact, it’s getting to be very likely that you’d wind up with the kid contacting you.
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Interesting discussion of what works on college binge drinking. Roughly, they argue that telling the truth, when the truth is that most people do not engage in the bad behavior, rather than emphasizing the consequences of the bad behavior seems to be more effective in decreasing binge drinking.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/the-destructive-influence-of-imaginary-peers/?hp
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“”back in the 90s, there was a bit of a fad among girls for semi-platonic bed-sharing with male friends. ”
I remember this (along with back rubs, foot massages, . . . .). I think this is a variant of the “platonic” touching of dancing that used to prelude a change of relationship into a courtship. The difference is that dancing was done in public, and bed-sharing is done in private, increasing the probability that platonic changes to something else.
My suspicion is that this kind of morphing of relationships is a lost cause to argue against, given that the sexes are no longer separate, though its worth pointing out that there’s a lot of pretense going on.
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BJ, all I can say is witnessing a close friend in the process of becoming a crack whore gets a teen’s attention. It is sadly much more effective than any lectures about the dangers of addiction.
Likewise, witnessing a friend flunk out of college due to alcoholism meant more to them than describing behavior they thought was parent exaggeration.
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bj said:
“I remember this (along with back rubs, foot massages, . . . .).”
Yep.
By the way, at our last college posting some years ago, I saw a lot of peer norming anti-binge drinking posters of the kind you mention. Only X% of college students drink without eating first, Y% make sure to walk an inebriated friend home, only Z% binge drink, etc. The middle one had a really improbably high number (90ish?) that I think probably more reflected students’ ideas of what they should do, more than what they were actually doing.
That’s another related and important issue–not drinking with strangers, using the buddy system, making sure your friends get home safely, knowing what is an appropriate level of alcohol for your body weight, knowing when a friend needs immediate medical attention, etc. That girl in Steubenville really needed a buddy.
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I think we make a mistake when we focus so much on the risks and fail to appeal to the hero in our sons.
The other side of the “make the woman your partner before you give her children” choice, the one where that’s what a responsible guy does, offers these tremendous benefits.
1. There is NOTHING like the joy of finding out you are going to be a parent when this is what the two of you have hoped for. You can choose to have this joy.
2. There is NOTHING like holding a tiny person in your arms and realizing that you are in charge of keeping that little person safe. It’s empowering and joyful and a little scary. But mostly joyful. You can choose to have this power.
3. There is nothing like the heroes welcome a small child gives Daddy when he comes home. You can choose to be living with your child, and have this rock star experience every single day.
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Pedestrians walking out into traffic is so bad around our big city university that the local ambulance corps actually sponsored a PSA ad about not texting etc. while walking! Seems kind of obvious but I guess not…K
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“Seems kind of obvious but I guess not…”
I know. I don’t know whether it’s “kids today” or whether college students have always been like this, but there’s a real absence of street smarts. I’ve followed the police reports at two colleges, and college students get into a lot of trouble because they don’t lock doors or they open doors to people that they don’t know.
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Well, I’m late to this, but recently talked about this with one of my classes (8 20-21 yr old women, one of them already a mother). They know I have a 6 year old son. Two things were clear. They wish all boys were taught the girls can really enjoy sex a lot; and they wish boys were taught what the clitoris is, where it is, why it is so important, and that boys should explore, with its owner, what does well for it.
All of them said that no adult ever mentioned pleasure, when talking to them about sex as teens.
Depressing. But, I will follow their instructions when I talk to him about sex.
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Here’s an example I plan to hammer the guys with: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130404/NEWS09/304040086/Sex-offender-s-lobbyist-job-leads-to-arrest?Frontpage&gcheck=1&nclick_check=1
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I’m unconvinced that stories of unlikely examples and emphasizing risk is an effective way of modifying teenage behavior (for most teens). I think that’s a plan of attack that makes more sense to adults (who have fully developed executive functions) than it does to the kids we’re trying to convince/teach.
There’s wobbly reports of studies out there that suggest that risk taking is an evolutionarily desirable behavior in teens, that they’re programmed to believe that they’re immune to worst case scenarios. On the other hand, as parents, especially, we are programmed to believe that the worst case scenario is going to happen to us and to our child. This creates a pretty big gulf in communication.
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“There’s wobbly reports of studies out there that suggest that risk taking is an evolutionarily desirable behavior in teens.”
It certainly makes a Marine recruiter’s job easier.
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The examples aren’t unlikely. The teens caught at neighborhood house parties experience real-time consequences. The teens showing up drunk to a dance experience real consequences. Witnessing peers suspended from school or banned from playing on the high school team gets teens’ attention. As discipline issues are disclosed to colleges, seeing peers lose college acceptances focuses the mind.
Another example. A teen was caught speeding while a junior operator. The consequences he had to undergo–loss of license, court appearance, fines, lack of license for set period of time, required additional courses–shocked his peers. Mind you, those same peers had been lectured about the same consequences in Drivers’ Ed classes.
