A Chicken's Guide to Talking Turkey with Your Kids about Sex ...

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Chapter 1: It’s a Tough Job, but Someone Has to Do Itduring this stretch of time is change. Kids who have behaved like normal,all-American children will begin showing sides of themselves youswear you’ve never seen.One day your daughter hates chicken, and the next she eats fourhelpings of it. A simple pimple becomes a volcano, and a boundary youset becomes the beaches of Normandy. You may hear, “You never let medo this! You never let me do that!” in response to something that, to yourrecollection, has come up in conversation only once before.We know of one mother who casually asked her adolescent daughterat dinner, “Did you finish your homework, honey?” and was met with anexplosive, “You hate me, don’t you? Why can’t you just leave me alone?!”Though puberty is a time when you may, for the first time, legitimatelyfeel like killing your kid, it’s also that critical time when you asa parent need to guide him or her through the stormy seas of life to thatport we call adolescence. As a parent, you are the one who must navigatea semistraight line to help this child whose boat is being tossed ona sea of hormones and blown by the winds of culture, and the windstoday have grown strong indeed.Kids in this generation are growing up in a world in which we’vetraded Mathers. Jerry Mathers (“as the Beaver”) has been replaced byfoul-mouthed rapper Marshall Mathers (Eminem). We’ve gone from thatbaby-faced kid next door whose favorite saying was, “Gee, Wally!” to aguy whose latest album features vulgarly explicit lyrics. Kids are engagingin oral sex, not at parties or friends’ homes when parents are away,but on school buses and at school during school hours—and many ofthem don’t even consider it sex.This isn’t a problem limited to kids outside the church. In his bookRight from Wrong, Josh McDowell cited a study that showed 27 percentof Christian teens had experienced sexual intercourse by the age of eighteen,and 55 percent had engaged in fondling breasts. 1It’s a turbulent world our children are entering.Can we be blunt? The raw reality of today’s society, in which the vastmajority of kids have sexual intercourse before the age of twenty, meansthat a passive approach to parenting will no longer work. If you do whatmany parents do—cross your fingers, hope for the best, and stay silent—your family will add to the statistics of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, sexuallytransmitted diseases, and broken hearts, all before your childrenreach the age of twenty-one.17
What have you shared with your kid about life? Have you really discussedthings, or have you avoided the difficult topics that need frankdiscussion the most?Here’s just one example: Mom, you have to come to grips with thefact that your son (and very likely your daughter) will masturbate. Hisbody is beginning to produce semen at a very high rate, and there areonly three ways that semen will come out: sexual intercourse, masturbation,or nocturnal emission. You can help him choose how he will handlethis natural biological pressure, or you can simply avoid the topicand leave him to stumble onto a healthy approach all on his own.In the same way, your daughter is going to become interested inguys. Whether these new connections are healthy or exploitive willdepend in large part on how well she is prepared to handle older boys’interest. She can learn by trial and error, or she can benefit from a lovingparent’s advice and thus avoid considerable emotional trauma.Toward the end of puberty, as your child heads into adolescence, that littlegirl or boy who used to crawl up into your lap might be thinkingabout crawling into other people’s laps.The precious, critical years of puberty are over once the firsts aredone: Your daughter is beyond the breast buds and has started her period.Your son has had his first nocturnal emission and, toward the end ofpuberty, begins moving into those emotional and psychological changesthat accompany adolescence. But in early puberty, your son or daughterstill straddles childhood and adolescence, a time some call the“tweenager” years. 2 During your child’s puberty, you still have a great dealof influence by lovingly instructing your child and setting boundaries.A Parent to Be Proud OfBack in 1994, USA Today 3 chose an “all-USA high school baseballteam” and asked each player several questions, including whom they mostadmired. A common theme came up in their responses. Among the playersquestioned, you may recognize many as current sports professionals:18A Chicken’s Guide to Talking Turkey with Your Kids about SexJaret Wright: “My father, Clyde.”Mark Johnson: “My father, George.”Derek Baker: “My father, Don.”Troy Glaus: “My mother, Karen Jensen.”Rob Hauswald: “My mother, Karen May.”
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