It seems like anyone who advocates that teen-agers actually refrain from sex until they’re married or, at least, until they’re “old enough to handle it,” is labeled an anachronistic moron who “just doesn’t understand” the adolescent world in today’s “modern times.”
OK, I admit that rap music does nothing for me except give me a headache (I still like the great R&B of the ’70s). And yes, I believe teen-age dress these days is too suggestive, seductive and inappropriate, though I didn’t when I was my kids’ age.
I also think boys should not wear earrings, girls should not have tattoos, and neither should bungee jump or drink and drive.
But as the father of four teen-age daughters and a son encroaching on teen-hood, I’m also not na?ve enough to believe that my kids are any different than tens of millions of other teenagers when it comes to wanting to have sex. I know this because – like all parents – I’ve been their age before and remember quite well how I, my friends, and the girls we desired, behaved. For that reason alone, it simply amazes me that more parents don’t insist on sexual abstinence for their kids, even though it still works in these “modern times.”
More parents should know that. Maybe they’re afraid to insist upon it because they don’t believe it works, but it does – to a point.
According to a Fox News report last week, an abstinence program in Delta County, Colo., is having a dramatically positive effect in reducing the number of teen-age pregnancies.
Six years ago the county’s birth rate for out-of-wedlock teen-aged girls was 10 percent (1 teen girl in ten), or twice the state’s 4.3 percent average. But by this year, the county’s “Save Sex” abstinence program – scoffed at and derided by critics when it began in 1995 – is able to boast that the county’s teen birth rate has dropped to near the state’s average. That’s nearly a 60 percent decrease.
The Save Sex program mentors combined increased parental involvement with education about the dangers of sex – not just babies but chronic disease as well – to produce the dramatic reductions. By any measurement, their efforts have obviously been a success.
Now, what if this program were adopted by more communities around the country? How many babies would not have to be aborted or abandoned? How many more teen-agers would not wind up with AIDS or genital herpes? How many fewer hearts and families would be broken?
Abstinence is unrealistic? A failure? Not worth the effort? I disagree on all counts.
Parents and peer groups, as well as community and national leaders, could do immense good for this country by promoting abstinence instead of “birth control” and condom usage. Our teens need to be told many of the same things we were told when we were their ages, such as, “Abstinence as birth control works 100 percent of the time.”
Abstaining from sex and, hence, abstaining from developing some of the problems associated with sex, also gives our teens a fighting chance as they grow from adolescence and into adulthood.
If we can keep more teens out of each other’s britches, then more of them will graduate high school with so many more options and choices in life than they would otherwise have as parents or, worse, carriers of an incurable disease.
Will this approach work?
No, not for all kids. No matter how rational the argument against sex, many – perhaps even most – teens will try it anyway.
But some won’t, and that’s the point. As parents, that’s probably the best we can hope for, but it beats what we’ve got now, hands down.
“It’s no mere coincidence that after over 30 years of so-called safe sex education, our nation is suffering from an STD [sexually transmitted disease] epidemic,” the Family Research Council’s Heather Cirmo said this week.
I agree.
