Founder and executive director of Children-At-Risk Empowerment, a welfare organisation set up in 1997 wh ich does school-based social work and offers family and marriage counselling. A former teachel and mother of two girls aged 24 and 26,sht has more than 15 years'experience in youth counselling.
A worrying trend among this generation is that they view sex as just an experience
Much of what they know about relationships comes from the Internet, movies and television, which portray sex simply as something sensual and pleasurable.
They don't touch on commitment or sexual values.
For Gen X, if they slept with their partners and the relationship broke up eventually, they would be devastated because they feel that they have given up a lot.
Not so Gen Y. They tend to think: Whats the big deal? Sex is what people do, it's part of life.'
For the past three years, I've seen about three cases of teenage pregnancy a year, a: the youngest so far are two 14-year-old girls
This generation lacks strong relationships with significant people, like their parents, grandparents and teachers.
Because dual-income families are the norm these days, parents have less time for the family, so children today grow up without positive role models.
Many of the youths I counsel would say they don't want the kind of marriage that my parents have.'
Kids who grow up in families that do not have a strong bond tend to have less self-worth.
When you have self-worth, you are less likely to jump into bed with the first girl boy who comes along.
To help their children, parents first have to work on their own marriage. Many of us don�t realize we are modelling relationship and marriage for our children�
