Well, that’s super, you make sure I know you don’t mean to be insulting, then insult me again, just for good measure. :rolleyes: Well, as a matter of fact I am not “dumb” and I wasn’t “dumb” at 13 either. I was a solid A and B student who had never gotten a C in her life. But when I decided to stop doing my homework I just assumed I could coast in on my stellar exam scores. And for the most part, I was right. But then I got my first C and was absolutely stunned that I couldn’t weasel my way out of it. I could absolutely see the same thing happening to a 13 year old girl suddenly finding herself pregnant or infected. It’s not stupidity, it’s denial.
Yes I did.
My family were fairly open about it and simply assumed I was sexually active. My mother, in fact, would aften ask if I and girl-x were bonking yet. No shame was attached to it, nor was it seen as a bad thing. I never had any trouble seperating sex from love. Better with someone you love? Sure it is. But it is not a necessity.
Bravo, Abbie Charmichael! (Post #45)
Close. I’m arguing that those immature parts of the teenage brain are still mature enough to handle sex. The long term planning, risk vs. reward judgments that are necessary for, say, choosing to use a condom are not as complicated as those for, say, managing a mutual fund. If teenagers can handle life-threatening illnesses and food allergies that require extreme caution, they can handle sex.
Sorry, you’re not making it sound any better. If you just assumed your grade was based on exams instead of homework, without making any effort to find out whether that was true, that was dumb. If you somehow thought you were an exception to the grading system, that was dumb.
Call it denial if you want, but it’s still dumb, and I don’t think many teenagers would make those same assumptions. I sure didn’t at that age, and neither did my peers - in fact, until your post in this thread, I had never even heard of a student being surprised that her grade was negatively affected by not doing the assigned work. If that’s your view of how teenagers act, I can see why you’d think they shouldn’t be allowed to have sex, but I think it’s a pretty skewed view.
That’s a fair point. I think every good parent would and should be concerned that their child is engaging in behavior that they are not prepared for. But I think that a parent’s view of their child is also a bit more idealistic, generally speaking, than is warranted (if my anecdotal evidence was not enough to convince me, the statistics in this very thread are).
Oh, quite rare indeed. But I would not use them to characterize my position on the matter. I expect young people to make all kinds of mistakes in learning social behaviors, some comical, some more serious. I wouldn’t support tossing 13 year-olds into the whorehouses, but being pressured into sex by a peer is not endemic to young teens. Avoiding all sexual contact is as good of a solution about “preparedness” as chopping the hands off thieves is a good solution for robbery. It works in principle, but it is a degenerate (2) solution. [math analogy] A point, though a valid solution to some conic sections, does not characterize them. [/math analogy]
But don’t you think that sexual behavior (among other behaviors young teens are also learning about) helps to stabalize appropriate paths, rather than having them fall as perfect ideals from Platonic heaven into their delicate heads? I guess that is kind of my point. “Responsibility” is not something that is, but something that happens, often in response to irresponsibility. We would hope that no teen would have to get pregnant or contract a (hopefully) curable disease to learn such a lesson, just as we hope our offspring learn to look both ways before crossing the street without getting hit by a car to drive the lesson home. Risky behavior, and assessing risk, is not, to me, something that will just appear to a person (else Genie, the tragic wild child, would easily learn tasks we expect of toddlers), but something that is engendered in them by activities in their youth that they would not repeat or otherwise carry into adulthood.
It is not the exception that drives our understanding of interaction. It should not be the exception (the extremely mature 13 year-old) that characterizes our view of when a person is “ready” for sex. If we respect their will, it is theirs to determine. We guide them, and perhaps inhibit contexts conducive to behavior we wish to discourage, but we are not prison guards and they will exercize their will with or without us. This is not meant to be a defeatist attidute, merely a practical backdrop to the realities kids face. If the parent cannot face them, the parent cannot meaningfully instruct them at all. I don’t consider my position idealistic, but completely practical and rooted in real kids doing things real kids will do.
I trusted my mother on everything, save for sex and drugs, two topics on which, even contrary to her own experiences on the matter (as I would eventually come to find out), she held a “typical” parental opinion on. Her mistake is what I mention above: she viewed her well-considered adult opinion on matters as somehow having spontaneously generated, and being transmissible by mere words and authority. We trust our parents can instruct us on the proper ways to behave, but we also surreptitiously misbehave and, eventually, come to view things in much the same way, not because of the lessons we were told about behaving, but the lessons we learned through misbehaving (and I don’t mean: “my parents/school admin will punish me if I…”). Instead of compiling the real feelings a young person would have from unsuccessful or difficult social situations with the added guilt of parental disapproval of perfectly normal behavior (what lessons, exactly, do you want to last a lifetime?), I think it is best to accept that a young person will be engaging in activity we would not like and do what we can to mitigate the hurt that can, but not necessarily will, come.
Now, I believe there could have been a different path that wouldn’t have required some bad relationships to help me see what was wrong with them, but that would have required an approach to sex, and an unfiltered (by parental idealism) understanding of what I was going through, that she did not take and was not prepared to take. We, as adults, joke about the intensity of the feelings we had when we were young, how some girl or guy or even movie star was The One (until another came along). What is a better picture of teenage spirit than teenage poetry? --Than the arguments they have with us about whatever they happened to learn about in school? We tempered that youthful idealism with experience and time, and they will do the same–with experience and time.
