You can help your child by modelling and reinforcing values and beliefs about safety, responsibility, honest communication and respect in relationships by treating your partner with respect and talking about how to stay safe. Most teenagers will experiment with sexual behaviour at some stage — this is a normal, natural and powerful urge in these years. But not all teenage relationships include sex. Teenagers are also maturing emotionally and socially.
BRIGHT Magazine
Understanding teenage sexual behaviour, sexual attraction and sexual identity
Adolescence can be tough enough to get through without questions of sex, sexuality, and sexual identity. But adolescents are humans, too — no matter how alien they may seem to their parents at times. Sharing factual information with and giving good moral guidance to your teenager is a vitally important part of helping your teen understand herself or himself. It can help your child avoid devastating, and possibly life-threatening, errors in judgment. Wibbelsman, M. Carefully preparing children for the normal changes in their bodies as well as the endless assault of peer pressure, media glorification of irresponsible sexuality, and advertising come-ons is the only way to create a sense of security for parents and children alike. We hold their hands. We educate them about the risks. The good news is that as many as half of all adolescents do just that. But that leaves the other half at risk — many of them engaging in unprotected sex, exposing themselves to potentially grave disease and unwanted pregnancy.
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Can they be taught to see it more critically? Photo illustration by Sara Cwynar. By Maggie Jones. Then in ninth grade, he found online porn sites on his phone.
Sex education is offered in many schools, but don't count on classroom instruction alone. Sex education needs to happen at home, too. Here's help talking to your teen about sex.
