Amy Lang, MA: March 2008 Archives

New to me websites  – check them out!

www.theporntalk.com Learn how to talk to your kids about pornography.

www.scarletteen.com Site for teenagers to learn about sex and get questions answered honestly by a savvy, feminist Seattlite.

http://www.thenationalcampaign.org The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy’s great and informative website.

www.childtrends.org Learn about our children’s health.

http://www.netsmartz.org Just that – Net Smarts – find out how to keep kids safe on line.

That’s all I got - Milo’s bugging me to get up! Time for breakfast and a little Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I'm just wondering if this scares you? It does me! That's a lot of girls and a lot of unprotected sex. Makes me wonder what the stats are for the boys - probably the same or close to it.

I was poking around on www.teenpregnancy.org looking for updated teen birth rate statistics and they had a little note asking "What should we do?" They were specifically referring to these alarming STD stats.

Not surprisingly, I think we should quit thinking our government is going to do anything helpful and start focusing on parent education. Parents need to be talking to their kids about STD prevention - not the TV and not the government.

Consider the fact that Congress initiated and sponsored a study of "Community Based Abstinence Programs" last year. They were wondering if they had any long term impact on the kids that went through these programs.

Guess what? They discovered that the kids who went through these programs were the same age at sexual debut (14.9), same number of partners and same condom use rates as kids who didn't go through these programs.

But don’t you worry - Congress still poured millions of dollars into Abstinence Only programs this year. Our kids are safe from any sort of pragmatic government program that might actually help them.

So, parents. Get on it. Talk to your kids. Their health is at risk.

Got breast buds at your house? Then you’ve probably got a period headed your way in about a year.

This information is often surprising to parents – probably because we don’t remember our own breast buds particularly well and haven’t managed to figure out what the first sign of puberty is.

For girls it's breast buds and for boys it’s testicle enlargement – how I’m going to be able to check that one out is a bit of a mystery to me – but I suspect I’ll figure it out.

With breast buds and enlarged testicles comes a certain amount of craziness. Or maybe I should say crazy-making, because once those puberty hormones kick in, so does another round of brain development.

The long and short of it is this: the prefrontal cortex, that would be the part of the brain that handles impulse control, emotional regulation, “if…then” thinking, gets pruned and tuned up.

What this means to you is some crazy-seeming behavior. Irrational outbursts, poor decision making – you were a teen – perhaps you recall this period of your life?

Here’s the poop – they can’t help it, this crazy behavior.

Here’s the other poop – you can control your behavior (in theory) so it’s your job not to match their nuttiness when they are pitching a fit. Not fair, I know, but one of our jobs as parents is to teach our kids how to behave and the best way to do this is by modeling appropriate behavior.

The reason this is on my mind is because I’m reading a great book on this topic called Primal Teen: What New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids by Barbara Strauch.

It’s a delightful read and I highly recommend you read it before you have breast buds (or enlarged testicles) at your house.