Not all 13 year-olds will be having sex. Nor those that are 14, or 15. I’ve met more than a few people who remained virgins until their 20s, and even one well into his 40s. I hope that they chose these paths out of some personal consideration and not a view of sex riddled with unfocused guilt, or thinking of only the negative things that can happen because they were prohibited from ever seeing the positive aspects. There is nothing wrong with waiting; and the opposite of every great idea is another great idea.
Safer sex is not completely safe sex. Children engaging in sex at younger ages are much more likely to have multiple partners and to take more risks. The consequences are potentially life changing if not ending. And despite your impression that sex is all fun and games the emotional consequences of sexual realtionships can be quite significant.
catsix, trust me, if I wanted to insult you I wouldn’t veil it thinly or otherwise. And to both you and UnwrittenNocturne- I am less talking about your age as positions in life. Few parents of kids approaching the teen years or in it or beyond have any difficulty understanding the parental role in providing sets of expectations and guidance; few people who have raised children to adulthood would think that parents should abdicate that responsibilty when it comes to risk taking behaviors like sex just because the boys penis and scrotal sac have enlarged or the girl has breasts. Be you 22 or 39, if you are without kids then you are closer to a teen than to a parent of a teen.
As a parent I do not want my children, males and female, to grow up to approach sex like you do. I do not believe in prudishness or that sex is dirty, but I do believe that sex is fun and games and more at the same time. I do not believe that casual or promiscuous sex is good idea for most people. I will do what I can to transmit my values and to enforce them while they are children in in my house. That is my parental obligation.
I’ve seen my teen grow up into a responsible man. I see his younger brother beginning the process. As teens they know it all, they think they can make informed decisions about drinking, drugs, driving, sex and many other items. A few teens can. Most cannot. The ones who are most sure they can are usually the farthest away from really having the ability because they don’t even yet know that do not know.
Erl Sometimes the opposite of a great idea is a real stupid one.
Well…I recently read that most children who die of life-threatening food allergies die as teenagers or young adults. As they become more independent, their parents can’t supervise their eating as closely–or, perhaps, think it’s not necessary? While it’s probably true that most allergic kids can handle that risk, it turns out some can’t or don’t. Anyway, that really surprised me. Food for thought, so to speak.
It’s been a day and I still can’t recall the name of the style of thinking that researchers credit to teenagers–the invincible, “statistics don’t apply to me” thinking.
A-freakin-men!
Plenty of teenagers act that way- and it’s not a specific assumption that the grades will be based on tests alone, or that the teen in question is some sort of exception. It’s more a feeling of invicibility- “bad things only happen to other people”. Sure, my teacher could fail me if I don’t do the work, but it won’t happen to me. It can be dangerous to do tricks on my bike while riding in traffic, but nothing bad will happen to me. It’s possible to get pregnant or catch an STD but it won’t happen to me. I can cross the street without waiting for the fast moving traffic to stop- somehow, I won’t get hit. If I drop out of high school, I will still be able to get a well paying job. It’s an attitude that is not at all specific to sex, and isn’t really impulsive. They know about the risks they are taking, consider them for a moment, and dismiss the possibilty that the undesirable consequence will happen to them. For an example, think about the thirteen year old on the couch. Did she know it was possible that her stepfather (or any other member of the household ) might walk in? Of course. Did she want that to happen? Unlikely. Did she take even the most minimal precautions against being “caught in the act”, such as taking the boy to her bedroom and closing the door? Nope.
Or rather, from the scene set-up described in that case, she presumed that everything would “go her way”: that no other family members would return home prematurely, and that there would be some sort of blatant obvious tipoff of when stepdad was no longer working the yard. However… in this sort of case going up to her bedroom and closing the door would have been seen as “riskier”: if youré on the couch and you detect an incoming parent in time to square yourself away, you can pretend nothing happened; if you walk out of a closed bedroom the parent will have a reasonable presumption that something was up.
That’s idiocy, not invincibility. Let me just say once again that I’ve never encountered a 13 year old who thought that way. When I was in eighth grade, I and every one of my classmates understood how grading worked and that it applied to everyone. Maybe it was something in the water in my town… or maybe teenagers are more reasonable than you give them credit for.
Overestimation of one’s own skill. Assessment of probabilities. Overestimation of one’s own skill. Overestimation of one’s own skill combined with ignorance of the job market.
As JRDelirious said, taking those precautions would be incriminating in itself. Also, you have to consider the potential consequences - being caught in the act is embarrassing, but it’s not life-threatening (at least in that particular family). If she believed she’d be beaten or kicked out of the house for having sex, might she have been more cautious? I think so.
And that, perhaps, is a better way of stating what I’m trying to get at, the presumption that “everything will go her way”.
Oh, and just so we understand, I can comprehend 12/13-y/o’s experimenting and “testing the envelope” just out of natural curiosity and plain being climb-the-walls horny; and if an encounter between early-adolescents is just honest exploration, carried out freely and out of sincere, mutual and equal interest, I would not consider that they were doing something “bad”, just something very risky that DOES require a thorough orientation as to what they’re getting into, a very clear explanation that things DO NOT always “go your way”, and an admonition that they have to prove they can be trusted to handle delicate situations before I’ll leave it entirely to them. That would have to operate on a case-by-case basis: as with any other issue regarding the rights and responsibilities of minors, the operating default must fall on the cautionary side even if it’s unfair to the group of smart, sensible, competent minors.
OTOH at the first hint of any exploitative, vitiated-consent, or manipulative situation, such as doing it to fit into the “all the cool kids do it” or the “else no boys will go out with me” scenario, or it’s a one-way, no-reciprocity thing, then my responsibility as a parent is to have this STOP until that component is not in play.