Is teenage sex wrong?

Parent Cafe
1

<p>What do normal parents think about it in general? Is it just plain wrong?</p>

<p>I mention “normal” as a qualifying characteristic because my parents deviate from the norm in that they are extremely liberal Britons. </p>

<p>Do you all think teens should wait? Or that it’s unbecoming? Or perhaps we’re not responsible enough?</p>

<p>One of my friends has a saying, “If grass is on the field, play ball!”. This is one of them term he uses to rationalize sleeping with girls younger than himself. Do you think it is OK for a 17 year old boy to have sex with a 15 or 16 year old girl? What if the boy is 18 and the girl 14? Where should the line be drawn?</p>

2

<p>I don’t think it’s wrong, but I do worry about whether the young people are ready for it.</p>

<p>To me, it’s more a matter of timing than morals. I tend to be concerned when either partner is under the age of 17 or thereabouts. The age is not exact; much depends on the individual’s maturity. </p>

<p>I would also be concerned if there was more than a one-year (or one-school-grade) age gap between the two partners. In this situation, the older partner may be (perhaps inadvertently) pressuring the younger one into something that the younger one is not ready for.</p>

<p>I should also add that some people don’t even feel “ready” at 18 or 19, and this is something that should be respected. There are also young people – and they may be of either gender – who prefer to wait until they are in a relationship in which having sex would feel natural. This has a lot to do with trust and a feeling of comfort with the other person, as well as sexual attraction. In such instances, a relationship may go on for quite a while, often many months, before the couple feels ready for sexual intimacy. And this can happen at 20 as well as 16. Not everyone takes sex as casually as your friend seems to.</p>

<p>Sex is fun, sure, but it’s also serious business. There are real risks involved: the possibility of pregnancy or disease. There also may be strong emotions involved that a young person might not be ready to handle. And here in the United States, there is also the issue of the young woman being labeled a “slut” if she starts to have sex at a very young age or has multiple partners.</p>

3

<p>Let me ask you, did you participate in teenage sex? I think it’s wrong for parents to scrutinize their daughters/sons for doing something so early, if the parents were doing the exact same thing roughly 30 years ago.</p>

<p>Think about it…during the Middle Ages teenagers were reaching their mid-life crisis and expected to have kids. Do you think our bodies/hormones/mindsets have evolved that quickly? </p>

<p>Also, even if you’re putting pressure on your kid to not engage in sexual activities that perhaps you don’t approve of, he’s in a tug of war between you and the media/friends/being cool.</p>

<p>Just think about that.</p>

4

<p>I think as a rule it is dangerous both physically and emotionally for teens to engage in sex. They are not prepared for potential consequences once again both physically or emotionally. It is not a moral judgement for me.</p>

<p>There are huge maturity gains each year of high school and although one year may not make a difference, two can, three definitely. I have a 12th & 9th grader - they can be friends, but they are in no way true peers.</p>

<p>crmichi - Biology has not changed since the middle ages, but unless you are capable of supporting yourself and someone else and you think it is just about urges, then you prove my point that teens are not ready. And if teens are engaging in sex due to media/friends/being cool??..point proven further.</p>

<p>And no, not everyone has sex as teens.</p>

5

<p>I think that very, very few teens are emotionally ready to have sex. (I am talking HS students here not college although many college students aren’t ready either). A lot of teens get caught up in the “everyone is dong it” mentality. The truth is that not everyone is. And not everyone was back in the 70’s either.</p>

<p>In general, I think that high school students should wait.</p>

6

<p>30 or 40 yrs ago, the most serious consequence of consentual teen sex was an unexpected pregnancy. Known diseases then were annoying and embarrassing, but fully curable. Today, the consequences can be death.
In the middle ages, the life span was about 30 for a typical peasant. If we want to use that argument, then a pregnancy 1/2 way through a person’s life span would argue against pregnancy until the 30’s today!
Those 2 ideas are not convincing arguments at all. They are not even a good try.</p>

<p>And this one cracks me up: " Also, even if you’re putting pressure on your kid to not engage in sexual activities that perhaps you don’t approve of, he’s in a tug of war between you and the media/friends/being cool.</p>

<p>Just think about that. "</p>

<p>Yes, as parents we are already aware of that. You know why? We were teens once with parents. We have grown and matured. Now we have teen children. We not only see how it is, but we have already been there and done that. Children often don’t have a big enough perspective to understand parents have already been through almost everything an adolescent is just getting to.</p>

<p>I’d add too, that fairly or not, society considers it far more “wrong” if the fellow is older, rather than the girl.</p>

