Parenting

You've probably seen all kinds of adults writing about teens and sex. Some of that writing is well-researched and thoughtful. Some -- most, sadly -- is hysterical and full of fearmongering and shoddy (or no) research. I was lucky enough to interview an author who belongs solidly in the first category.

Ways to connect with the teens in your life. What can you do to stay connected without becoming the main component of their social lives? Helping a teen through a break-up If the teen in your life is dating, odds are there's a break-up in their future and yours. Break-ups suck, and they suck the most for the person experiencing them. But that doesn't mean it's pleasant to watch someone you love go through one, and you may feel at a loss as to how to handle it. Here are some tips to help you go about it.

An easy way to both normalize safer sex, and make sure that the young person or people in your home have access to basic safer sex and contraception they may need is to have some of those basics in your home, somewhere where everyone can easily find and see them.

For 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.

Messages parents or guardians have given our users about gender come up frequently, and often problematically. As feminists and queer activists, we address gender stereotyping often in our content and conversations around women and gender nonconforming people of many stripes (or polka dots, whichever one prefers), and we know the weight of it all too well. But gender stereotyping is not just everybody’s problem, it’s a problem for everybody, and that includes for men, and the problems, for everybody, many gender stereotypes about men create.

Some of our favorite resources for parents to help them do their best with sex, gender, consent and sexuality in their parenting.

If you take nothing else away from Scarleteen Confidential, we feel these five things are the real guiding principles when it comes to parenting well with sex and sexuality.

Quite a few young people have come to us with this scenario: a parent has told their child that they are open to talking about contraception. But when the young people bring this up with us, they sometimes say that even though that invitation was extended, they don't feel comfortable picking it up and asking for that help, or can't figure out how. I absolutely see what I am sure are usually the best of intentions with this invitation. But I'd like to suggest an alternative that will probably work better.

Every day, we talk with young people at Scarleteen about sex and sexuality, sexual health and their relationships, including their relationships with their families. We've been providing truly comprehensive sex education, information, and one-on-one help in our direct services online to millions of...

Our societies are chock full of norms and ideals of beauty, and we all run up against them eventually. These norms and expectations often have a hand in shaping how we feel about our own bodies. When you're a teen and trying to sort out how to feel comfortable in your changing body, these messages can be very potent indeed. So, what can you do - and what shouldn't you do - to help teens feel at home in their own skin?