Disagree

by Jaclynn Davis

Created on: January 19, 2011

Caught in the moral crossfire of “teen sex”, are a generation of young people who were never taught to associate sex with healthy sexuality.  Within a charged realm of right and wrong, the adults whose task it is to guide their adolescents through this important stage of human development, have instead created a paradigm of risk and consequence that has all but eliminated the importance of healthy sexual development, nurturing relationships, or empowerment to make personal decisions.  The risk to academic success is thereby not in the act of sex itself, but in society’s treatment of adolescent sexuality as abnormal, taboo, or even delinquent.  When we fail to acknowledge and teach the full spectrum of sexual development, we do a grave injustice to our teens.  It is this injustice that gives rise to academic struggles, health risks, and social recklessness—not the act of sex itself. 

 Theories of human development establish stages that we pass through in order to move on to our next phase in life.  We learn to walk, we learn to talk, and we learn to interact with other people positively and communally.  If we don’t learn these tasks appropriately, we still pass on to the next phase but we are now crippled in some way.  Perhaps a child never learned to interact appropriately with peers and is now shunned for his or her inability to share or a tendency to express anger through violence.  That child still continues on throughout his or development, but does so at a distinct disadvantage, also posing a potential risk to him or herself and to others. 

Sexual development demands the same advancement from humans.  As youngsters we begin to explore parts of our bodies, and as adults we often find a lifelong intimate partner.  Adolescents are in the most important phase of developing a healthy sexuality, caught on the brink between childhood and adulthood.  They are learning how to form intimate relationships, how to express conflict or joy, how to make decisions that consider their physical, mental, and emotional health.  They will pass through this part of their development whether adults support it or not, and so as adults, we have the choice to guide our teens through their development and into a healthy and successful adulthood as we have promised, or we can leave them to flail and struggle, moving along in life, but crippled in essential ways, a risk to themselves and to their partners.   

Fear has silenced us.  It has screamed "Pregnancy!" and "STDs!" and painted it across the walls that our children grow up within.  It has turned off the conversations about love and communication and intimacy and replaced it with an important, though very partial conversation of bodily fluids and risk.  When we limit the conversation to penises and vaginas, we risk missing the far deeper levels of adolescent sexual development.  We neglect the aspects of teen sexuality that tell a 13-year old that she is ugly compared to the women featured in media.  We neglect the 15-year old girl who throws up daily to avoid weight gain.  We focus so strictly on the mechanics of pregnancy that we forget to address the sexual identity of LGBT youth and in the process, we ostracize and invalidate.  We frantically set curfews and rules and shout "NO NO NO" so loudly that we can’t hear the teen who is crying out for help because she is a victim of adolescent relationship abuse.  Because no one ever taught her what a healthy relationship should look like.  Because all she ever heard was, "Don’t have Sex".  Because that’s all anyone ever cared about, and so she got the message that sex was the only thing that was important, the only way to gain the attention she craved. 

Ultimately, academic success is contingent upon a young person’s total wellness—their physical health, mental stability, and emotional maturity, their social connectedness, their ability to advocate for themselves, to formulate goals and dreams and feel supported in them.  SEX, is an act.  SEXUALITY involves a young person’s total sense of self, self-worth, and identity formation.  Teen sex does not pose a threat to academic success, but society’s neglect in raising sexually healthy adolescents, may very well be. 

Learn more about this author, Jaclynn Davis.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.