Adolescent Sexuality by Dr. Karen Rayne

(Written by guest blogger JustAnotherTeen.) 

Hi, I am going to be the guest blogger for the next two weeks while your regular host is away on vacation! I am an 18-year-old male and I am currently a senior in a residential high school that concentrates on math and science. I live at school approximately 10 months out of the year. With the exception of when my girlfriend is home from college (she lives in the same city that my school is in), I am here every weekend, unless we are on a break. I enjoy reading and could definitely be considered a dork or geek, whichever you prefer. I also enjoy leadership. Our school is very selective and we have a special group of current students that serve as tour guides, hosts and hostesses, and ambassadors for the school. I am the president of this group and enjoy coordinating events, strange as it may seem. I already know where I am going to college next year and plan to major in engineering. I have a full tuition scholarship plus a $10,000 scholarship so far, and look forward to graduating high school and moving on to bigger and better things!

I will be posting on Wednesday and Friday of this week and then Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of next week. On Friday of next week, I would like to answer any questions you have about teenagers and sex. So please e-mail me your questions! justanotherteen@gmail.com

I loved Juno.  I thought it was a smart, interesting, and real portrayal of teenage pregnancy.  What struck me as surprising was that Juno is really a movie for adults about a teenager.  It’s more common to see movies about teenagers for teenagers.

There are plenty of positive, even rave reviews of Juno.  Mostly the praise centers around fully-formed portrayals of smart teenagers (mostly of Juno and her boyfriend Paulie).  Other aspects worthy of praise are the portrayals of the relationship between the adopting parents, the discussion of the difficulties of adoption, and the portrayal of the parent/teen relationship between Juno and her parents.

The negative reviews of Juno - although there are few of them - mostly remark on the “unrealistic” nature of Juno’s wit, that is that the character has an adult’s wit rather than a teenager’s wit.  While I sympathize with this critic (particularly the first 15 to 20 minutes seem like one sarcastic, well-timed comment after another), I disagree with it.  Almost all of the characters in this movie are particularly witty and sarcastic, and Juno does not seem to be more able in this area than her family and friends.  This is probably true of most real teenagers as well - their sarcasm and wit are generally similar to the people who they are surrounded with.

The sarcasm and wit, interestingly, extend to everyone except for Vanessa, the woman who Juno has chosen to be her baby’s adoptive mother.  Vanessa is also portrayed as the one most capable parent for the baby - not to say that all of the other characters wouldn’t be passable parents, just not as good as Vanessa.  I haven’t heard much discussion about this particular point, and I wonder if the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, meant anything by it?

I am delighted to announce that a guest blogger has offered his services while I am gone during the two weeks after Christmas.  JustAnotherTeen is his psudonym of choice.  He is 18 years old, and has had sex with his girlfriend.  I’ve had some conversations with JustAnotherTeen, and I think everyone will be really interested in what he has to say.   JustAnotherTeen will be posting more about himself, his relationship with his girlfriend, his sex education, and how these issues have affected him starting on Monday, December 31st.  He will post three times a week until Friday, January 11th.

JustAnotherTeen would like in his last post to answer questions from readers, and has set up a special e-mail address to receive questions (justanotherteen@gmail.com).  So, here is your golden opportunity to get real, honest answers about sex from a real, honest teenager.  Don’t be shy, or feel the need to mince words.  JustAnotherTeen is very open, very real, and very delighted with the opportunity to help improve adult-teen communication about sexuality.

So Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant. At sixteen. She announced this apparently news-worthy information through OK! Magazine, and everyone from the Huffington Post to MTV feels compelled to weigh in on this one. So, I figured, why not me too? I mean, this is clearly the biggest teenage sex scandal of 2007 (given how close to the end of the year it is, I feel pretty comfortable saying that).

So people are outraged. They are railing against Britney for being a bad role model older sister. They are railing against Jamie Lynn’s mother Lynn Spears for not teaching either of her daughters about birth control or morality (depending on which side of that fence they’re on). They are railing against Jamie Lynn for not making good choices. They are railing against abstinence-only “sex education” for not teaching about birth control. They are railing against comprehensive sex education for not teaching teenagers to wait until marriage to have sex. The list goes on.

But here’s the thing: about 750,000 teenagers get pregnant in the United States every year. About half that number of teenagers give birth every year. Some of those teenagers are actually pre-teenagers, and are as young as 10 or 11. What I’m trying to say is that Jamie Lynn is hardly alone. While I understand that it useful for people to latch on to one emblem of the problem and focus on her, it is inappropriate to do that in this case.

Yelling and screaming our heads off about what a poor mother Lynn Spears is, about what a poor mother and sister Britney Spears is, and how horrible it is that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant will do nothing to help the real issue of teenage pregnancy or teenage parenting.

