You're Teaching My Child What? (19 page)

What? It's
healthy
to be confused, a
lifelong
adventure? Not according to anything I ever learned about human development. I checked a pile of textbooks, as well as online material from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Society for Adolescent Medicine, and see nothing of the sort. Instead, it's the
resolution of doubt
that promotes emotional stability—and the sooner the better.

Finally, on many of these sites, every type of intimate behavior—including some you'd rather not know about—is discussed in a breezy manner, sometimes with language and graphics you wouldn't allow in your home.
⁸

Question: Are the people at SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, and AFY aware of the dangers they're encouraging kids to fool around with? Do they agree with everything the sites they recommend to kids promote? And if they're not aware of the content of websites and books they're recommending to teens... shouldn't they be?

Let's begin by delineating a principle of human development. Each stage of development—infancy, toddlerhood, school age, adolescence and adulthood—is accompanied by specific tasks. For example, infants must gain the skills to sit, stand, and walk; preschoolers must learn to share their toys and visit the toilet. In every case, there is an
inner drive—a maturational push—to master the task at hand and move to the next stage.

A task of adolescence is to move toward a firm and cohesive identity.
⁹
Who am I? Where do I belong? What do I believe?
To some degree, all teens ask those questions. Am I vegetarian, atheist, “goth,” or conservative? Should I join the army, go to college, or get a job? Of course, teens must tolerate some ambiguity while they mature and sort things out, but in time, a consistent and enduring sense of self is achieved. This brings a young person satisfaction and a readiness to take on the tasks of adulthood. This is what growth is all about.

It is axiomatic that people want to know who they are. Confusion and self-doubt therefore implies some degree of distress. Teens might feel mixed-up about almost anything, of course, but identity is a particularly significant issue, and if identity confusion is deep or drawn out, the distress can be significant. In order to face the challenges of adulthood effectively, the adolescent question, “Who am I?” must be answered.

Except, it appears, with sexual orientation. In that case, the educators who claim to be promoting your children's growth and health dump this principle. There's no inner need or drive to clarify this part of yourself, they say; it's imposed on you by society. “There's a lot of pressure to define yourself,” explains
gURL.com
,
¹⁰
as if the source is completely external. Restrictive labels may not apply to you, teens are told, but be prepared for everyone else's insistence to place you neatly in one of their boxes.

The bottom line? Kids should resist the pressure, labels, and boxes. They should remain open to all the options, check them out,
¹¹
and feel
good about themselves along the way. In this paradigm, doubt—“maybe I like boys
and
girls,” and exploration—“I'll try it and see”—represents growth, not crisis.

Where does this come from? Open-mindedness cannot be a goal of identity development. Otherwise, what does identity even mean, if it's not a lasting conviction of who you are? And if sexual orientation is “a fundamental piece”
¹²
of who we are, “an essential human quality,”
¹³
who we are “deep down,”
¹⁴
as kids are taught by sex educators,
¹⁵
persistent uncertainty about it cannot be healthy.

Columbia University's “GoAskAlice” is an award winning site manned by “a team of health counselors.” When a 12th grader, who has already had three boyfriends, wonders about relationships with girls, she's encouraged to “explore” and “experiment.” Being willing to do so, she's told, “will only add to your future well-being and peace of mind.”

I am unable to find a study that supports that advice. To the contrary, what's well documented is the many ways this 12th grader would benefit from
delaying
sex, with boys or girls. In general, the earlier she begins sexual activity, the greater the number of partners she is likely to have. Early sexual debut and high numbers of partners are linked to a variety of negative life outcomes, including increased rates of infection with sexually transmitted diseases, increased rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and birth, increased single parenthood, decreased marital stability, increased maternal and child poverty, increased abortion, and yes—increased depression.
¹⁶

Could someone at Columbia direct me to the research showing a positive association between sexual experimentation by teen girls and their future peace of mind? “Alice” has no hard data to back her up; the advice is based on Kinseyan ideology: womb to tomb pansexuality. If this teen's health and peace of mind were the priority of these health educators, their advice would be the opposite.

Time out
, Alice would tell her.
Even with consistent condom use, having so many partners is going to land you in the doctor's office.
There'd be straight talk with all the sobering facts. Instead, Alice is comfortable
that this girl—not yet out of high school—has already had three sex partners; she appears eager, in fact, for her to add a fourth and fifth.

