A lot of parents have their heads up their a$ses when it comes to facing up to the fact that their kids are bumping uglies according to a new study. But they think everyone else’s kid needs a beating. Pop the hood.
This story on MSNBC is a good example of why so many families are all screwed up.
“Parents I interviewed had a very hard time thinking about their own teen children as sexually desiring subjects,” said study researcher Sinikka Elliott, an assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. “At the same time, parents view their teens’ peers as highly sexual, even sexually predatory.”
These disillusioned parents are factually wrong, as there were 435,436 births to teens aged 15 to 19 in 2006, and 6,396 for those aged 10 to 14, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the dual thinking about teenage sex has its own consequences. By viewing their own children as holier-than-thou, parents shift the responsibility for potential sexual activity to others.
A lot of parents in the study fooled themselves into thinking their kids aren’t even interested in sex.
For instance one mother, 52-year-old Beatrice (white, lower middle class) commented on her 16-year-old daughter, saying, “One thing I’ve noticed is that she’s probably a little bit more immature than some of her friends, and that’s okay, I think it will come.”
Even though Elliott interviewed many more moms than dads, she found fathers similarly viewed their daughters as immature.
Another mother, Beth, 39 (white, upper middle class), believed her son, 16, was a virgin because that’s what he told her, and he hadn’t dated. This mother added, “When you look at your child, they’re just so little and young. You just don’t think of them ever even thinking about [sex]. It’s hard to even think about what you should be saying to kids. You don’t think they are old enough when you think about those things.”
The parents seem to think everybody else’s kid is a pervy little sex maniac.
Some parents specifically contrasted their kids’ lack of sexual desire with peers’ hedonistic tendencies.
“This binary thinking does more than simply establish their teens as asexual and, therefore, good; it also creates a scenario in which their teenagers are imperiled by their peers,” Elliott writes in the May issue of the journal Symbolic Interaction.
For instance, parents of teenage boys often voiced concern that their sons might be lured into sexual situations by teenage girls who, the parents felt, might use sex in an effort to solidify a relationship. Meanwhile, parents of teen girls expressed fears that their daughters would be taken advantage of by sexually driven teenage boys.
When are folks going to wake up and see that it’s not everybody else who is the problem?
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