On the other hand, teaching teenagers real information about sex will address the issue at hand.  So let’s spend our energy doing that instead.

Virginia has recently joined a group of 13 other states in refusing abstinence-only “sex education” funding from the federal government. Basically, this allows these states to design their own sex education programs - theoretically because they want one that is comprehensive rather than abstinence-only. Where does your state stand? Here are the states which have declined federal abstinence-only “sex education” funding:

• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• Maine
• Massachusetts
• Minnesota
• Montana
• New Jersey
• Pennsylvania
• Ohio
• Rhode Island
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin

This is great news.  Probably.

What I am mostly concerned about is that it is darn hard to find actual information about what kind of sex education programs these states DO offer. It was my intention with this post to link to a description of the sex education guidelines from each of the states listed above. And I am pretty good at finding information on the net, if I do say so myself. But after extensive searching on California, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine, I could only find information from California. So I gave up, and am writing this critique instead.

Because, while I do not support abstinence-only “sex education” programs, I do think that there needs to be some sort of sexuality education in schools. I am highly disappointed that what states are mandating (or not mandating) their schools teach (or don’t teach) about sexuality is so hard to come by.

And in the end, I’m not sure that silence on the subject of sexuality is any better than abstinence-only “sex education.”  At least it’s probably not much worse.

I ran across this blog the other day, and I think it’s worth sharing: The Virtual Mystery Tour: How the Internet impacts teen sexuality for better or for worse.  It’s written by Dr. Kris Gowen, author of Sexual Decisions: The Ultimate Teen Guide and Image and Identity.  (I haven’t read either of these books, so can’t recommend them one way or the other.)  Dr. Kris also teaches classes for adults on classes about teenagers, the Internet, and sexuality.

While Dr. Kris only writes on her blog once or twice a week, she has interesting things to say.  It’s worth heading over and taking a read.

We all need a break–a nice, long vacation–every now and again. It seems that adults just don’t get that very often. This time of the year, the lucky ones get Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off, and maybe New Year’s Day. I could go on about the lack of balance in our lives, but I will leave it to the many others working diligently in that area.

However, the annoying lack of vacation time around the holidays becomes truly problematic when our children have, in my case, three weeks off from school. Today (well, tomorrow actually, since I’m writing this really late on Sunday night) is my children’s first official day of Christmas Break.  And I am one of the lucky ones. I work mostly from home, and I work for myself.

There are plenty of parents, however, who are stressing about leaving their children and teenagers home alone for the next two or three weeks. This is hardest as children reach the cusp of adolescence. With 17 and 18 year olds, it’s pretty easy to leave them home alone. (They’ll sleep most of the day anyway.) But what about your almost-teenager? The 12 year old who is too old for a babysitter, but too young to be home alone for 10 hours a day? Or what about the 15 year old with the girlfriend/boyfriend who you don’t trust?

These are times when balance and communication may not come easily.

Nevertheless, balance and communication are truly the only ways to get through these hard situations. Talk about expectations. Talk about trust. Talk about the consequences of lack of trust. And know that it will all work out in the end, one way or another. (Even if it doesn’t work out the way you had hoped for.)

How have your dealt with these situations with your children? How did your parents deal with you when you were a teenager?

I will be leaving on vacation for the two weeks after Christmas.  I’m hoping to find a guest blogger who can post 3 to 5 times, both weeks, about some aspect of adolescent sexuality.  It’s really quite a fun experience - my last guest blogger really enjoyed it!  Anyone interested?

A friend has a teenage son. She was trying to figure out something to make him for Christmas. Of course, this is a very individual thing, and different teenagers like different kinds of things. But here are some ideas of things to make for teenagers:

• food (cookies, especially sugar cookies cut and decorated to look like a dinosaur eating Santa)
• hats, scarfs, mittens, etc.
• blankets/quilts/pillow covers
• poetry or an illustrated story book (again, it can be digitally created, so long as it’s fun and funny)
• cell phone/MP3 cases
• light switch plate covers (just get an image they like, glue it on to a plain white one, cover with clear contact paper, and cut out the little hole for the switch to poke through - ta da!)
• Christmas decorations
• socks/slippers
• posters (created digitally and then framed, of course)

Because here’s the thing: all of these things can be made (a) black, with a skull and crossbones on them, (b) pastel with lots of ruffles, and (c) everything in between.

The point is that teenagers are just people too. And like most people, they tend to like things that are made with them in mind. So figure out what it is that you feel like you can make, then get into your teenager’s head. Connect what you can make with what the teenager in question is into. Then just do it. If it’s a total flop, well, tell them that your second choice was to choreograph and perform an interpretive dance of their potty training experience. I guarantee your present will start looking better immediately.