The Guide to Getting It On (136 page)

A Final Word about Boundaries

If you think your younger teenagers would do better to wait a couple of years before sharing sex with partners, then you might do something other than tempt the fates.

One thing is to talk to your kids about sex and encourage them to talk to you. That way, if they’re going to become sexually active, it won’t be just to get back at a prudish parent. Another thing that might help delay sexual activity is getting teenagers involved in activities that challenge their minds and bodies, we’re talking about things like science fairs and playing soccer or building things.

Understand that good kids do not always make good decisions. If you give them enough rope to hang themselves, most will. On the other hand, no kid ever lost a friend because their parents insisted on knowing where they were and with whom. No teenager ever died because his or her parents set a curfew on weekends. No kid ever shriveled up and blew away because one parent called another parent to make sure that an adult would be home when their kid was sleeping over.

Your kids will have plenty of time to do what they want once they are adults. Until then, it is your job as parents to get them there safe and sound.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:
The Secret Lives of Teen Girls: What Your Mother Wouldn’t Talk about but Your Daughter Needs to Know
by Evelyn Resh, Hay House, 2009. As parents, we often deny our daughters’ emerging sexuality or make it clear that we expect them to deny it. Fortunately, Evelyn Resh’s book for parents of teenage girls addresses this disconnect. It offers us more effective ways to deal with our daughters’ sexuality, including the use of humor to diffuse situations rather than threats or pretending it’s not an issue. Ms. Resh has spent years working with teenage girls, helping to guide their growth when their parents were not able to acknowledge the sexual milestones they had reached. Whether you agree with Ms. Resh’s perspective or not, this book is helpful because it frames the sexuality of teenage girls in ways that actually make sense.

Special thanks to Bill Taverner, co-editor of the
American Journal of Sex Education.
And to Debra Hafner’s
From Diapers to Dating: A Parent’s Guide To Raising Sexually Healthy Children,
Newmarket Press, for a reminder about nannies and other things mentioned in this chapter.

CHAPTER

64

“Send me a hot pic” for Parents

M
uch of what parents hear regarding their kids and the Internet focuses on pornography and sexual predators. This chapter tries to help you get perspective so you can hopefully be helpful to your kids in ways that they genuinely need you to be.

As for sexual predators online, there is the hype and there is the reality. For those of you who would like to deal with reality, the chances are good that your teenage daughter is at much greater risk of getting into serious trouble from the influence of the 21-year-old fry cook who she works with at Taco Bell than she is online. And if your child is going to be molested, in 9-out-of-10 cases, it will be done by someone you personally know. You have more to fear from your relatives, baby sitter, neighbors, or the people you might be dating. In far less than 1-in-100 cases will it happen through a predator on the Internet.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be hyper-vigilant about what your kids do on the Internet. It just means that if you are concerned about harm reduction, there may be bigger fish to fry in most kid’s lives than what they face online. Unfortunately, blanket prohibitions aren’t going to work any better with the Internet than abstinence-only sex education does with sex. Even if you take your kids’ computers away, they will get access at a friend’s house. So unlike the “Just say no!” philosophy that many people recommend,
The Guide’s
advice is, “Say yes some of the time, but don’t be dumb about it.”

Junior Inherited His Dad’s Appreciation for All Things Sexual

So, you’ve discovered that your little altar boy has bookmarked some seriously crude websites. There’s nothing unusual about that. Most of his friends have as well. Today’s middle school students are seeing images that would have been shocking to a lot of college students a generation ago. No one can say if it’s a bad thing for kids to be seeing explicit porn at this age.It just is and it’s not going to change.

What parents should be concerned about is not so much the porn, but that there are often no thoughtful adults for kids who are watching porn to talk to about it. There’s no one they can ask what’s normal. There’s no one they can ask “Is that something I’m supposed to do when I have sex?”

When younger kids are seeing things on TV that are scary or confusing, the first thing parents will tell them is “Don’t worry, honey, it’s not real. They’re just actors. The gobs of blood squirting out of that man’s chest is just catsup.” But there are few parental figures helping kids to sort out what parts of porn are real and are a normal part of lovemaking and what parts aren’t.

This can be especially concerning when we look at how couples negotiate relationships in most types of porn. In mainstream porn, there’s no conversation between the actors about the sex they are having, there’s no asking each other if it feels good or not, no asking about whether their partner wants to be doing what they are doing, no asking whether their partner feels aroused enough to begin having intercourse, no conversation about liking each other and wanting to be closer to each other. There’s very little kissing in porn, very little tenderness, very little mutual respect, very little, if any, concern about birth control or STI’s. Everything just magically happens. Sex in porn is effortless. No one is unsure of themselves or uncomfortable.