“If you like women, fantastic,” she's told. “If you like sex with both guys and girls, lucky you.”
¹⁷

Kids learn from an early age about these discrete categories: gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual. But when they're older, they're informed these sexual orientations exist on a continuum.
¹⁸
They're not either/or. Heterosexuality lies at one end, gay or lesbian at the other, and in between lie a multitude of possibilities. Individuals use different labels—er,
descriptions
—of where they fall on this continuum. Ambisexual. Bi-lesbian. Bi-queer. Dyke. Fluid bisexual. Heterosexual with questions. Lesbian who has sex with men. Not straight. Pansexual. Polyfide. Polysexual. Queer. Unlabeled.
¹⁹

“Wherever you are on that continuum,” teens learn on outproud. com, “you've got plenty of company....”
²⁰

“Some argue that there are as many sexual orientations as there are people,” teens learn on Columbia's Alice, “everyone defining for themselves their own rules of attraction, fantasy, and relationships.”
²¹

Gurl.com
provides a visual of the spectrum of sexual orientation: twenty-three female silhouettes in shades from dark lavender, representing “totally gay,” to white, “totally straight.” Click on any of these figures to find quotes from girls and women ages fourteen to forty-one who placed themselves at that point.
²²
A sampling:

Pay attention, parents. Your child may like the possibility that “anything could happen,” or be drawn to “the art of ambiguity,” and be headed for turmoil.

One of the most fundamental premises of psychology is that, in order to build an acceptable, coherent sense of self, young people actively seek to answer the question, “Who am I?” Persistent uncertainty about core identity leads to inner turmoil. We're all familiar with kids who cannot decide on long-term goals, group loyalties, or value systems. They are pulled in different directions, it causes distress, and they are pre-occupied—with both the conflict and the distress. There may be significant anxiety, mood swings, self-doubt, and worry about the future. It may impair their academic or social functioning.

These kids may have difficulty making decisions or show impulsive experimentation. They may “try on” different roles to see what feels right.
²³
A person without a coherent identity is seriously handicapped. If the issue remains unresolved, there may be difficulty making commitments to careers or relationships. Friendships and family relationships may deteriorate. Educational achievement may be lower than ability.

But while it's self-evident to child development specialists that a firm identity enhances well-being, sex educators have a different perspective: an uncertain identity, along with “safe” experimenting, is also fine—not just in adolescence, but any time. In fact, kids learn, with sexual matters, identity confusion
is
an identity: you are “questioning”—the Q in LGBTQ. It's as valid a category—perhaps even more—as the others.

Matt has turned to the experts at Planned Parenthood's site for teens, wondering, “Is it natural to be confused about your sexuality?”
²⁴

Yes, he's told, it's “normal and very common. Many adults are still figuring it out. Understanding sexual orientation is “a lifelong process,”
²⁵
Matt would learn on
positive.org
,
²⁶
a site endorsed by SIECUS. Advocates for Youth agrees: Everyone has questions about their sexuality at some time or other, they claim.
²⁷

Wait a minute. It's
normal
to be confused?
Everyone
has questions? Since when?

Yes, many teens experience brief insecurity about their sexual identity. I won't argue with that. But what's
common
is not necessarily
healthy
. Kinsey used the same logic sixty years ago: his data indicated a high frequency of certain behaviors; therefore, he claimed, those behaviors represent a normal, healthy variant. The logic was faulty then, and it's faulty now. As one of his critics pointed out, if at a given time more people have the flu than not, that doesn't mean that having the flu is normal. Likewise, just because it may be
common
for teens to question their sexual orientation, that doesn't mean it's
healthy
for them to do so.

The claim that confusion is natural and experimenting is healthy, will, for many kids, prolong or intensify an already difficult process. Our job—the job of anyone guiding teens—is to support them through periods of insecurity and caution
against
exploring. Furthermore, experts in child development know that as adolescents seek to define their identity distinct from family, negativism appears—just like in two-year-olds. “I can do it myself... Don't tell me how. . . don't tell me what to wear/where to go/who to be friends with . . . ”

Adolescent negativism sometimes means taking up behaviors that drive their parents crazy. Teens must announce, “I have a mind of my own,” and they may seize on almost any issue to prove that. Once upon a time, that meant sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. Now, in some vulnerable
individuals, that struggle may lead to exploring “alternative” sexualities or genders. These kids might get their parents' goat by identifying as non-straight (“Mom, Dad—I'm gay”), or gender-bending (“Mom, Dad, don't call me Robert any more. I'm a girl. Call me Roberta.”).

For all these reasons, introducing doubt about sexual orientation (“many homosexual people don't realize it for years,” or “who you're most attracted to today might not be the same as who you'll be eyeing five years from now”
²⁸
), and encouraging sexual behavior should be avoided at all cost.

Nevertheless, the oligarchy leads kids to believe that questioning, confusion, doubts, experimentation... they're all good.

From Columbia's Alice:

At
scarleteen.com
, Hartley has turned to Heather Corinna for guidance. She just turned fifteen, and has come out to family and friends as bisexual. Still, she wonders, is it “because of my hormones” or does she truly like both girls and guys? How can she know for sure?
³⁰