Not My Kid

What Parents Believe about the Sex Lives of Their Teenagers

Sinikka Elliott

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814771341
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Teenagers have sex. While almost all parents understand that many teenagers are sexually active, there is a paradox in many parents’ thinking: they insist their own teen children are not sexual, but characterize their children’s peers as sexually-driven and hypersexual. Rather than accuse parents of being in denial, Sinikka Elliott teases out the complex dynamics behind this thinking, demonstrating that it is rooted in fears and anxieties about being a good parent, the risks of teen sexual activity, and teenagers’ future economic and social status. Parents—like most Americans—equate teen sexuality with heartache, disease, pregnancy, promiscuity, and deviance and want their teen children to be protected from these things.

Going beyond the hype and controversy, Elliott examines how a diverse group of American parents of teenagers understand teen sexuality, showing that, in contrast to the idea that parents are polarized in their beliefs, parents are confused, anxious, and ambivalent about teen sexual activity and how best to guide their own children’s sexuality.Framed with an eye to the debates about teenage abstinence and sex education in school, Elliott also links parents’ understandings to the contradictory messages and broad moral panic around child and teen sexuality. Ultimately, Elliott considers the social and cultural conditions that might make it easier for parents to talk with their teens about sex, calling for new ways of thinking and talking about teen sexuality that promote social justice and empower parents to embrace their children as fully sexual subjects.

1

Sex Panics

Debates over Sex Education
and the Construction of Teen Sexuality

In the summer and fall of 2004, like many states around the nation, Texas was mired in a debate over sex education. One side thought that youth should learn about contraception in public schools (typically called comprehensive sex education), whereas the opposite side felt that schools should teach youth to abstain from sex until marriage and should not provide contraceptive information (known as abstinence-only sex education). I attended three public State Board of Education meetings where this debate unfolded, allowing Texans to voice their opinions about sex education. Curious to learn how teen sexuality would be discussed in this public venue, I found that, in keeping with dominant discourses around teen sexuality in the United States, speakers on both sides justified their stance by invoking images of diseased, pregnant, vulnerable, at-risk teenagers. Similarly proposed textbooks, regardless of their discussions of contraceptives, warned of the grave social, physical, and psychological consequences of teen sexual activity, and, indeed, all sex outside marriage.

I also attended the meetings as a parent of two children (at the time my son was 11 and my daughter was 8). Listening to speaker after speaker, I grew increasingly aware of the extent to which “parents” were being mobilized on one side of the debate or the other. Many who spoke before the board introduced themselves and justified their standpoint “as a parent” or, in some cases, “as a grandparent.” I also frequently heard the phrases “no parent would want” and “any parent can see.” Most speakers assumed that parents have strong convictions about sex education, differing only in whether they endorse an abstinence-only or comprehensive curriculum. Speakers also generally implied that parents want greater control over what, when, how, and, for some, whether their children learn about sex in school. These assumptions about parents and teen sexuality have governed policy decisions over the past three decades. The “Chastity Act” passed early in Reagan’s administration, for example, identified parents as the rightful dispatchers of sex education. In a speech, President Reagan expressed the prevailing view: “The rights of parents and the rights of family take precedence over those of Washington-based bureaucrats and social engineers.”¹ In line with Reagan’s vision, shifts in sex education over the past few decades have increasingly designated parents as the “guardians of their children’s sexual lives.”²

Yet, the portrait of parents that was painted in the Texas debate—as polarized and firmly convinced of the rightness of their view—did not fit easily with my own sense as a parent. Nor did it match positions I had heard parents express privately. It was not clear to me, then, what parents really thought, and I left these Texas meetings full of questions: What do parents who are not involved in the battle over sex education say to their kids about sex and sexuality? I also wanted to understand why parents say what they say and how they feel about talking (or not) to their children about sex. What do parents think about teenage sexuality, their own children’s as well as their children’s peers’? In particular, I wondered how parents were making sense of teen sexuality at a time when sex education was regularly in the spotlight, offering divergent views on how best to teach teens about sex but portraying teen sexuality generally as a menace to teenagers and society. Not My Kid takes up these questions.

Shifting Understandings of Sex Education and Teen Sexuality

To understand why Texans were debating sex education in the first place, it is worth looking back at the events leading up to 2004. Teenage sexual activity in the United States is frequently framed as a social problem, leading to unintended pregnancies and teen motherhood, disease, heartache, low self-esteem, lower socioeconomic status, and even death. Yet social policy about how best to deal with teen sexuality has been radically reframed over the past few decades.

