“There is literally no way during sex to tell if the other person has orgasmed unless you ask them. Never assume that you are making your partner feel good. They might be making noises or faces that lead you to believe they are enjoying the experience, but the only way to know for sure is to ask for confirmation.”

“Sex doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. It doesn’t have to be a new and amazing and mind-blowing experience every time. Sometimes sex is just for ‘scratching an itch.’ That being said, you should at least both be having a good time. It doesn’t have to be great, but it does have to be good. And if it’s not, you need to be able to talk about why.”

“Hey, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Sex is not the pinnacle of the world. Sex is not the best thing there is. Sex isn’t even the best part about being in a relationship. Sometimes the best satisfaction is heavy petting and reaching peaks and orgasm and not going all the way. It’s so important that you’re touching base with your partner and understanding your personal goals, beliefs, and values as well as theirs—making sure that you’re on the same page and that as you pursue those goals together, you’re both enjoying it.”

“We’ve talked about it before—sex is never owed. But I need you to know, too, that relationships don’t have to end if you decide to abstain from sex for a while. Couples can decide to take breaks from sex and adjust what they expect for physical intimacy and still maintain a romantic relationship. So long as they are on the same page and are checking in with each other, that’s just as healthy a relationship as if they were still having sex.”

“Okay, I get it—‘do you like that?’ is a trope at this point. And that’s true—you don’t necessarily have to ask your partner if they’re enjoying themselves as an explicit question. Maybe you agree beforehand that you’re going to verbalize that things are going well. ‘Yes, this is good. Hey, I like that. Hey, keep that up. More of that. Do that more. Keep doing it.’ Or maybe you set up a nonverbal cue to tell each other that things are going correctly—or that they’re not. Maybe you say ‘If I’m nodding, it means keep going.’ Or ‘If I touch the bedpost, I want everything to stop.’ Think outside the box and talk to your partner about what’s going to make both of you happy in the moment. I know this is kind of a weird thing to hear from your mom, but like … it’s really important to me that you have positive sexual experiences and that both of you stay safe.”

“If anyone is pushing your boundaries or resisting your boundaries before, during, or after your sexual encounter, that is a huge red flag. Remember, boundaries are about what you will accept. So if your partner is saying, ‘Hey, you don’t need to wear a condom. I know you like it better when you don’t, and I want you to enjoy this,’ and won’t drop the matter even after you insist on wearing a condom, you maybe shouldn’t have sex with that person.”

Another part of helping our teens prepare to have safer sex is running through scenarios they may encounter as they move into the dating world. This might look like prompting them to consider how they would assert their protection boundaries in hypothetical situations. Some examples you might use to prompt them include:

How would you react if your partner says you don’t need to wear a condom because they’re on birth control?

What would you say if your partner pulled out an ancient condom from their wallet and tried to use that for sex?

How do you establish where you want to stop, before you ever start? How can you tell your partner that you want to make out, but you won’t have sex?

Even though it feels like you just read and processed roughly five thousand words instructing you on how to help your child choose to become sexually active in a safe way (because you did read roughly five thousand words), try to remember that you do not have to memorize those words. You do not have to convey them exactly as I’ve written them, and you do not have to adhere to all the recommendations I’ve made—you, as a parent, are allowed to sort out what works for you and your child and move forward with the plan that fits you and your relationship best. If that means identifying and discussing one pillar at a time—creating your own version of scaffolding for this chapter—then I hope you write me a note and let me know how it goes so I can cheer for your ingenuity. Because ultimately, the experts on the subject of your child is your child, and you.

CHAPTER 11: IN BRIEF

Some parents worry that providing accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education may result in their child feeling like they have “permission” to become sexually active. In reality, no one can provide permission to another person for what they choose to do with their body. The Five Pillars of Safe Sex were created to give parents and their teens an easy shorthand for discussing safer sex practices.

Key Takeaways

Confirmation asserts that both parties should confirm that informed, specific consent has been freely given.

Communication should occur before, during, and after the sexual encounter. This includes boundary setting, questions to check in, voicing of feelings and preferences, and discussion of the experience.

Protection should be utilized for all forms of sexual contact, should protect against both pregnancy (if applicable) and sexually transmitted infections (always), and should be used/stored according to the manufacturer’s directions.

Lubrication is required in certain scenarios, but may be beneficial in most scenarios. As such, it should be discussed and agreed upon beforehand.

Enthusiastic participation is required by both parties for the duration of the sexual contact, or contact should not be occurring. If either party wishes to revoke consent, the interaction stops immediately.

CHAPTER 12 The Number 12 Rule (Dating)

At sixteen, I learned what a thrill it was to sit on the back of a motorcycle. My parents were not motorcycle enthusiasts—my mom has always felt they are more risk than reward—but in the summers of 2002 and 2003, I got to experience what everyone else thought was so cool. I had started hanging out with a group of girls from my high school I hadn’t gotten to know well before. They were nice enough—I got invited to hang out a bit because of a mutual friend—and we used to chill behind the main street in our tiny little town. We also spent time at our local bowling alley, walking through the local Walmart, and just generally keeping ourselves busy.