7

<p>MTV has a show called 16 and pregnant where they follow their lives for about 5 months. The commonality that all of these girls have is at the very end they say knowing what they know now they would have waited.</p>

<p>That is the thing kids (talking 15-18) are not ready to get pregnant, yet they don’t realize it can and does happen. The emotional toll is large regardless of whether you decide to abort, keep or place up for adoption. Condoms are @97% effective, that means 3 out of 100 will become pregnant, it sounds reassuring that 97 won’t get pregnant, but if you are one of the three? What will you do?</p>

<p>I don’t think any 15, 16 or 17 yo is ready emotionally to deal with these issues. Place the risk of getting pregnant or getting a disease aside, people tend to lose sight of the relationship when sex is placed into the equation. They tend to think by having sex it equals love. It doesn’t, it equals sex. If you are equating it with the depth of love than it means you are not ready to have sex.</p>

<p>Don’t read into that as saying I am saying no biggie, because I am not. I am saying that every girl has been down the road at some point when a guy says “I love you and want to show you how much” that isn’t love…want to show me, take me to the movies every week and only watch chick flicks like the Notebook or Dear John. That will show me how much, pick up a box of tampons for me because I am doubling over in bed with cramps and can’t run to the store and that will show me how much you love me. If the guy won’t do those kind of things, than like I said it is sex and nothing more. It means that they have not reached the maturity level to be sexually active.</p>

<p>There is a very old cliche, women have sex to make love…men make love to have sex.</p>

8

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<p>This is not necessarily a valid argument.</p>

<p>If the parent had sex as a teenager 30 years ago and discovered that there were negative consequences that he/she had not anticipated, the parent might well want to share that experience so that the son or daughter could learn from it.</p>

<p>There’s no reason why a younger person cannot benefit from an older person’s experience.</p>

9

<p>I think young teens should not be having sex. Young teens (those under 18) are often driven to sex for the wrong reasons and the emotional fall-out afterwards can be life-damaging.</p>

10

<p>I don’t think kids under 16 have the maturity to make this decision, and I don’t think a 17 or 18 year old boy should think about a girl under 16. (This annoyed me coming from the mouths of boys when I was 14 or 15, but now I can see they were right.)</p>

<p>After 16 I think it depends on the individuals.</p>

<p>However, no underage sex (or any sex unless it’s a committed, long term monogamous relationship, and even then testing should be done) without condoms.</p>

<p>The list of STD’s just grows. HPV is present in about 80% of young people, and can lead to cervical cancer, among other things. It can also diminish later fertility and injure babies born vaginally from an infected mother. Of course, the same is true of herpes, but it is not as prevalent.</p>

<p>And then we get more serious from there – gonorrhea and AIDS.</p>

<p>There are physical risks and psychological risks, and I would talk to teens about both, and then encourage them to think clearly and take care of themselves and not fall to someone else’s pressure. This goes for both sexes.</p>

<p>OP: As for that expression and your friend, he sounds crass, I don’t agree with him.</p>

<p>And if you’re a ■■■■■, haha.</p>

11

<p>I am a seventeen year old and after reading all the comments I feel like saying something on this.</p>

<p>The basic fact is that people have sex for pleasure. If anyone wants to have sex it is for pleasure, so you can never mix ‘love’ in this issue (at least for teenagers) because if the universe changed overnight and sex suddenly became excruciatingly painful/repulsive, no teenager would do it. At least most of us aren’t going to, even if it meant saving a relationship. It is definitely not for love. </p>

<p>Now comes the question of whether teenage sex is wrong. It is. Outright wrong. Because as I said earlier we do it for pleasure and you cannot label anything ‘right’ just because it gives you pleasure; otherwise it would have been okay to use drugs. Sex is just one component of a relationship; there is so much more but as teenagers most of us don’t realize that. For most of us -guys (i don’t know about girls), a relationship in high school almost always means sexual attraction at the base. So its wrong, because we have not understood a relationship. It also validates the ‘middle ages’ point; true, back then people used to get married in our age but then they had a real relationship, real understanding, they really had to live a life and they had to live it together. So even though they were married at our age, sex would be what it should be-a component of a relationship, not a whole basic factor.</p>

<p>And I would like to add that I fully agree with bulletandpima’s post.</p>

12

<p>If you are willing to take responsibility for any child you might produce through sexual activity, given that you will be legally responsible for this child for the first 18 years of thier life? Then, no, you are not too young.</p>

