adults

What's Death Positivity and How Can It Help Us? A Conversation with Sarah Chavez

We are living in a time where death and loss are everywhere we look and is a part of so many of our lives, often before we think it will be. Here's some talk with The Order of The Good Death's Sarah Chavez about death positivity -- what it is, what that means, and who it can help -- and how young people can better understand death, can better talk to each other about it and support each another through it.

Scarleteen Confidential: Helping Youth Handle Rejection

Young people don’t arrive at their conclusions about appropriate romantic behavior in a vacuum; they’re influenced by a myriad of messages, including input from the adults in their lives. Sometimes that input includes ideas that end up exacerbating issues around rejection and dating. One of the ways we can work towards a world in which acts like this no longer happen, a world in which people, and women in particular, aren’t afraid their “no” will make them a target of violence, is to make a concerted effort to help the young people in our lives learn to deal with rejection in healthy ways. With that in mind, we’ve put together recommendations to assist adults in doing exactly that.

Scarleteen Confidential: Teens and Decision Making

Unless you live under a very large rock, odds are good you've heard some statistics and research about adolescent minds and neurochemistry and how they are still doing a lot of developing through the early to mid-twenties.

Yes, the adolescent brain makes impulsive behavior more likely. But that doesn't mean that teens and emerging adults don't know what they want, who they are now, or what they're talking about.

Scarleteen Confidential: In Defense of Teen Media

SCsquareFor two years, I worked in a bookstore that was aimed primarily at children and teenagers. It was a job I quite enjoyed, but I quickly discovered that when you work near books, people always want to tell you their opinions on said books. That's fine most of the time. But I noticed a pattern when parents or adults would refer to The Hunger Games series. They would express dismay over a child wanting to read the book, wondering what they saw in it, and either implicitly or explicitly stating that they thought the book was not good for youth to be reading.

What struck me about these conversations was that ninety-nine percent of the time, the adult in question had not even read the book they were criticizing. They dismissed it, either as inappropriate trash or as mindless fiction without ever actually seeing what it had to say.

You Can't Test for Virginity

Tammyluvgurl
asks:
Hello I'm 13 and don't plan on having sex but my mother says that when I'm 16-18 she is going to get me checked to see if I'm still a virgin because I'm religious and we believe in no sex till marriage. Even though I don't plan on having sex, does masturbation affect the test the doctors going to take? And how do they take this test?...

Scarleteen Confidential: The Big Five

If we had to pick just five central things we think are most important to parent well around sex, sexuality and relationships, these are the five we'd choose.

About Scarleteen Confidential

New for parents and families! We're taking what we hear and learn from young people to help adults do better with sex and sexuality parenting.