You’re certainly not going to change the basic messages of porn, but as parents, you can offer your children another point of view than they are currently getting from porn. Also keep in mind that it’s not just porn your kids can use some help with. They will also be seeing some seriously bizarre and disturbing video collections which might include people killing themselves or getting wasted in accidents. Through your attitude and willingness to be involved, you can help your kids sort through some of the twisted images that they may well be seeing.

For a discussion with your teens about porn, please see Chapter 29:
The Fairy Pornmother
and Chapter 30:
Porndoggie’s Dirty Dozen
.

One Young Man’s Experience

The Guide’s
tech advisor said that when he was a young teen in the mid-90s, his family had the latest Internet set up because his mom was a university professor. Although he assured her he wasn’t looking at porn, what else was a healthy young guy with a mouse and browser to do?

Like any of us, he found porn that was seriously twisted and porn that wasn’t. Yet when he started dating and needed to decide what parts of Internet porn were going to influence his relationship with women, it all boiled down to the values his mom had taught him when he was growing up. Porn had nothing to do with it. His mom clearly got hoodwinked on the smaller issue of porn on the net, but she won the much larger battle, which was to instill in her son moral values that he has taken with him on his journey through life.

Is It Horniness or Loneliness?

If your children are spending countless hours on the web, it might be due to loneliness and isolation instead of normal usage. At the same time, there are entire communities of people on the Internet who can be better friends and a better influence than some of your kids’ friends at school, and at least it is often interactive instead sitting on the couch watching TV.

If the Internet usage is an escape from loneliness, try to get your kids involved in extracurricular activities where their time is structured and they are doing things that make them feel good about themselves.

While masturbating to porn on the Internet is pretty normal, if one-handed surfing is your kid’s main activity in life, let him know he will have plenty of time for that when he’s older. For now, your job as a parent is to decide what is and isn’t good for him, and the hours-on-end stuff has to stop. If he is really isolated and the computer is an emotional lifeline, you might try to get him involved in a computer class. Use it as a bridge. Therapy is also a consideration—but please, not for “porn addiction,” but with a child therapist who can help your kid with his or her isolation and loneliness.

When Your 12-Year-Old Is [email protected]

You just discovered your 12-year-old daughter is on the Internet calling herself [email protected]. It’s kind of a harsh awakening for parents who still think of their daughter as playing for hours on end with Webkinz and Club Penguin.

Yes, there are things parents should be concerned about and steps they should take. Do a browser search for the latest precautions for parents that make sense to you, as opposed to the ones that are pure hysteria. This should include checking your kids’ profiles, online identities, Facebook page and privacy settings. Also talk with your kids about not giving out any personal information, including their real name, address, phone number and credit-card information. Sometimes they think they are just sending their phone number to a friend, when it’s actually out there in front of thousands to see.

As for risk reduction, the author’s wife works in the juvenile-justice system with teenagers. She’ll tell you about a problem that is a MILLION times more immediate for most kids that weirdness on the Internet. It’s when teenage girls go to the beach, river, park, or to some unknown house with boys and get high on alcohol and prescription drugs. She’s seen case after case of this, and she says the number of young girls who are in trouble with alcohol has skyrocketed. We’re talking girls with good grades from good homes who get into cars with guys who they’ve never met—online or anywhere else. So if you are trying to get your harm-reduction priorities straight, drinking and drugs should be on your list in addition to social networking sites.

Sexting

Between a third and a half of teenage girls will send nude or semi-nude photos of themselves to a boyfriend or a prospective boyfriend. Consider these words from the mom of a teenage son who has full access to his emails. She says all he has to do is text “send me a pic” and “he gets a picture of a girl topless or holding a teddy bear over her breasts, and he’ll be like, ‘Mom, can you believe this? I just asked her for a pic, and look what she sent.’”

You can try using common sense, but you should also consider letting your daughter know that all of her privileges including her phone, allowance and driving privileges will disappear until she’s 90 if you catch her sending a naked image of herself. Unfortunately, the best you can hope for is that this is incentive for her to at least cover up at least some of herself with a teddybear before she snaps a shot. As for your teenage sons, they should receive the same the punishment if they send or ask for naked pics or forward them to others. Let them know that some district attorneys are not what we would call enlightened, especially if the dad of the daughter whose nude images are in your son’s possession has contacted the district attorney.

Gay and Transgendered Teens

The Internet can be a lifesaver for the isolated gay or transgendered teen. At least on the Internet they can see that their feelings and questions aren’t strange. We have excellent links for gay and transgendered youth at
www.Guide2Getting.com
.