Teenagers: Our Philosophy on Rearing Them - Sex Under Our Roof?
Apr 25 '02
The Bottom Line Have few rules, but be firm on those few. Pick your battles - let go of what won't be important in 5 years.
If you have read other epinions by me or looked at my Web pages, you know we are liberal parents. It may sound shocking that 2 liberal parents managed to bring up 3 college graduates. (Well one will be in 2 weeks.) I tell you this so you can see that our method of rearing * teenagers did not rear a 14-year old who got pregnant or a 24-year old who can’t hold a job. This is a redo of an old editorial with updates. I realize people have a lot of various thoughts on the subject.
~Co-ed sleepovers started to become popular about 8 years ago. I remember because my oldest daughter was in high school when the kids started having them. If you think this was happening in homes with no supervision or neglectful parents, please read on. I first wrote this after watching the Ricki Lake show. She thought the idea was horrible. I wrote to her telling her that, in my opinion, I am not her typical guest and my children had and went to co-ed sleepovers. As a college-educated Social Worker I think they can be harmless and fun.
~Many of the ones my children went to and had were hosted by our religious organization which had dances and then various parents hosted up to 10 children of both sexes to sleep over. Other sleep overs were popular after the high school play. One of the drama club members had a party and rather than having the children drive home late at night we allowed our children to sleep over. It was clearly a co-ed sleep over. Even the daughter of one of my most conservative friends allowed this.
~I never found it to promote promiscuity. I never found it to promote teenage sex. My feeling was they didn't have to sleep in my house to have sex and most likely were less apt to have sex in my house than in the car or behind the bleachers on the football field. This leads up to my "lead story" and that is the following:
~Two summers in a row we have allowed my daughter, who was 19 the first summer, (She is now 21 and the soon to be college graduate going to medical school.) to sleep in the same room as her friend, I'll call him Joe. The first summer, they were “just friends." Last summer they were in a relationship.
I will continue while some of you pick yourselves up off the floor or stop swearing at me.
~We also allowed my stepson and his girlfriend to share his bedroom when she stayed over. When they first started dating, the girls were young, so he ended up in the living room when they got up for school in the morning. It wasn’t long though before we stopped that charade.
Why did we allow it? Why would we continue to do so?
~I know many parents whose children live with their significant other in their own apartment but still do not allow them to share a room “under their roof.” I also know parents who would not allow their children to sleep in the same room with a "friend" until marriage. Some of these decisions may be arbitrary and some set in stone. For example, some say “They can when they get engaged” and that is their standard.
~My daughter and Joe have never lived together nor are they engaged. They have been an exclusive couple because they choose to be not because they require it of each other. This relationship has continued throughout their college years. This is important because I want to make the point that we allowed this even though this may not be the person with whom my daughter spends her life; or for that matter he may not be the person with whom she spends tomorrow. In fact, now that I am redoing this, I will go as far as saying that it seems as if they will be going their own way after graduation.
~I must stress that their sharing a bedroom wouldn’t be allowed if they had just met and she was bringing a friend home because we live on the beach and he felt like going for a swim and staying over! That is where we would draw our line.
~My husband and I are not against premarital sex. Our morals and religion do not make it a sin. I am more concerned with pregnancy and HIV. My daughter is on birth control pills and I hope they are either practicing safe sex or they do not have other partners. My daughter is well educated in human anatomy. She knows how babies get made and how HIV and STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) are spread.
~I grew up in the 60’s when “free love” meant indiscriminate sex. It was not seen as promiscuous among my friends. It was just OK to “sleep around.” Today it isn’t ok because of HIV and I would never promote my daughters bringing home random young men. It has never happened. My girls never even dated in high school and this is the first relationship for my now 21-year-old.
~Joe is not a random young man. As I said he will be graduating with her in 2 weeks. We like him very much and I would imagine they have sex at college. I would be naïve to think they don’t.
~The first summer when he was planning on visiting (I thought this was cute.) my daughter asked me where Joe would sleep. I said, “I guess the couch.” She looked at me like I had 2 heads (She knows her mom pretty well!) and said, “I told Joe you were liberal and that you would let him sleep in my room.” To which I said “You know what, he can.”
~For us, this isn’t a matter of trust. If they wanted to have sex they would at school, on the beach or when we weren’t home. I am not giving them permission to do something they do not have the opportunity to do. I am just respecting their rights as human beings to choose how and where they want to spend the night. Obviously, age and maturity of your child may determine your own thinking.
~It is interesting that on two occasions when they could have slept in the same bed they chose not to. One was when I visited my daughter in Atlanta and Joe spent the night because he was in an apartment transition. He slept in an empty bedroom. When we took him to DisneyWorld, he slept with my stepson, when they could have chosen the pull-out couch. To me this indicates that given the freedom, children will often do what they feel is the right thing to do and in this case it was to not sleep in the same room while mom was visiting or family was around.
Our Rules
An addendum (This was a separate piece on raising teenagers but because it is relatively short I will include it here.)
~Do our feelings about sleeping together relate to our views that gave our children few rules, but those rules were the ones that mattered and they never fought them? I think so. I think if you give your children freedom with limits, if you trust them to do the right thing and if you at least think about our philosophy, I can't promise that your children will grow up problem-free, but I believe they have a fighting chance.
Of course there is no magic wand and our children have some war wounds to prove that life hasn't been perfect.
~Our philosophy was a simple one. We had very few rules and if I were to pick out what had the most influence on how they turned out I would pick that one. Some would argue that the rules we had should be givens or expectations, but that just isn't so, in my opinion.
These were our rules:
1. Don't get pregnant or get anyone pregnant
2. Don't drop out of high school
3. Don't go to jail
4. Don't get HIV
5. Don't do hard drugs
That's it! Purple hair, belly button rings, eyebrow rings and whatever kind of clothes they wished to wear were all right with us.
By the way..the eyebrow ring came out when my daughter went to college and didn't want to make the wrong impression- she substituted it for a tongue ring; my stepson's earring came out when he went on his first job interview and they offered him $70,000 a year; and the nose ring came out somewhere along the way.
Another key to what I consider was our successful rearing of 3 teenagers is picking your battles. Which ones are really the important ones to win and which ones don't mean much in the greater scheme of things? Which ones in 5 years will you look at and laugh over? Those battles you can let go of.
We expected some drug experimentation, but at one point my then senior in high school had heard it so much she asked "Do I have to?"
A few years back while my now 24-year old was in college she shared that she was at a party where there was cocaine. She thought back to our rules and told herself that we had so few and not doing hard drugs was one of them. (She defined hard drugs herself.) We must have had our reasons, she surmised for that rule, so she said no.
Not one of the 3 ever had to be "grounded."
This is, of course, just my opinion, based on personal and professional knowledge. It worked for us.
If you have any questions or comments, you know what to do!
*The use of the term rearing is used purposefully feeling that cattle are raised; children are reared.
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