Let them have sex
Hobi Reader
Viewpoint
Grad Student, MALA

        My son recently had sex for the first time.  He waited long enough.
Too long, I thought.  I have been teaching him about sex since he started
asking, which was a very long time ago.  I answered every question he had
and then some.

        He’s 16.  Now this may shock many of you, but I think it’s
perfectly natural for a teenage boy or girl of this age to engage in sex.
The key is education.

        I started giving him condoms a few years ago, and asked him to 
pass them out to his sexually active friends.  I taught him about pregnancy,
STDs, the emotional component of having sex with someone, abortion, AND 
choosing to wait until marriage.  This last one was difficult for me, 
because it is not part of my own belief system.  But I felt that I had to 
give him all of the information he needed to make the right choices.  I had 
to tell him about things that I didn’t even believe in.  The choice was 
ultimately his.
   
     When I asked him why he wasn’t having sex yet, he simply replied
‘I’m not ready yet'.

        This came as a surprise to me.  I thought teens all ran out and 
had indiscriminate sex because they couldn’t control themselves.  I am
beginning to look at it in a different way.

        When we tell a kid not to do something, it is usually what they do
first.  This is not just regarding sex, but almost any behavior we consider
unacceptable.  I think it’s time to give them a little more credit.  Teens
are in a funny slot; we tell them to act like adults but we deprive them of
most of the things we adults get to do.  It’s not really fair.

	Back to the sex.  I asked him what he thought that he would do if
his girlfriend had an unwanted pregnancy.  He told me they had already
discussed this, knowing that condoms are not a perfect birth-control method.
He said they were both pro-choice, and that she would get an abortion with 
his help. I nearly fell off the chair.
      
	Now, understand, this is no perfect kid we are talking about.  He’s
a rat-fink most of the time.  He doesn’t have a job.  He sucks me dry for 
money. He stays out too late. He is irresponsible at times, and if you want 
to walk through his room you need a shovel.  But the difference between me 
and many other parents?  I trust him completely.

        If he says he’s going somewhere, that’s where he goes.  And because
I am so liberal he has a lot of places he can go and tell me about. He went 
to the gambling casino the other night.  I wanted to get pissed off,  
because I am totally against gambling. I’ve never even bought a lottery 
ticket.  But I held my tongue, knowing that by reacting negatively to it he 
would probably be there every night.

        He’s usually hanging out at a friend’s house or at the arcade.  Or
here at the house with friends.  Or at the computer.  Pretty typical.

        So now he has sex, like millions of other teens.  The sad thing is
that many of those kids’ parents think that by not talking to their kids 
about it, sex will never happen.  Wrong!!  Those are the kids who get HIV, 
get pregnant, get STDs, and sometimes end up thrown out of the house because
there is a baby.. What a surprise.

        Some of the time this teaching does not fall into the religious or
social beliefs a parent has.  But that’s no excuse not to teach them!  It is
a bonus, because if a parent is believes that waiting is the key, it’s very 
scary for the teens to hear about all the 'what ifs'.

        In Scandinavia there is a very open policy about sex education.
They also have the lowest teenage pregnancy rate in the world.  We do not 
teach our children about sex in the schools.  The few classes are the 
obligatory menstruation and anatomy classes.  They touch on birth control, 
but not to the degree that it is useful.  

        It is up to parents to fill in the gaps.  It is unfortunate the
schools aren’t dealing with these issues the way they should. But the 
schools are not where kids learn most of the practical information they 
need.  It is usually through friends and family.

         We are biological creatures, and the sex drive is the probably the
strongest of all.  It is the way we get our genes into the next generation.
Unfortunately, this drive the strongest at a time when it’s culturally
unacceptable to have those feelings.   

        In our own past and currently in many other cultures, this is the
age when marriages are common.  Our uptight, right-wing, single-minded,
Judeo-Christian culture is the exception rather than the rule. 

        Let’s let them have sex.  Lots of it.  But let’s teach them
everything we can.  The teen years should be a time for practice, 
investigation and fun. Not a time for shame, embarrassment and unwanted 
parenthood.

        Peace to you all.