In the 1970s, fears of an “epidemic” of teen pregnancies, especially among African Americans, and the belief that teenage motherhood contributes to rising poverty in America, led to increased support for comprehensive sex education programs that instruct students in contraceptives’ proper uses.³ Owing largely to the decentralization of education at the time, sex education was not implemented nationally or uniformly in public schools, but the programs that did exist in the 1970s and early 1980s were largely comprehensive in nature.⁴ They were also widely considered as successful in view of declining teen pregnancy rates. Studies found that even though teenagers were more likely to have sex in the 1970s and 1980s compared to the 1960s, the overall birthrate among teens decreased over the course of the 1970s.⁵ Youthful sexual intercourse was, if not endorsed, at least grudgingly accepted as inevitable by government, sex educators, and other professionals. The 1970s also saw changes in policies and practices around abortion with the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1973 establishing abortion as a constitutional right.

A shift occurred in the early 1980s. In 1981, President Reagan signed the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), Title XX of the Public Health Service Act, also known as the “Chastity Act,” which denied federal funds to most programs or projects that provided abortions or abortion counseling. In addition, the AFLA mandated abstinence education and, in the sex education programs it funded, stipulated the inclusion of units promoting “self-discipline and responsibility in human sexuality.”⁶ The passage of the AFLA represented a concerted “attempt to shift the discourse on the prevention of teenage pregnancy away from contraception and instead to ‘chastity’ or ‘morality.’”⁷ As such, it had a profound effect on sex education, shifting the debates away from the question of whether sex education should be offered in public schools to the issue of which sex education curriculum should be taught. Conservative groups designed new sex education curricula “to convey an unambiguous condemnation of sexual activity outside of marriage.”⁸ These programs became broadly known as abstinence-only sex education. By the early 1990s, amid mounting concerns about HIV/AIDS, a growing number of schools had implemented this type of sex education.

In 1996 under the auspices of the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act (also known as welfare reform), President Bill Clinton signed into law a new entitlement program for abstinence-only education. The new law defined abstinence education as any sex education program that teaches, among other things, “that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity, … that sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects, and … the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity.”⁹ Hence this legislation discursively bound sexual activity to marriage, personal responsibility, and financial self-sufficiency, thus overwhelmingly stressing the antisocial repercussions of nonmarital (i.e., teen) sexuality. This law, part of sweeping welfare reforms imposing stringent work requirements and time limits for welfare recipients,¹⁰ coincided with increasing economic deindustrialization, a rapid rise in (low-paying) service-sector jobs, and an ever widening gap between the rich and the poor. In this context, such legislation bolstered the notion that Americans must be responsible for their own well-being, and that sexual behavior can either help secure a promising future (e.g., through abstinence) or hinder future prospects (e.g., through nonmarital/teen sexual intercourse).

This legislation also helped support and build a thriving abstinence-only sex education industry. With renewed funding under the Bush administration, and expansion under a new federal program established in 2001—Community Based Abstinence Education—abstinence-only sex education programs grew in popularity. In 1988, only 2 percent of public school teachers taught abstinence as the only way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. By 2003, 30 percent of the nation’s instructors reported teaching abstinence only, providing no information about condoms or other contraceptives other than their failure rates.¹¹ Midway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of American youth were receiving instruction in school on how to “just say no” to sex without learning what to do if they decide to say yes.¹²

These shifts in sex education did not occur without controversy. The debate in Texas I observed was not an isolated event, as similar debates have occurred in communities across the nation in recent years. Although national polls indicate that most Americans support sex education, and despite the fact that expressions of sexuality in popular culture have become far more open and explicit since the 1960s, battles over sex education have increased in intensity over the past four decades—a period marked by “sex panics,” explosive political and local clashes over issues of sexuality such as gay rights, censorship, and sex education.¹³ Despite the controversy and despite a recent backlash against abstinence-only sex education,¹⁴ by the mid-2000s, when I started interviewing parents, abstinence-only sex education was beginning “to assert a kind of natural cultural authority, in schools and out.”¹⁵ In other words, abstinence-only-until-marriage had emerged as the dominant discourse around teen sexuality, promoted as the only surefire way to prevent disease, pregnancy, and the heartache and financial ruin regularly associated with nonmarital sexual intercourse. How does this discourse shape parents’ understandings of teen sexuality?

