Now, I am not suggesting that you encourage your child to have sex. What I am suggesting is that if you want to have an easy rapport with your teen and you want your teen to trust you, you need to completely accept that your teen is a sexual being, even if your teen is not sexually active. Why is this necessary? Because when you ignore this reality, you will overtly or unconsciously communicate a message to your teen that you do not accept his or her maturation, that you still see your teen as a child. And this message will cause your teen to resent you because your denial about your teen’s maturation leads him or her to feel guilt and shame about what is a basic biological reality: all people are sexual beings.
As for the act of sex: you need to start communicating your values about sexuality much earlier than your child’s sixteenth birthday if you hope for those to become your teen’s values. If you want your child to follow certain moral codes regarding sex and sexuality, you need to communicate those clearly, without innuendo or subtleties. The younger you start, the more likely those values will become a part of the fabric of his or her being. As your child matures into a teen, he or she may question the values you tried to instill. After all, a teen’s job as an adolescent is to become an adult, and that means questioning authority, trying on new ideas to see how they fit, and living life according to a belief system that makes sense to who he or she is and what he or she values. Nonetheless, as we have seen in most other areas of a teen’s life, teenagers are more likely to follow their parent’s moral teachings around sexuality than they are to go their own way.
Practice What You Preach
What your teenager hears you say about sex and sexuality to others will have just as big of an impact as the clear cut “lessons” you attempt to impart. So you can’t be preaching a gospel of chastity to your son, and then turn around and tell a dirty joke to your buddy at the hockey game in front of your son. Your child will immediately recognize the hypocrisy of your behavior and grow to mistrust you.
If you have a more liberal attitude toward sexuality and you are open to your child becoming sexual while still a teen, that is a value system as well that needs to be directly communicated to your child. Why? Because talking about values, what we believe, and why we hold such values are excellent opportunities to build rapport with teenagers. Teenagers want to better understand the adult world that they are about to enter and the best way for them to do that is to be able to have open, honest conversations with adults who are not pressuring them, but simply sharing their beliefs. Now, all that being said, don’t be surprised when your teenage daughter asks you to take her to Planned Parenthood for birth control or your son shows up one day with a pregnant girlfriend. You can’t suddenly change the rules of the game by reacting with shock and blame. If you do, your teen will lose all trust in you.
Whether you are imparting conservative or liberal sexual values, you want to be consistent in your message if you hope to build rapport and trust with your teen. Teens don’t so much care that they have conservative or liberal parents, but that they have a parent whom they can trust to be a consistent force in their lives, even when the parent and teen don’t always see eye to eye. Most importantly, if you want to build rapport and trust with your teen around issues of dating and sexuality, then you need to keep my three essential steps at the forefront of your mind: respect the life stage called adolescence; remember what it was like to be a teen; and accept that your teen is becoming an adult.
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