One of the primary qualifiers of a Good Hang-Out Spot was the people—who was going to be there? Okay, let’s not pretend it was the people in general … it was the guys. Which guys were going to be there? Each place had its own draw: The bowling alley was a good place to find both your local friends and possibly some cute out-of-towners. Local stores like Walmart and the gas station had a reliable cast of characters—if you had your eye on someone special, you could casually shop and hope they noticed you. “Behind main” was a bit like roulette—you never knew who you were going to get, but it was almost always interesting.

The summers of my sixteenth and seventeenth years, a trio of men in their early twenties came to town. They were best buddies, with matching crotch-rocket motorcycles in three colors—red, blue, and yellow—and they lived together, too. These three would hang out behind main, flirt with the girls, and give the special girls rides on their motorcycles. Never mind that most of the girls on the backs of those motorcycles were under eighteen—that didn’t seem to matter.

I remember looking enviously at the girls in the group getting special attention from the Crotch Rocket Crew—I knew I didn’t qualify as pretty enough. You might think that this is negative self-talk or my memory being hard on young me, but you’d be wrong. The guys in the group had stickers on the backs of the bikes that read “No Fat Chicks” and it was clear that I was much too close to their definition of fat for anyone’s comfort.

I was jealous of those girls, and I’m ashamed to admit that I slut-shamed the girls who turned the Crew’s heads. I was judgmental—it didn’t occur to me at the time that the special attention and sexual interactions between the girls and the Crew were more than “technically” illegal. They framed it as a bullshit law that could get them in trouble, but the Crotch Rocket Crew were all well-established adults who never should have been engaging with children the way they were. But this was the early 2000s—each of us girls had been taught by various forms of media that attention from older men was the ultimate goal, and that anyone who successfully had a “relationship” with an older man was more mature than her peers. And as a result, I spent months feeling sad about not being “good enough,” wishing yet again that I could be shorter and slimmer and up to their standards … until I met Brad.

Brad was even older than the Crotch Rocket Crew. He was taller than me and rode a Harley and invited me to take a spin the first time we met. He was kind to me and gave me attention, and it seemed like he was flirting with me! I tried valiantly to flirt back … and was really bad at it. It was obvious that I was inexperienced in dating and that I just desperately wanted positive attention. It felt like Brad was kind about what I knew was my own “neediness”—he kept talking to me and giving me rides and letting me know when he was going to be in town. We even kept in touch some after I moved away for my senior year, and I always checked behind main to see if he was there when I came back to my hometown.

After I met Brad, I felt like my eyes were opened to what the Crotch Rocket Crew had been up to. I knew they had been sexually active with a few of the girls, and I knew they hadn’t exactly been kind to the girls when they ended things. These girls were high school juniors and seniors who all still lived with their parents, just like me, and those jerks didn’t have the same level of maturity and respect as Brad, who was willing to wait for me. I was suddenly grateful that I’d never been an object of attention for them and was happy to get on with my life … and keep in touch with Brad.

But after I turned eighteen, I noticed a subtle shift in the tone of our conversations. While he had always been flirtatious, after I was “legal,” he was much more obvious about his thoughts. He made advances and offers to hook up a couple of times, but I always declined. Not that I wasn’t sexually active by that point—I had recently become so with a man I was seeing off and on—but I knew deep down that a one-night stand or casual hookup with Brad wasn’t going to make me happy. Our communications became less and less frequent, and I eventually heard that he had married and settled down and was planning to start a family.

It didn’t occur to me until much later—probably my late twenties—that intentionally or not, Brad had been grooming me. I had been right to think he was smarter than the Crotch Rocket Crew—he wasn’t going to risk going to jail by having sex with a minor while he was in his twenties (at least not that I knew of)—but he also wasn’t opposed to trying to ensure that as soon as I was no longer a minor, I would be open to the idea. You may have anecdotes similar to this one—remembering the significantly older people who may have been pursuing us for reasons we didn’t fully understand. In our own eyes, we were interesting (true) and beautiful (also true) and “mature for our age” (irrelevant), but in reality, we were impressionable, probably naive, and available as conquests. But how were we to know that, especially when we didn’t necessarily know the difference between dating and grooming?

