Parents Top Five Worry list:
Education: 39%
Health/health care: 12%
Safety: 8%
Drugs: 7%
Making time for kids: 7%

Sex and the Single Teenager
Q: What's the appropriate age for teens to have sex outside marriage?
Québec
15: 5%
16: 30%
17: 18%
18: 25%
19: 5%
Never: 11%

Rest of Canada
15: less than 1%
16: 5%
17: 5%
18: 28%
19: 14%
Never: 41%

Pardon me while I say HAHAHAHAHAHA! 41% in the rest of Canada said "never"?!?! HAHAHA! A lot of these parents are kidding themselves, I have to think. My guess at the percentage of teens who aren't having or haven't had sex by the age of 19 doesn't go beyond single digits. Either 30-40% of parents think their kids are behaving in an extremely inappropriate manner, or they just don't have a frigging clue. What is it between Québec and the rest of Canada that makes Québeckers so much more realistic about this? The only similarity I can see between the two is that both groups like round numbers (15 & 17 were much lower than 16 & 18), which tells me that parenting is being looked at as though there's some kind of owner's manual- that "kids to this by this age, and that by that age", and that too many parents don't realize that the number of days you're alive doesn't necessarily mean a darn thing when it comes to maturity. I'm not quite getting the words out to express my sentiments accurately, but it just seems that parents are dealing with ideas surrounding their kids in broad stroaks, which are the product of our culture, as opposed to just accomodating the needs of the children as they arise. It also suggests, to me, at least, that a lot of parents want to know what's going on in their kids' sex lives, and I can tell you right now that most of the time, if you try to talk with people my age about their sex lives as a parent, the most likely response will be "Um, no." In other words, "This is none of your business, and it is extremely uncomfortable. Stop now. You are making me seriously dislike you." Which is not to say parents shouldn't know anything about their childrens' sex lives, knowing who they're dating and how serious it is would be common enough knowledge. But knowing the when, where, why, and how about their sexual behaviour, I would say, isn't terribly necessary. Dare I say asking about it in detail is beyond intrusive and likely to result in a dropped jaw and squinty eyes from the kid who feels a tremendous infringement on their privacy.

moving on.

It would be acceptable for their children at some time to have a sexual relationship with a member of the same sex:

Québec: 57%
Rest of Canada: 44%

When reached for comment, a PFLAG spokeperson said they thought the numbers were promising. Sure, they're better than prior surveys, but the majority of Canadians outside Québec are still worked up over this. It's like when we hear polls like "75% of Canadians think Canada will still exist in 25 years! hooray!" uh, yeah, but 25% said no. To me, that's. A. Problem. And I don't know about you, but this kind of poll gives me the urge to try and corrupt some other teenage boys.

Finally, the "secret lives" poll

percentage saying their teens are always open and honest with them:

Québec: 62%
Rest of Canada: 52%

Percentage saying their teens have...
Drunk alcohol: Q-57% ROC-37%
Smoked cigarettes: Q-39% ROC-14%
Used illegal drugs: Q-25% Roc-8%
Had sex: Q-23% ROC-4%

This to me says that between 20 and 40% of parents in the rest of Canada are sinfully naïve. what do you think?

[ October 03, 2002: Message edited by: meades ]

I'm giggling over the "never" thing too in the rest of Canada. Good grief. Of course, meades, you really do need to take into account that just as you don't want to think about your parents having sex (there's a nice picture to go with your morning orange juice), parents don't particularly feel comfortable thinking about their children having sex, so the age at which they think it's acceptable may be a little higher than what they know is reasonable or what they even know THEY did it at.

At the risk of TMI, I first became sexually active at 15 (and let's not get into the whole "virginity" thing, because I hate this thing about "if I'm a technical virgin then I'm not sexually active - I was "technically a virgin" until I was 18) but the thought of my son doing so makes me very uncomfortable and I hope he'll wait a year or two longer than I did before he does. Because even though I thought I was really ready and adult and grown up enough to handle it, when the relationship ended a couple of months later, I took it very, very, very hard. Much harder than I would have if the sexual dimension hadn't been there. A break-up with a boy who was much nicer and that I really fell for a year later was much easier to take for me, and I think it was because we hadn't had sex.

Of course, you couldn't have told me that at the time. So those rather conservative numbers could be reflecting an ideal well-being sort of idea on the part of parents rather than a stifling or head-in-the-sand kind of thing.

What I can't believe is that parents are so unrealistic about whether their children are having sex. That's just wild.

But don't forget, 15, 16, and 17 year olds see each other as autonomous beings. They see the persona the kid shows at school. But the parents at home see all the immaturity that there still is in the kid. Allowances (if they get those). Rooms that look like a fire hazard (well, some things never change, at least for me!). In many cases, parents are still doing their teenagers' laundry, checking their homework - well, in short, still RAISING them. It's kind of hard to think of your son as an autonomous sexual agent when you're still washing his clothes and giving him an allowance, you know?

For me as a parent - I think 16 or 17 is soon enough for a teenage boy to start having sex. If I know my rebellious and active and outgoing young lad, I'm willing to bet he'll become sexually active sooner, but if you ask me when I think an "appropriate" time is, I will stick with 16 or 17, knowing in my heart of hearts that even at that age he still likely won't be able to handle the emotional aspect of it very well because he likely won't have the emotional maturity of an adult.

However, in a way he's right - just because he has a hickey doesn't mean he's having sex. I think hickeys are pretty benign. I'd be happy if that's all my kid was doing at 15.

Even if your kids ARE having sex at a younger age than you feel comfortable with, I would make sure that they have all the information they need about birth control, and make no moral judgments on their sexual activity (well, unless they're raping people, but you know what I mean, about NORMAL sexual activity).

Incidentally, at 15 when I had my first serious boyfriend, my father gave me "the talk". It consisted of a horror story about someone he knew when he was younger who got pregnant as a teenager, and the advice that when you're on the pill, "if you skip one day, you blow the whole month."

I didn't catch it until, like, days later. snerk.

Parents: They will catch you flat-footed, sometimes. They'll get into some shit that, when you find out years later, you'll be glad you didn't know about. Most of the time, they'll get themselves out again, same as we did. When they can't, you'll pick up the pieces.
Kids: We did a lot of that, too, and mostly, our parents didn't know and we didn't want them to.

I figured if this information, which I'd gotten in school a couple of year earlier, produced this effect, a discussion of the mechanics of sex would be way beyond her. I went to the library, found out what I wanted to know, and decided I would wait a bit before venturing down that road.

I'm hoping my grils will wait until they're 18, like I did. Not that I didn't have opportunity, I just didn't feel that I was ready for that level of relationship until 18.

But on the off chance that they decide to start earlier and are disinclined to library research, the gals will have already gotten as much information as I can give. Or refer them to. I do not want them getting erroneous info from unreliable sources, that can be worse than no information at all.

[ October 04, 2002: Message edited by: Zoot Capri ]

Be that as it may it's not being "naive" or detatched improperly by affording them the same rights to privacy that we afford and expect as adults.

By that I mean in our discussions I don't gross them out with personal annecdotes-- kids are soo squeamish about thier parents being sexual beings, as if they aren't walking bits of empirical evidence of it-- and my eldest always keeps things in an hypothetical tense.

Talking about sex is much more than just covering the bases about birth control. Schools do that. Schools cover the technical aspects of sex pretty well as far as I can see.