Before You “Do It” (ages 13+)
Unfortunately, the same media that’s painted teen relationships as mini Shakespearean tragedies has also perpetuated the idea that sex is both meaningless and the ultimate goal—I think about every teen movie made in the early and mid-2000s and feel so sad for the messages I got as a young person. As a parent, this is frustrating in part because it complicates already complex topics—the intersections of sexuality, romance, attraction, and personal readiness. Conversations about these topics are going to be highly influenced by factors exclusive to you—things like your values, spiritual beliefs, location, culture, and more. The following scripts express my own feelings toward the topics of intimacy, sex, relationships, and communication, and serve as a good jumping-off point for you to reflect how you might tailor these scripts for use with your own children.
“There are lots of people who think that sex is the most intimate thing you can do with a partner. And for some people, that is true—they feel like sex is the ultimate culmination of a relationship. But it’s important to me that you understand that there are several steps for partners to go through before they have sex, and that those steps are also very intimate. Getting to know someone’s likes, dislikes, fears, dreams, and private thoughts is a form of intimacy that is not physical. There is also physical intimacy that doesn’t involve sex, like being willing to get undressed in front of a person who knows a lot about your private thoughts. There is also touching another person’s body in ways that they like or that make them feel aroused—including touching their external genitals. All of those are ways to be intimate with a partner that do not include penetrative or oral sex.”
If You Can’t Talk About It … (ages 13+)
One of the best and most powerful self-reflective tools I was ever given for maintaining my own physical and emotional health has a mystical origin. The phrase was “If you can’t talk to your partner about it, should you be doing it?” I called my sister to ask where it came from, because I remember hearing the message from at least a couple of my safe grown-ups when I was a kid. She couldn’t remember who said it first, either (it might have been her, if I’m honest), but we both held on to it like a flashlight in the dark. It was simple and straightforward—if you didn’t feel comfortable talking to your partner about your boundaries and needs in sexual situations, perhaps you should reflect on if you were actually comfortable enough to be having sex with them. Not only did this mantra help steer me out of situations when I realized I felt less than prepared to sleep with someone, it also helped me confirm when I was ready—because I felt like I could voice what I needed to my partner, and therefore did.
“One of the best ways to determine if you’re ready to have sex with your partner is to see if you feel comfortable talking about all aspects of sex with them. Do you know your body enough to know what you like? Do you feel comfortable telling your partner what you like? If they ask you to try something you don’t think you’ll like, do you feel comfortable enough to say no? All of these are good questions to ask yourself before you decide if you want to have sex with that person.”
CHAPTER 9: IN BRIEF
As children grow, their relationships move from being highly based on proximity (relationships built with people they are close to physically) to being based on factors like communication, trust, respect, safety, honesty, responsibility, boundaries, and compatibility. Parents should talk to their children about how healthy relationships feature the aforementioned factors, as well as intimacy and love. Children should be encouraged to reflect on which attitudes, values, and behaviors in their friends and (later) their partners contribute to feelings of intimacy, commitment, and (someday) passion.
Key Takeaways
Before embarking on romantic relationships or highly intimate friendships, it is valuable to identify what your child views as their core values and beliefs, as well as what makes them happy and fulfilled—help them develop and foster a sense of self.
Intimacy is a sense of closeness and safety—whether spiritual, emotional, mental, or physical—with another person.
Intimacy is integral to human experience, but is not necessarily easy to talk about with children.
The triangular theory of love states that there are three key domains to love—intimacy, passion, and commitment—and that the levels of each domain in a relationship can change over time.
Children should be encouraged to reflect on their relationships—both platonic and romantic—to determine how they are being impacted by the levels of intimacy and types of love.
Social connectedness is valuable for maintaining resilience, so children should be encouraged to build relationships.
CHAPTER 10 Consent NOW
It’s dark, there’s entirely too many people here, and I am not sure how we got to the point where he isn’t wearing any pants. Not exactly a thought Kelsey had ever anticipated she would have running through her head, but there she was—about to be seventeen years old, in the apartment of a newish friend, with a boy she’d recently met whom she’d been “dating” for a few weeks.
That time of her life had been difficult—her mom had moved out almost two years before, her dad was recovering from being very ill, and she had spent the previous school year bouncing around to different houses with caregivers who were trying their best to keep the wheels turning in her life. Add the fact that she had been bullied extensively for not fitting traditional beauty standards, and you had a recipe for precarious relationships and ill-advised choices. Plus, she was a teenager—she was hardwired to make mistakes.