Lecturing, “if you do x, y will happen,” tends not to leave an impression. Pointing out the consequences of a friend’s behavior makes an impression.
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Oh, yeah, probably they don’t have to be unlikely in order to go through one ear and out the other. Probably just not absolutely certain.
I do think they are more likely to pay attention when it happens to a peer.
But unlike parents, do they see people on the internet as peers.
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“Lecturing, “if you do x, y will happen,” tends not to leave an impression. Pointing out the consequences of a friend’s behavior makes an impression.”
To support Cranberry’s pedagogy, some of my friends said that the best way to teach kids is with stories (they were talking about religious education). The immature mind doesn’t absorb rules well, but does absorb stories, especially vivid ones. My family used to be super alcoholic (it’s the curse of Northern European genetics) but it all stopped with my grandfather who for some reason decided not to be like all the other men in the family. My family had a massive informal educational program based on anecdote. “See this pretty dish? It’s the last one from the set. Auntie Myrtle used to do dishes after she’d been drinking.” “Toward the end, your Uncle Ivan was wearing pajamas under his clothes.” (Uncle Ivan had been a very successful Southern California veterinarian in the 1940s, before addiction took him down.) “We had to watch Uncle Morton when he came over, because he’d help himself to the vanilla extract.” Those were all some of the stories I heard as a kid, and I remember them 25 and 30 years later. It went a long way toward keeping heavy drinking from sounding cool to me.
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(it’s the curse of Northern European genetics)
I’ve always assumed that being half-Italian I’m genetically incapable of becoming alcoholic. I think I read something that said that.
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I had a college anthro class where they talked about the geographic distribution of different traits (being able to tolerate milk, alcoholism, etc.). The Mediterranean peoples do manage alcohol way better on average than Scandinavians, the Irish, Scots, Russians, American Indians, etc.
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Seeing their friends suffer bad consequences may upset teens, but I’m not sure it affects their behavior in any long-term way. It certainly didn’t for me. Having friends who got kicked out of school for drug use, for example, just made me more determined not to get caught.
Also, let’s be honest, most bad behaviors by middle-class teens don’t have serious long-term consequences. My friends who got kicked out of Exeter went to high school back home and still got into good colleges (one of them ended up at Yale with me). My daughter’s friend who sent out a bunch of tweets about getting high, which caused the Dartmouth squash coach to terminate his recruiting efforts, still got into Hopkins. The girl who got pregnant (and didn’t have an abortion, as most did) took a semester off, made up her coursework over the summer, and went to a good college.
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y81, I hate to break it to you, but I strongly suspect you and your friends are not middle-class.
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The middle class kids in our town (who may be upper-middle class) are experiencing consequences such as: death by overdose, death by DUI, expulsion from the public high school (and no, he won’t end up at the Ivy League.)
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So is Exeter a drug haven? It had that reputation in my private Midwestern college prep high school (which drew from a similar demographic, at least as close as you get to that demographic in the Midwest.) We explained it on the grounds that it was the era when boarding schools gave up on providing parental oversight.
I’m wondering if it still has that reputation, cause the older girl read about “harkness teaching” on the Internet and expressed interest.
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Come to think of it, more current anecdotes to add to the trove of family lore. “Your alcoholic auntie got fired from a restaurant for drinking on the job. She was nipping from a Snapple bottle.”
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You’re supposed to use coffee. It has a strong aroma of its own.
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Amy’s comment: “To support Cranberry’s pedagogy, some of my friends said that the best way to teach kids is with stories (they were talking about religious education)” reminded me of the link about the importance of family narratives in this post:
http://www.apt11d.com/2013/03/spreadin-love-543.html
Maybe the importance of narrative goes both ways, not just to teach the positives of family identity but also to teach the negative consequences of bad behaviors. And if you think about it, what else is mythology (and religion) but attempts to teach people how to behave and to give them a common identity?
Maybe teaching the humanities isn’t such a stupid idea.
Also, as I’ve gotten older and more experienced at teaching, I find I am doing two things more and more:
1. Telling stories, and
2. Using vivid visual analogies.
I have a whole story I tell when I teach research skills about what it used to be like in the dark days before the Internet. If I’m “on,” it really comes across as a horror story, and when I say “then you would turn the pages to find your article and … it had been ripped out by someone else” it becomes one of those *gasp* moments.
(Let us all bow our heads and remember the dark days of the Readers Guide to Periodicals, ok?)
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Hey Beedge, I’m back! and with a report. I gave the lads a ride to school today, and they were very impressed with the story of the Iowa Schlub. They also peppered me with questions about what the statutory rape rules are for pairings where both members are under 18. So, they are at least engaged.
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“They also peppered me with questions about what the statutory rape rules are for pairings where both members are under 18.”
They do understand that the laws are different from state to state, right?
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And that knowing too much about them can get creepy.
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MH,
Yes indeed.
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Wikipedia knows these things so you don’t have to.
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