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Kate says her 14-year-old son is too young for sex: “I don’t think it’s safe for his age. Maybe it’s just him…he’s a little naïve.” I asked Kate, “What is it about your son’s age or his naïveté that makes you feel he wouldn’t be safe?” After a long pause, Kate responded with a sigh, “I don’t know. I…” She trailed off, so I prompted, “Is it that he wouldn’t use contraception?” Dismissing my suggestion, Kate replied, “I guess my worry is that he’d do something he didn’t want to do. Get pushed into something or let himself be pushed into something. Like, I’m not going to be cool if I don’t do this.”
In essence, Kate worries that her son will get pushed into sex before he develops an interest in it.
In an effort to protect her son from getting caught up in a sexual situation he’s not ready for, Kate warns him, “Girls can manipulate you or be controlling. Because he is one that would let a woman walk right over him.” Similar worries have led Shawna to caution her 15-year-old son, “You’ve got the nice girl and you’ve got the slut. You’re seeing kids in elementary school pregnant, you know.” Scott, a father of three teen daughters, also described going to great lengths to protect his daughters from sexually predatory boys, “You know, I was a guy and I want to protect my girls from that.”
Parents I spoke to in the course of researching parents’ views on teen sexuality consistently told me something along this line—that their good, sexually innocent kids are imperiled by their bad, hypersexual peers. As Renae tells her teen sons, “Sometimes girls trap you.”
Parents’ beliefs about their own teen children fit with modern ideas about teenagers as young, immature, and at risk. But where do their ideas about their teens’ peers come from?
We can look to the criminal justice system for part of the answer.
More than 2,000 young offenders are currently serving life sentences. The vast majority were sentenced in the past two decades, reflecting shifts in the criminal justice system in the early 1990s, including changes that made it easier to try young offenders as adults.
In June the Supreme Court struck down one such law, requiring youths convicted of murder to receive life in prison without parole. Writing for the majority in the decision, Justice Elena Kagan observed, “Mandatory life without parole for a juvenile precludes consideration of his chronological age and its hallmark features—among them, immaturity, impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences.”
Justice Kagan’s words reflect the increasingly common view of teenagers as immature, impulsive, and not fully responsible for their actions. Yet, until the Supreme Court’s ruling, the criminal justice system had routinely labeled some teens as willfully bad and a danger to society and locked them away for life.
Parents hold similar ideas about teenagers—that some are good and some are bad. We see this way of thinking coming from the parents of the four middle-school boys who mercilessly teased their 68-year-old bus monitor—calling her names, telling her she was ugly and unlovable, and threatening her—and then posted the video online. The video went viral, outraging Americans and leading the boys and their parents to publicly apologize. Apologizing on behalf of her son, the mother of the boy who made the video insisted that he is “a good kid” who shouldn’t have listened to his friends, implying that her good son succumbed to peer pressure from his not-so-good friends.
Like this boy’s mother, the parents I interviewed overwhelmingly characterized their kids as good kids who are surrounded by kids who potentially are not. This shapes how parents think about their teen children’s sexuality. While Americans have long thought about teenage girls as less sexual than teenage boys, parents of daughters and parents of sons told me that their own teen children are sexually naïve and innocent while characterizing their peers as hypersexual and even sexually predatory.
This way of thinking has a number of implications for how teens come to think of themselves (and their peers) as sexual beings. Teens are getting the message from their parents that they are vulnerable victims in sexual situations, which can lead to an antagonistic view of heterosexual relationships—as a battle of the sexes.
But let’s pull back again and think about what’s informing parents’ beliefs. Trying young offenders as adults likely plays a role, given that it treats some teens as willfully bad. Abstinence-only sex education policy also likely plays a role.
Since the 1990s, abstinence has become the gold standard for teen sexuality—touted as the only surefire way to protect teens from a host of physical, psychological, and economic risks that supposedly accompany sexual activity. (Yes, economic. Abstinence sex education is supposed to stress “the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity,” implying that sex jeopardizes young people’s future economic status.) The Obama administration reduced funding for abstinence-only education in 2010, but abstinence remains popular—37 states require sex education that includes abstinence, of these, 26 require that abstinence be stressed as the best method—and in April, Health and Human Services added an abstinence-only curriculum to the list of pregnancy prevention programs it will fund.
The abstinence-only line goes something like this: If teens simply abstain from sex until adulthood (and preferably marriage), they will have access to the good life—to security, stability, and happiness. Given that parents’ greatest wish for their teen children is that they are happy, it’s not surprising that parents are invested in seeing their children as not sexual.
Abstinence is typically presented to teens as a no-brainer: Don’t have sex and you won’t get pregnant or a sexually transmitted disease or suffer all those pesky emotions that go with sex. The other side of the coin is, of course, have sex at your peril.
The message of abstinence sex education in this regard is similar to the one we send when we treat young offenders like adults: Don’t do anything bad (like have sex) and you will be fine. Do something bad and you’re on your own—all bets are off.
These kinds of policies up the ante. It’s all or nothing. You’re either safe or endangered, good or bad.
The reality is, of course, kids screw up. They make mistakes (as do adults, for that matter). Yet the consequences for missteps can be quite high in the U.S., especially for teens whose parents don’t have many resources to buffer them from their mistakes.
So I, for one, am heartened by the Supreme Court’s decision. It leads us one step closer to being a society of second chances. Another step in the right direction is to reject stereotypes about teenagers as good or bad, innocent or corrupting, asexual or hypersexual. Just as most of us realized when we were teenagers that we were more than we were stereotyped to be, so we should recognize that all teens face pernicious stereotypes that deny them full humanity and make them easy scapegoats or vulnerable victims. Those kids who viciously harassed their school-bus monitor? They’re ordinary kids who did a bad thing. How many of us can’t say the same about our own childhoods?
