The Guilty Parent

I haven’t been feeling well lately so my bed and television have become my BFFs this past week.

Which of course meant a chance to catch up on the daytime TV.

Aside from catching up on my favorite soaps and a healthy dose of Noggin and Sprout with Peanut, I caught Friday’s Oprah and the revisit with Dr. Laura Berman.

I know you will remember how in April, Jennifer posted about why she would never watch Oprah again. I loved her post even though I respectfully disagree with some parts of her post. So to watch this episode on Friday with two teens who claimed to “be ready” to have sex with each other,

credit: geo cristian

was not so much an eye opener, as it was a breath of fresh air and an affirmation of how I feel about talking to my kids about sex (and now my teenage son).

I mean lets get real, kids are going to have sex, despite the preaching of abstinence and telling kids not to do it (I believe Bristol Palin is a prime example of why that doesn’t work). I was (cover your eyes and ears if you don’t want to see mom and dad), 16 when I had sex for the first time. It wasn’t awful but it wasn’t fabulous either. It would take a few more years and sexual experiences for me to finally get comfortable with sex, my own body, my own sexuality and the power I had as a woman. It’s astonishing to me that we aren’t talking to our kids.

Was I talked to about sex growing up? Yes… and No. The REAL TALKS came after I was having sex and they came from my father. (shocked yet?) I give my dad HUGE PROPS for talking to me (I think it was a year after I had sex for the first time). Did he want to? *snort* Probably not! I’m sure he would have been thrilled to never have that discussion but he did it. I gained so much from that strained, awkward, and challenging discussion in our tiny kitchen. He never went to the topic of self stimulation (I think that would have been the end of him right then and there!) but we talked about being safe, making good decisions and he opened the door for me to say a few things that I had been thinking.

I don’t think that my soon to be 10 year old daughter is ready to learn about self pleasure and gratification either so I’m waiting on that. However, thanks to a young female family member and a few sleepovers away from me, she has learned a few things about sex and where babies come from. I found all of this out recently and at first I was enraged that this very personal conversation had taken place. I was beside myself with anger that the talk that I wanted to have with her had been taken from me. It took all I had to not go through the roof. Going through the roof would have gotten me nowhere so I calmed myself and talked to Bebe about what she knew and what she learned from her older, and not so much wiser female family member.

The details aren’t important, but I did learn that there is still power in talking to your child. Bebe knows that some of the information she got was incomplete at best. She knows that in time, when her body and mind are ready she will be able to have a baby too, and she now knows that this information I’ve given her, the correct information, is for her ears only. It’s not her place to share it with friends or her brothers. I’ve given her the gift of saying it’s OK to ask questions and learn more. It’s OK to want to understand about your body and what it can do. I’ve also given her the information that not everything she hears is correct.

Back to Dr. Berman and Oprah; I’m glad they are having these shows. Times have changed. It’s ridiculous to expect our children to remain innocent forever and it’s our moral obligation as parents to talk to them about what’s happening to their bodies and their minds when they become teenagers. Just because we are educating them does not mean we’re giving them license to go out and have sex. BUT at least they have the correct information, they have the whole story (as Dr. Berman took Courtney through the entire thought process of what could happen after sex including what does staying together a long time really mean to her and her boyfriend).

Kids grow up faster today than they ever have. Peer pressure and information from peers is not only the norm but it takes the place of parental supervision for a lot of teens. I’m not about to stick my head in the sand and pretend my kids won’t turn into sexual beings. I’d like to think I’d be as realistic as Pierce’s mom (the young man on Oprah’s show). If it were my daughter or son, I would (and will) take them to buy the protection that they need too.

I’d like to think my kids will wait until they are married to have sex but in case they aren’t…

I know that not all of you are going to agree with me here. I don’t expect that (let the hate mail begin). This is a sensitive and highly controversial topic, but if you have kids, at one point or another you’ll have to make a choice about the discussions you have and the knowledge they need so I think it warrants talking about now. I was lucky that I had a proactive parent in my life, who has much as it pained him to see me grow up, he didn’t stick his head in the sand.

As I said earlier, I learned a lot from my dad in that very awkward discussion but the most important thing I learned was exactly how much he cared for my well being and safety to suck up his own embarrassment and reservations about teenage sex to have an open and honest talk with me.

That’s the same thing I want my kids to learn from me.

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My son is 12, soon to be 13. I love him with all my heart, but ever since he has started getting hormones running through his almost-my-size body, he has continuously tested my nerves! His mouth and attitude are beginning to be a problem. I know he isn’t perfect but all in all, he’s a good kid.

Recently, he’s been telling me about a problem a few of the neighbor boys. Two of the boys he used to be friends with and the other one we have been having problems with for a long time. The day we moved in, this boy called my son the N word. (My son is half-Caucasian and half-African American.) Now, I don’t promote violence but I also don’t want my children to get walked on or beat up by anybody, either. Being that this boy called him that, him and my son got to fighting. I spoke with the boy’s father at that point and we agreed that the boys just needed to stay away from each other. That was five years ago.

The things between the three boys and my son and his friend (who is African American) are escalating. Apparently, either the “main” boy is lying, or my son is lying, and the bottom line is that there is a rumor going around that my son is in the woods in our neighborhood starting fires. And this boy is the one that told me about it.

Credit Henning Buchholz

Well, that’s something I’m definitely not going to tolerate since I don’t want to pay for my son committing arson, so I went looking for my son and he was walking with this other boy in the neighborhood, and I asked them where they were and they both said that they were at the other boy’s house. They weren’t far from this other boy’s house, 100 feet tops. The woods are behind that row of townhouses, a little ways from where we were.

I meant to go down there to speak to the boy’s parents who said that my son was igniting fires, but between working 10 hour days and daily life here at home, I hadn’t made it over there. Mind you, it’s only been 2 or 3 days since this all went down.

Yesterday evening, after I got home from work, the boy’s father knocked on my door and told me my son got in his face and all this other stuff. Of course, my son claims that this is not true, that this adult threatened to beat my son’s A-word!

Being the parent, you automatically want to side with your children. But there is a part of you that wonders if they’re lying. Let’s face it, we’ve all done things that maybe we shouldn’t have when we were kids. But considering the players that are involved, the history of the situation, and the fact that there’s a smidgen of racism involved, I am tending to lean towards the assumption that my son is telling the truth and the other boy is embellishing a little bit.

Yes, embellishing. Meaning not the whole truth.
I’m sure some of the things I heard from the father are true. But not all.

The father told me that the other three boys were planning on going to the Guidance Office at school today and talk to them about my son “messing with them all the time”. The story I get is that the “main” boy mentioned above is the ringleader and always has these two other boys do things to my son on the bus, little things like throwing things at him and flicking him. Of course, I’m not there so I don’t know what my son is doing to them, either.

Last night, after all of this went on, my son and I talked about it and I explained to my son that from now on he needs to ignore these boys from now on and not feed into the games that they are playing. That if they took him into the Guidance office on account of this situation, to keep his cool and explain his side, and if necessary, bring the other boy in as a witness.

What would you do?

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