The newish friend had been helping Kelsey meet people and feel accepted during the summer of chaos. She couldn’t tell me where they had met; they had gone to the same school, but the friend was a few years older—old enough, in fact, that she had her own apartment and much older friends. All Kelsey distinctly remembered was that one of her friend’s friends brought a boy around who was maybe the most attractive boy she’d ever seen in real life: “He legitimately looked like a movie star.” I feel for Kelsey like I feel for myself—sad for those younger versions of us, so desperate for romantic attention that it didn’t matter if it was positive or negative.
Kelsey and the boy spent minimal time getting to know each other—he wasn’t terribly talkative in the first place, they didn’t spend tons of time alone, and they had almost nothing in common. But that didn’t matter much to Kelsey at the time. The thing she was most interested in was that he wasn’t embarrassed to be seen with her. At least not in front of the small group of people they spent time with. That he was interested in her at all was the only threshold she felt needed to be met.
As we look back on it now, she can see all the red flags: The perceived pressure (from him and others around her) to be together. The lack of communication but the feeling that she had to agree to physical closeness. “Not that he ever explicitly pressured or coerced me—the sense of duty was being supplied by the voice in my head,” she said. There was very much a feeling of He’s going to dump me if I don’t … Which was how she ended up in the position she was telling me about—feeling like she was at a crossroads.
I had been in a very similar situation at about the same age, and I’m grateful that my story had a happy ending—the interaction stopped before anything regrettable happened, in part because of discussions I’d had with at least one caring adult in the year leading up to that summer.
Like many women my age, I was not immune to believing my worth was tied to how desirable I was in a relationship. An extension of that feeling was thinking that I would be more desirable the more passive or submissive or willing to make my partner happy I was. I know now how lucky I was to have the adults in my life that I did—I had been told for my entire childhood that I was a valuable and cherished person, no strings attached. I also understood that my autonomy was absolute—that my consent was required for a sexual encounter. But it wasn’t until I had a conversation with my older sister that I fully understood: In order to consent, I had to be at least a little bit excited to do whatever I was consenting to.
For children raised with “no means no,” we assume that the concept of consent should be fairly automatic. We assume they understand that bodily autonomy is nonnegotiable and that any physical encounter must include consent. What can become complicated is helping kids understand how their bodily autonomy interacts with other people’s. That’s where the FRIES framework (see page 57) comes into play. FRIES establishes that consent is freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific, sure, but what does that mean in real-world situations?
Teens most frequently have difficulty with the “freely given” and “reversible” aspects of the FRIES framework. We know that consent cannot be given if one party is impaired—if they are under the influence of drugs or alcohol—or if one party is a vulnerable human. But additionally, if there is a power imbalance or one party had to be convinced, coerced, or blackmailed into having sex, the agreement to engage in sex is not considered consent because the “yes” was not freely given. Emotional manipulation like “Don’t you want to make me happy?” and “I just wish we loved each other as much as I thought we did” is something I’ve seen in far too many teen relationships, both in media and in my own life.
Similarly, many teens I’ve spoken with struggle to remember that consent is reversible. As I remind them, “Just because you’ve said yes previously, or you said yes even five seconds ago, doesn’t mean that the ‘yes’ is permanent.” I’ve heard teenagers say that in order to ensure that they are able to prove each person consented—to “provide receipts”—they will take photos or exchange text messages or sign a note that says they both agreed to sex. However, within the FRIES framework, we know that using text messages or phone calls as evidence that someone said yes to something is not the proof people think it is. Just because someone consented in a text message doesn’t mean they consented in the moment, because they can reverse their consent at any point. Instead of thinking of a “gotcha” framework like tangible proof of consent, teens should be asked to reflect on why they might feel like they need tangible proof: “If you are concerned that you may need to prove your partner consented, are you sure that having sex with them is a good idea?”
This goes hand in hand with the “enthusiastic” message in the FRIES construct. When we discuss consent, lots of parents and caregivers focus on the “no” side of things—how to say no, what “no” means, what to do if you feel like someone isn’t respecting your “no” and all of the things that can go wrong. These are all important conversations to have, particularly as we try to raise a generation of children who do not hurt each other by violating consent. But what some folks miss is that consent is inherently about “yes”—what you do want to partake in matters just as much as, if not more than, what you don’t. And when we miss that discussion, we can end up with kids who feel like “yes” is wrong, or shameful, or should be avoided, and who also don’t know that “yes” should be enthusiastic and engaged. Kids (like most people) aren’t always great at seeing the areas in between the ends of the spectrum—it’s either “all the way” or “absolutely not.” So when an in-between thing happens, they might feel torn about whether it was a good thing. Highlighting for our kids that they are in control of their bodies and that they’re allowed to say “yes” when they’re ready is empowering, just as reminding them they can say “no” helps them feel safe. If we highlight their ability to provide (and accept) an enthusiastic “yes,” they will hopefully recognize that proof of consent isn’t necessary when consent is freely given, informed, enthusiastic, and specific.
