MTV is going to celebrate Valentines Day with one of their documentaries titled Sexting In America: When Privates Go Public. They're out to shed light on the consequences of the racy text and pix messages that teens and pre-teens send each other.
Reading about this reminded me of a book I read a few years back - Slut! Growing Up Female With A Bad Reputation. I'd like to take this moment to encourage anyone who has a daughter to read this book. I know us girls were all teenagers once and so if we really try we can remember what it was like, but a good reminder from time to time about the very real hardships that girls go through in their formative years is a good thing.
After all, Mean Girls is a funny movie but let's not forget that it was based on the non-fiction book Queen Bees & Wannabes (Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence). Girls are incredibly mean to and hard on each other, making it all too easy for girls to end up with a bad reputation - deserved or not. While you're talking to your daughters about sex, you might also want to talk to them about how things that might seem harmless to them at the time, can have consequences they don't expect.
I know teens who think that they're grown up enough to have sex (and I know teens who are having sex), but I'm not so sure they take into account how having sex could lead to them being considered a slut and how hard it'd be on them if they had that reputation. And in the case of sexting, I'm quite sure that none of the kids who send naked pictures of themselves to their boyfriends and girlfriends expect those pictures to become public, but they always do. Breakups happen and people borrow phones and before you know it, everyone in your school could easily pick your boobs out of a lineup. That's something that might be worth mentioning to your daughters when you sit down for that talk.
I mean, the more they know, right?
2 comments:
here here! Thanks for the reminder that it's a good thing to have 3 boys :). Not that this doesn't effect boys but they're a tiny bit easier.
I'd say boys are definitely easier through the teenage years. Girls are so hateful to one another that it seems a miracle we all survived it!
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