To Parents of Teen Girls: Teaching Our Teen Girls What to Expect and How to Say No

As parents and society we try to protect our teen girls from the dating world. We tell them they can start dating when they are 30. We tell them to not have sex under any circumstance, and we hope that they will trust us and abstain. Unfortunately it is too much to hope that every teenage girl will stay away from sex, and even when they try to stay away sexual situations sometimes come to them.

Teen girls in many cases are not prepared for the world of sex and dating. They see things in the media and hear things about sex through friends, and at school. When it comes to an actual sexual experience though, they are often unprepared for the situations they face. I work with a number of teenage girls and adult women who all report similar experiences. Most of them describe at least one situation over the course of their life where they were caught off guard by a boy who was making a sexual advance that they did not know how to handle. Weather it is being at a party and boy began to touch them without warning or going out on a date and being cornered into doing more than they were prepared for.

Girls can benefit from being told the types of situations they may encounter and the emotions that may accompany them. For example: if you are a teen girl and you are at a party with a boy you really like it may be confusing if he makes an advance. Part of you may say "yes!" and then as events unfold the "yes" may turn into a "no". How do you let him know that you want him to put on the breaks without feeling that he will no longer like you. If girls are able to think through situations before they occur they will have the opportunity to make choices that they will feel better about in the end.

Teens are very impulsive and if they do not have a chance to think things through in advance they will be more likely to go with the flow and live in the moment. Even if that means regretting the moment for a long time later. This is not to say that there will not be moments when they want to say yes, but it is important to know how they might want to respond in a number of possible situations.

Teenagers are afraid to have conversations about sex with adults, in most cases because they are afraid of the adults possible reactions and negative evaluations of them. Teen girls my not tell parents about what is really happening because they are terrified of losing their most prized possession, their freedom. This being said, they still need to get answers somehow. The more information girls have the less likely they are to say "yes" when they don't really want to, and the less likely they are to find themselves in a situation they will regret. We need to arm teen girls with the ammunition of knowledge so that they can survive that adolescent battle of sexuality.