I want to acknowledge right now that this might feel overwhelming. You might be reading all this and thinking you want to tell your kids “Just don’t do it until you’re adult and know better.” I completely understand that desire, but remember that for most people, the drive for sexual contact is hardwired; humans are designed to want to keep going. It is evolutionarily beneficial for humans to want to make babies. And how do you make babies? With sexual contact. Add the fact that sexual contact feels good, and you have a recipe for people to get carried further into an interaction than they’d planned. There is an extra layer of risk for teens, whose brains aren’t even done cooking and whose impulse control can be questionable at best. Having these (admittedly difficult) conversations is the best thing we can do to protect our children from their own biology. By helping our kids define where their boundaries and limits are and teaching them how to respect other people’s boundaries, we give them the tools they need to find and be safe partners. As a caregiver and safe adult, you need to help your children know how to say yes and how to say no.
Sample Scripts
How Do You Know You’re Ready (for Dating, Sex, and Otherwise)?
As we discussed earlier in the book, kids go through several stages of cognitive development. They also transition through periods of physical development, including puberty. Around age twelve, many children start to experience puberty and its associated hormones. These hormones are responsible for a myriad of changes, and also for a potential increase in sexual curiosity and the beginnings of sexual attraction. At around the same time, Piaget proposes that children begin to move into the formal operational stage of development where they can engage with higher-level thinking and logic. Because of these two changes—an increase in physical attraction and the ability to engage with more complex thoughts about boundaries, morals, needs, consequences, and behaviors—I arrived at what I call the Number Twelve Rule.
This rule states that, beginning at age twelve, children can begin to “date.” This does not mean solo trips to Bali and their own hotel rooms. In the beginning, it means group outings with chaperones nearby in public places; it means finding out that your child is kissing and/or holding hands without freaking out; it means frankly discussing how to navigate sexual urges, peer pressure, and societal expectations with the knowledge that these are forces that may soon be impacting your child. Eventually, when a child has demonstrated that they understand how to advocate for themselves, how to have effective communication with you and with their partner, and how to accurately assess risk, consequences, and reward, they can move into more traditional dating (in my experience closer to ages fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen).
Are You Ready? (ages 11 to 13)
“We’ve talked a bit about dating and having crushes and stuff, and we have talked about how sex works. But we haven’t really talked about how people decide when they’re ready to date—to have a partner, kiss, hold hands, you know, all of that relationship stuff—or when they’re ready to have sex. We have rules about when you are allowed to date—the number twelve rule that we’ve talked about—so you know that after twelve, you can start thinking about if you’re ready to date. But did you know that some people will set goals about when they want to have sex? Some people say they want to wait until they’re married, others want to be engaged first, and some people say they want to wait until they are a certain age. Right now, you are just starting puberty—your brain is changing a lot, and so is your body—so you are not ready to have sex. That will change as you get older, but for now I am telling you that the rules we have in place are to help you develop safely.”
Consent Is About Yes (ages 11+)
“Remember when you were little and you used to ask me for tickles? You would tell me you wanted tiny tickles, not big tickles? And if I tried to give you tickles, you would say, ‘I don’t wanna play that game’? You were practicing how to say yes and ask for the attention you want, and how to say ‘I’m done.’ You get to decide what to do with your body and when you want to do it—no one else gets to pick for you. And you get to decide if you want to keep going or if you want to stop. And when you decide in a safe way what you want to do with your body—hold hands, hug, kiss, and someday have sex—you don’t have to explain why you decided to say yes or no, because you are the boss of your body.”
Legal Consent (ages 12+)
This conversation is going to vary greatly depending on where you live—age-of-consent laws are different from state to state and country to country. Rather than getting into the weeds about what is technically legal or allowed in your area, it might be more helpful to talk to children about what the laws are trying to accomplish: making sure that people who are not able to consent are not being allowed to consent.
Are You Ready? (ages 14+)
