Teen pregnancy is a pressing crisis throughout the world, the United States, and Knox County. A gap in expectations between which topics parents should address and which schools should address may be partially to blame; while most parents believe that they should be the loudest voice in their children's sexual education, many of them do not take on that role. Through semi-structured interviews with parents, their junior high-aged daughters, and an after-school group of junior high-aged girls, I attempt to identify how parents' conceptions of their responsibilities to and relationships with their daughters and their understanding of what the schools are doing combine with daughters' perceptions of these efforts and their parents' attitudes to make The Talk more or less successful.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2007, the number of teenagers bearing children in the United States rose for the first time in 14 years. In 2009, the Heartland Alliance Report calculated the teen birth rate at 42 births per 1000 women between the ages of 15 and 19, higher than the statewide average of 39.5 per thousand (Timmons, 2009). One reason for that may be the Bush administration's decision to provide federal funding only for sexual education programs that adhere to an abstinence-only curriculum, but I hypothesize that a gap between what schools are expected to teach and what parents consider themselves responsible to teach is also a factor.
[...] Marla Forssberg, contrary to Marsman and Herrold, worried not that the schools would tell her daughter too much, but that they couldn't tell her enough without going into the taboo topic of religious morality, which she called springboard of what's right and what's wrong.” She seemed to see herself as responsible for filling in what the schools left out, but did not have particular strategies in place to do that (where the Jacobys had the OWL program and the Montcalms had book-reading sessions, regular parent-initiated talks, and “trickle-down” education from their older children). [...]
[...] What the Jacobys prioritize in sexual education is visible in their analysis of the OWL program: GRETA: They cover everything. I mean, they cover heterosexual, homosexual, um, bisexual, um, they cover traditional, oral, traditional meaning, I dunno, beast with two backs, I dunno how you want to say it.*laughs* Uh, oral. What else? I mean, like, everything. They cover everything. Though this definition of “everything” is certainly wider than what one would find in a public school sexual education program, it still focuses exclusively on intercourse and the physicality of sex: no mention of relationships, where to find condoms, masturbation, or any of those tricky topics. [...]
[...] I sat in on several of their meetings to develop a rapport with the girls before the topic of sexual education came up. I am confident that this study is ethically sound. Initially, I had been concerned about having to observe teen pregnancy classes and the like, given my position as a 22-year-old about to graduate from college with no children, but the study's focus on parents largely eliminated that obstacle. The only teens interviewed directly are the ones whose parents are interviewed, so parental permission was been easy and convenient to get. [...]
[...] Current academic research on teen pregnancy suggests that sexual education today does not do an adequate job preparing children to make educated sexual decisions, in part because nobody, parents included, addresses the aspects of sexual education that deal with emotion rather than biology: how a teenager knows when he or she is for sex, how to negotiate condom use in a sexual situation and so forth. Parents largely believe that they should be the main source of sexual information for their children, and they are willing and even eager to participate. [...]
[...] Though most parents would probably be uncomfortable with this “girlfriend” approach to sexual education, in the case of B and it seems to have worked. Even though B judges her mother for having been a and seems uncomfortable with her mother's openness, the fact that she's honest about her sex life makes her less likely to be a site of judgment in her daughter's mind. Being open with one's own sexuality as a parent may be one way to prove to one's children that they aren't judging them for being sexual beings (other issues such a candid mother-daughter relationship may raise aside.) 3. [...]
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