Henry Alford, are you out of your mind?!? His article in the New York Times entitled: Sex in a Teenagers Room? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/fashion/sex-in-a-teenagers-room.html basically gives carte blanche to teens to have sex in their bedrooms with or without their parents present. And the examples and reasons he gives to validate his postition are mind-boggling and naive.
Alford states that benign neglect puts the onus on teens to be more responsible, which might work if their brains were all formed and their hormones in check. That wasn’t true the last time I checked the research. Parents whined that they didn’t want to worry about where their kid was at night, and they also were trying to avoid any confrontations that might cause their loved one to explode on them.
There was a story about a parent worried that their high school senior daughter was already experiencing so much stress going into her senior year of high school that she didn’t want to add to it by setting boundaries and upsetting her. Really? Who is ruling that roost?
This same mom who allowed her daughter’s boyfriend to start sleeping over then allowed him to stay at her house for a gap year after he dropped out of college. Her reason: it gave her three younger adolescent children a view of committed love that far surpassed most of what they had seen from adults. That is the saddest thing I have heard in a long time. The adults in her life, especially her divorced parents, have failed those kids big time.
When it comes to sexuality, teenagers need education, boundaries, lots of non-judgmental conversations over the years, and good modelling from their parents. Nothing I read in the artcle points to any of these.
Sex in a teenagers room? Not under my roof!
We cannot teach our children to values themselves and then to have a significant other to respect and value them for life without the core of basic morals.
No sex in my house until you are married!
Period…..