Illustration by Chris Danger
It was the day before middle school started. “Want to go for a run?” I asked my eldest son. Somewhere around the half-mile mark, I jumped in with both feet. “Sex. I know it’s going to come up this year, and I think it’s best to be prepared, so let’s talk.” Instead of making him squirm in a chair like an interrogation, we side-stepped the awkwardness by conversing during a jog. We broke a sweat and the tension, our run providing ample room for connection and thoughtful silence without self-conscious eye contact.
Many parents seem more terrified than the kids when it comes to having “The Talk.” Why? We papas happily pass down to the brood our wisdom from the kitchen, garage and office, but why not the home bar, smoke porch or bedroom? My mother introduced me to “Changing Bodies, Changing Lives,” a progressive book from the “Our Bodies, Ourselves” team, and ran a sex-positive household where questions were welcomed without judgment. Following suit, we’ve enrolled our teens in the Our Whole Lives: Lifespan Sexuality Education program at First Unitarian Universalist RVA. They’re not excitedly Snapchatting it, but they’ll certainly thank us later.
Ask 21st-century teens about the birds and the bees, and they’ll tell you that they don’t need a biology lesson. (Thank you, Google and YouTube.) What they crave is frank dialogue about respect, gender identity, LGBTQ sensitivity, birth control and clarity around today’s blurrier-than-ever rules of engagement. They want and need to know about empowerment and harassment, whether they’re the ones uttering an enlightened yes or hearing an emphatic no. Teens are probably going to have sex, so let’s arm them with guidance (and prophylactics). No, this doesn’t imply complicity; it enforces maturity. Because the alternatives — ignorance and shame — don’t exactly lead to abstinence.
Likewise for drugs and alcohol. In our family, wine was treated as food, not vice. With open and learned access to booze long before college, raging and hazing were absolutely uninteresting to me once I got there. By age 30, I was a professional sommelier. Although exposed to pot years earlier, I smoked my first joint with Mom soon after college. It seemed unconventional then. These days, it’s common for parents to advise teens that if they must break the rules, moderate marijuana use is safer than drinking. But each family pens its own policies.
To calibrate your choices, consider the professional insights of Annie Coffey, a licensed clinical psychologist at Richmond’s Arts for Replenishment and Change.
Annie Coffee
Richmond magazine: How should parents approach these discussions with their teens?
Annie Coffey: There’s the necessary conversational backdrop to all of this: If addictions run in your family, the topic needs to be much more serious. If people biologically related to or in the role of raising your teen struggle with substance abuse, workaholism, “numbing out” via overeating or video-gaming, then those teens need to hear how inherently risky “vices” are.
If there’s little of that history in biological relatives or those in direct caretaking roles, then the teen can have this conversational backdrop: “You’re curious; you want to experience things; you are entering a new level of growing up that comes with not just us parents hoping for the best for you, but, ideally, you needing to be in the place of being wise and acting with your own best self-care in mind. Say goodbye to tween/preteen years. Say hello to excitement and the possibility of danger or unexpected consequences. Know that excitement goes hand in hand with our belief that experimenting can be safe and fun as well as relatively harmless.”
RM: What are the signs that your children are ready for this conversation?
Coffey: Listen for your teens talking about other kids drinking, smoking, driving too fast or under the influence, dating (and all the steps involved in that). Watch how they respond to scenes in movies, songs, the news, perhaps stories about ... their cousin Lilly getting pregnant by that “cool guy she met on vacation,” or the way Uncle Mike lost another job because of his drinking, etc. Do they sound interested and serious? Or do they seem to be unfazed, too cool, or are they posing their nonchalance?
RM: What are acceptable ways to monitor your teens without snooping or betraying trust?
Coffey: I don’t have a perfect answer for this. If parents are very worried, many just take their teens’ phones and read the text messages. Or the parents go online and find a way through their carrier to read all those messages. Some parents go to their teens’ social media sites and try to find out what’s going on. Or they might ask one of their kids’ friends to tell them what’s being posted, etc.
The most important part of this conversation is about establishing trust from the beginning. No snooping should be the norm, but if your teen starts to make you worry or wonder, tell them your concerns and tell them you need to talk. Should you be satisfied that they understand your deeper reasons for being concerned, your talk might be enough for them to change their behavior or at least to start thinking about changing their behavior. If you find it difficult to stop wondering or worrying, “snooping” is what you should do. Tell them as soon as you “find” the reason you were justified in being worried. Discuss and confront the truth/realities of what you found when snooping. You are trying to nip the behavior in the bud. Part of this snooping is really your intervention. Be sure to discuss together whether your teen needs counseling — individual or family.