I would also wager that at that time, none of us could answer the question “What is dating?” As adults, even, we fail to remember that dating doesn’t start with dinners out, picnic lunches, and long walks on the beach. For our parents’ generation, dating was … I don’t know, taking each other to the sock hop or the Sadie Hawkins dance, or maybe watching drag races in an alley—any of those tropes from all those old movies. Today, there are still some communities that have very strict ideas of what courtship looks like. They have everything spelled out from the order of the dates to when you can hold hands to when you can kiss. But for a lot of us, dating has gone from a structured practice like drive-ins, dances, and early marriage, to something more amorphous. Without clear definitions and ideas of what dating should look like, teenagers are left to take their instruction from what is modeled to them in the media they consume—YA novels, television, movies, fanfic … you name it. And I can tell you this much: I don’t want my kid doing what most of the teenagers on television and in movies are doing. Not because dating, relationships, and sex as a teen are inherently morally wrong—but because the way it’s done in TV shows and movies is often so unnecessarily hurtful to those involved. People end up with battered hearts and, all too frequently, minds and bodies that carry the scars of these poorly executed relationships.

So how do we lead our kids into understanding what dating is really for? The first thing we have to do is understand and explicitly define to ourselves what dating is for. The way I have explained it is that dating is for figuring out what we like and what we don’t like, what we need and what doesn’t serve us, and how to spot that in people we meet. After understanding it ourselves, we are tasked with explaining that to a child who’s starting to become interested in being romantically (and eventually sexually) involved with other people.

I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of different perspectives on when teens should be allowed to date. People are gifted onesies for their babies that say things like “heartbreaker” or “my daddy won’t let me date until I’m 30” or even “my best friend is my daddy’s shotgun.” I remember classmates who were told they couldn’t date until they turned sixteen … I also remember them having a boyfriend/girlfriend at thirteen and making sure their parents never found out. I was, on more than one occasion, used as a cover story so a friend could go out on a date but tell their parents they were with me. Thankfully, no parent ever called to check—my mom and dad would not have covered for my friends—but the possibility was there.

In part because I was a young mom myself, the memories of these experiences were fresh in my mind when I was reflecting on what my own children’s dating rules might be. Based on the cognitive and physical changes I discussed earlier, I landed on what I call the Number Twelve Rule. It’s fairly simple:

You may not date anyone until you are twelve years old. Your brain is not ready to date because it is still learning about itself and going through a lot of changes.

Once you start dating, your first dates will be group dates and chaperoned outings.

Until you are eighteen years old, there is no dating anyone who is more than twelve months older than you or twelve months younger than you.

Once you are eighteen, you will not date anyone under eighteen.

These “rules” are not etched in stone—they have grace and wiggle room, just like many of the rules I have as a parent. When I posted about this rule on my social media, I got loads of comments from people who had “what-ifs” to throw my way—mostly about the “don’t date anyone under eighteen” clause—and there was plenty of pushback from folks who felt the rule was too restrictive.

When I was seventeen, my boyfriend was twenty-three, and now we’re twenty-four and thirty-one and we’re plenty happy, thanks.

What, so if they have been together since twelve and thirteen, but now the older one is eighteen, you’re going to make them break up? That’s ridiculous.

Girls mature faster than boys, so it’s not at all weird to see a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl with an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old guy.

My response to these criticisms remains the same: There might be exceptions to the Number Twelve Rule, but the developmental science tells us that individual children and teens grow and mature at vastly different rates, development that can sometimes feel like it has happened overnight, and that having no more than a twelve-month age gap is a reasonable rule to start with. Explaining that to a teenager, however, might be a bit harder.

Sample Scripts

Dating and the Number Twelve Rule

Early Adolescence (ages 10 to 13)

“I noticed you reading that YA novel we picked up the other day—were we right? Do the main characters fall in love? They do? Ohhhhh, romantic. What did they like about each other? Similar interests, huh? Yeah, that sounds about right—dating is mostly about finding people who you like, who like you, and who you can form a connection with. There’s a lot more that makes a healthy relationship, but early on it’s mostly about finding people who you like to spend time with!”

“Hey, you know that you’re allowed to start going on dates with people now that you’re twelve. But I don’t know that we’ve ever really talked about what dates look like when you’re twelve. So here’s what the rules are: You can go on group dates, like to the movies, to the park, or to the bowling alley. You know, stuff where you and your friends can hang out and there might be somebody in that group that you’re interested in. You’ll do that for a while, and eventually, if you find somebody you’re really excited to spend time with, you can have dates together.”

“Now that you feel ready to go on dates with just your [boyfriend/girlfriend/partner], the rules are going to shift a little bit. You can go on dates, but to start they’re always going to be during the day and I’ll have to make sure that I know where you are and where you’re going. I’ll hang out in the car. Don’t worry, I won’t cramp your style. But I will chaperone you when you first get started, just to make sure that if either of you gets uncomfortable, you have a way out.”

“As you get more used to dating and you figure out what you like and what kind of people are good for you, you’ll be able to start going on dates with just the other person, but that’s at least a couple of years out. I trust you to pick people who are going to be right for you, and I trust that if you pick somebody who isn’t right for you, you will find the resources and support to end it in a way that’s healthy.”