On the phone with my 16-year-old daughter, she said that one of the girls on the varsity basketball team was pregnant. "Why is it that the really Christian ones are the ones who get pregnant?" she mused, and then gave herself an answer: "They're probably too scared to talk to their parents about birth control."
In the half-second pause that followed I felt fortunate that my daughter was talking to me about it.
Research has shown that abstinence-only programs have no more effect on teen pregnancy than no programs at all. My guess is that it has the same base -- and lack of success -- as Nancy Reagan's 'Just Say No' campaign against drugs in the 1980s. It relies on an authoritarian command ("Because I said so!") without even beginning to understand the dynamics underlying a very strong urge. And scaring people into believing doesn't result in solid conviction; it's merely hopeful, loyal, or subservient. Even more, it ignores knowledge about the subject and only treats it as bad, giving adherents no skill in dealing with it when it, uh, pops up.
Sexuality is complex. A lot of 'normal' adults have strong misperceptions and misunderstandings about it. How can we expect teens to deal with it okay when we're not that adept as adults?
I wrote a letter to my daughter several years ago, anticipating that one day she would be confronted with the issue of sex. In as simple language as I could muster, I wrote about love and feelings and relationships and decisions and the future and.....and sex. It's not easy to say, "I want to rely on you to make good decisions for yourself" when her friends are getting pregnant. But hey, she recently got her driver's license and there was some practice in Daddy letting go. And she seems to react better to guidance and encouragement than to command and control. I think it's time to send the letter.