<p>It is important to remember, however, that even if you, as a young man, decide to engate in sexual activity, you will not have any say whatsoever in whether or not the pregnancy is carried to term. This decision will be made by the girl, and also, in many states, because of parental notification laws, the parents of the girl.</p>

<p>It is something to be aware of. I believe the current estimates of the price of raising a child over the course of the first 18 years runs into the high hundreds of thousands.</p>

13

<p>AngelAngel: Something is not necessarily right or wrong simply based on the fact it is predicated on pleasure, love, even hatred.</p>

14

<p>I’d add “and able” to poetgrl’s comment about willing to take responsibility(post 15).</p>

<p>poetgrl is exactly right about a financial cost for a guy that only the girl can make. It’s sometimes debated, but it is one area where women who fight for equal rights prefer to avoid. In this area, they put blinders on. The equal rights of the male. 2 teens may be willing participants in sex, but if the girl gets pregnant, she suddenly has all the rights to make the decision about what to do, and the guy loses his rights. She can decide what bills he must pay. Good or bad? Fair or not? Makes no difference. That’s the way it is, and the fellow should remember it.</p>

15

<p>Yes, but “able” not in terms of what you might think, “able” in terms of what the courts will determine.</p>

<p>Basically, if a child results from a sexual encounter, the courts will determine what level of financial support you are to provide, and this will have nothing to do with what your opinion might be about that. Or, the girls, actually.</p>

<p>It’s a legal matter once paternity is established, and it is a nearly two-decade responsibility. Tough to go to college and pay those bills at the same time.</p>

16

<p>This thread kinda gives me the creeps…</p>

17

<p>Yes, based largely on my experiences, and those of my friends, having sex as high school students, I think it’s generally a bad idea for high school students to have sex.</p>

<p>Also based largely on my experiences, and those of my friends, I think it’s highly unrealistic to expect that many high school students won’t disagree with that view, and choose to have sex, or won’t have sex anyway even if they believe it.</p>

<p>There’s a Scylla and Charybdis of parenthood here. Knowing that my children might well decide to have sex regardless of my views, I didn’t want to fetishize abstinence and virginity for them, because I didn’t want them to feel bad about themselves and their choices, or that I would be disappointed in them or critical of them in any way about this. On the other hand, I didn’t want to get so wrapped up in my expectation that they would have sex that I wound up pressuring them to have sex because I was signaling that it was normative. Above all, I wanted them to enter the world of sexuality as un-traumatically as possible, to get over whatever trauma they didn’t avoid as quickly as possible, and to carry as little baggage about it as possible through the rest of their lives.</p>

<p>I have no idea whether I was successful or not. None. My children absolutely know that they can discuss anything with me, but they choose not to discuss this particular topic, and I’m not surprised. I don’t push them on it.</p>

<p>What I did do, when they were in high school and even middle school, was talk to them honestly about my own experiences. So they knew that I had sex in high school, but they also knew that I thought I hadn’t really been ready for it, that I had hurt my first girlfriend badly because of that, and that it had taken me a long time, and, ultimately the committed relationship that had produced them, to free myself of some of the negative effects of having immature sexual relationships (which included college as well). </p>

<p>I also tried to make them think about some of the ways they and their friends would overvalue choices about sexuality – to help them understand that pretty much everyone reaches the same point in a relatively short period of time along slightly different paths, and that having sex or not in 10th grade or 12th grade or whenever is not something that really defines who anybody is permanently. I called them on it if I heard them putting anyone down for choices about sexuality, whether it was being “slutty” or “prissy”.</p>

<p>By the way, that “grass on the field” comment is centuries-old boy talk. That, and lots of similar bits of pseudo-wit, is a mix of bravado, insecurity, and wishful thinking.</p>

18

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<p>This can definitely be argued – is it ethical to use someone else for the purpose of pleasure (as would sexual intercourse with the intent of pleasure and nothing else), even if they consent?</p>

19

<p>Just because the body matures, doesn’t mean the mind has. They need to be emotionally ready for it not just physically. If teenagers do decide to do the deed, try to have them be open about it (the last thing anyone needs is a “surprise”). If you can be honest then you can teach them how to be safe or make an appt with a doctor to go over everything with them.</p>

20

<p>“is it ethical to use someone else for the purpose of pleasure”</p>

<p>Most of my interactions with my friends are for the purpose of pleasure. I invite them to my house to enjoy their company, not as an act of generosity. If they didn’t make me laugh, I wouldn’t do it.</p>

<p>I will also do things for my friends that are not fun when they need me. But the reason we became friends in the first place is because I enjoyed talking to them. There are plenty of very nice people I’m not friends with because I don’t enjoy them.</p>