One of the hardest things for parents is knowing that their children grow up and will some day become sexually active. For each parent there is some point where they feel their child is old enough to have sex, and often that is in conflict with reality.
How parents view their son is completely different on how they view their daughter. This is simply because their son won’t come home pregnant someday. It is also generally viewed that male children are more apt to have sex simply because of how men are. Female children are more viewed to have been taken advantage of.
Protecting your children from sexual predators is a universal parental response, however the blurring of what is a sexual predator and normal sexual attraction is common. This was outlined in a previous entry here.
however the bottom line by natures book is when we are old enough to make a baby, then we are old enough for sex. Remove modern medicine and most of us can expect to live to forty something and if lucky fifty something. One of the most significant medical breakthroughs in the last 100 years was the discovery of penicillin. If you care to reflect back to world war 1 and how many people died in the trenches who never even took a bullet. All they got was a scratch and it got infected. Consider diabetes and if it was untreated how many would die. Type 2 diabetes usually sets in mid forties and if untreated can lead to death. So you can see the picture a little better as why the sex drive starts so young.
So seeing as far as nature is concerned we live to 50, we need to reproduce young to survive. In most cases 13 or 14 is the earliest age pregnancy can be achieved. Our hormones and sex drive see to that early on.
Some parents are over protective of their children and disallow any dating or relationships until they are 18 or even older. However that is a futile effort at best when dealing with raging hormones and natural sexual attraction. Many if not all men can relate to a 14 or 15 year old boy hoping the teacher wont call him up to the board to demonstrate something because he has an erection that simply will not go away until it is properly relieved. To think that a 14 or 15 year old girl does not get sexually aroused is wrong, it is just not that obvious except to mom who may notice a certain stain in their daughters panties when doing the laundry.
Being over protective and restrictive leads to secret relationships particularly on the part of the daughter.
DELTONA, Fla. – An angry Deltona father whacked his teenage daughter’s boyfriend with a metal pipe after finding the boy naked in his daughter’s room. Authorities say the father, 45, didn’t even know his daughter had a boyfriend or that the youngster had been sneaking into the home for more than a year.
When he heard noises coming from his daughter’s bedroom Thursday morning and saw a stranger standing naked on the girl’s bed, he swung a metal pipe. He then chased the teen out the front door and called police.
The boy was taken to the hospital where doctors closed a head wound with staples.
The father was charged with aggravated battery on a child and bonded out on $10,000.
Needless to say this is all too common and we must accept our children will become sexually active no matter what parents try to do to stop it. Secret relationships, and in some cases secret weddings have happened all because the parents were trying to control their children’s lives even well into their twenties.
Even some cultures prohibit certain relationships based on religion or ethnic background, however that simply is a non existent fence as far as nature is concerned. The desire is so strong even the fear of death takes a back seat to the sex drive. Some cultures may actually kill the female for having sex out of wedlock. However once again wedlock is a man made thing that nature has no part of.
So the correct approach to this problem is very simple. It is sex education. If you can’t stop it then the next best thing is going in armed with knowledge. Birth control methods, the effect condoms have on controlling sexually transmitted diseases is all important to know. Expect the urge that drives all of us to be in full swing by 15, so sex education at 12 or 13 is the right time for the full on truth about why their body is changing and why they have new and funny feelings about the opposite sex. That along with demonstrating condoms and all the other basics. Also an initial understanding sex education lesson at 9 or 10 is entirely appropriate. That talk should be more technical like the sperm finds the egg and so on. This is truly the best way to protect and ready your children for what awaits them.
If a parent can’t find it in themselves to talk about sex in a straight foreword way, then seeking out a counselor who deals with sex education is what is needed. The metaphoric approach to teaching sex education has been proven to be ineffective and even dangerous. Telling your daughter to hold a watermelon seed between her knees to keep her from getting pregnant does not work.
To Find a sex education counselor simply Google
“sex education (your city name)”