Parents and the Discourses of Teen Sexuality

Sexuality is commonly thought of as a purely biological drive,¹⁶ but, as the cultural historian Michel Foucault reminds us, sexual mores and expressions change over time and are closely linked to power relations, values, and culture. In this sense, sexuality is not so much about what people do as it is about the beliefs we associate with sexual beings—the discourses around sexuality. By discourses I mean powerful, taken-for-granted assumptions that shape how people think, talk, and act. For example, the discourse of teen sexuality as risky and hormonally fueled shapes how adults respond to teen sexual activity and teach youth about sexuality.

Discourses are neither accidental nor neutral but reflect dominant interests. “Experts” and moral entrepreneurs in scientific, medical, political, and religious communities play prominent roles in crafting and promulgating popular discourses of sexuality.¹⁷ Although unquestioned assumptions about sexuality may be internalized and become powerful motivators directing action, as entrenched as any other personal truths, individuals may also resist or adapt dominant discourses in their everyday lives and practices.

Discourses are not monolithic or omnipotent: competing discourses often vie for prominence, contest and contradict one another.¹⁸ The dominant discourse of sexuality in recent U.S. history has been a negative one, picturing sexuality as a potentially dangerous and immoral pursuit, particularly for the young, the unmarried, and those marked as Other.¹⁹ Parallel to this discourse, however, is the belief that sexuality is central to individual identity and personal fulfillment. Stemming in large part from a complex blend of free-market economics and restrictive sexual morality, U.S. society is characterized by a “paradoxical mix of sexual obsessions and sexual shames.”²⁰ In what follows, I briefly establish the historical context necessary to understand these and other discourses of sexuality and to locate, in time and space, the narratives of the parents interviewed within these pages. Seeing what has come before can also help us imagine new ways of thinking about teen sexuality. We turn to that issue in the concluding chapter.

Sexuality and Sexual Regulation: A Brief History

American sexual practices over the past 300 years have been closely linked to larger social processes, such as America’s urbanization and industrialization, and to social inequalities based on gender, race, and social class. During this time, moreover, our ideas about and efforts to control sexuality have changed considerably. For example, whereas many assume that sexuality in the United States was highly regulated during the colonial period, and that sexual freedoms gradually evolved, historical evidence suggests otherwise. A comprehensive investigation into the history of sexuality in America from the 1600s to the contemporary era, by historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, argues that sexual activity among the young and unmarried during colonial times was widespread and generally accepted, as long as it was covert and preceded marriage. In examining marriage certificates and birth records, D’Emilio and Freedman discovered that children were often born only a few months after a wedding, indicating that premarital sexual intercourse was relatively commonplace among the early colonists.²¹

Despite efforts on behalf of churches, families, local communities, and, increasingly, the judicial system to prevent premarital sex, premarital pregnancy rates increased in the late 1600s and throughout the 1700s, as young couples increasingly used a pregnancy to gain their families’ permission to marry.²² Premarital pregnancies plummeted in the first few decades of the Victorian era, however—a period generally attributed by scholars to a distinct shift in American sexual culture and regulation.²³ During the Victorian era, from 1830 to 1890, talk about sex increased dramatically. As sociologist Steven Seidman observes, “Victorians made sex into a topic of urgent public and personal concern.”²⁴ Through the proliferation of discourses about sexuality, the regulation of sexuality shifted inward to complex forms of self-regulation and self-surveillance.²⁵ Consider women’s sexuality. In the Victorian period, women—particularly middle-class, white women—were increasingly described as asexual, pure, and passionless beings, at least outside marriage.²⁶ As this discourse mushroomed outside “expert” circles to everyday people, women felt encouraged to police and restrict their own sexuality.

The 1800s heralded new ideas not simply of female sexuality but also of children and childhood sexua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Sex Panics: Debates over Sex Education and the Construction of Teen Sexuality
• 2. The Asexual Teen: Naïveté, Dependence, and Sexual Danger
• 3. Negotiating the Erotic: When Parents and Teens Talk about Sex
• 4. The Hypersexual Teen: Sexy Bodies, Raging Hormones, and Irresponsibility
• 5. Other Teens: How Race, Class, and Gender Matter
• 6. Anxious Monitoring: Strategies of Protection and Surveillance
• 7. Uncertainty in Parents’ Sexual Lessons
• 8. Conclusion: Reconstructing Teen Sexuality
• Methods Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author