Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: Orient me and our listeners here on what got you into this whole thing. What do you study? What do you write about and why did you choose that topic?

Amy: So I've written a book "Not Under My Roof" that looks at how parents deal with adolescent sexuality differently in the U.S. and the Netherlands and you could say I sort of got into it through two different routes. One was through my personal biography. I grew up in the Netherlands myself, but my parents were from the United States and I would visit in the summers, and one of the moments that stands out in my memory is of visiting a teenage girl who was a friend of mine at that time and asking her sort of very casually when she was complaining about not having time to spend with her boyfriend. Well, doesn't he spend the night with you? And she, even now several decades later, we both remember that moment because it was so weird to her that I was asking that.

Amy: It was weird to me that she thought it was weird and it was weird because her father was a scientist, her mother was kind of almost like flower-powery type of hippie lady, and I was like, "Well, why is this not allowed? It's not like they were sort of Bible thumping conservative parents.

Andy: Yeah, right, right. Sure. Close minded.

Amy: Yeah. And so that was a curiosity that started at that time, but the formal study of the topic came later when I moved back to this country and I could see that in many ways it was curious why this was so different. Not just from my own personal experience bumping up against it, but that you have two countries that are both modern countries, teenagers generally go to school, many go off to college. They have very similar experiences in that way. Both countries went through a sexual revolution in the sixties. Contraception is available.

Andy: A lot of cultural overlap.

Amy: Exactly. Why is this so different?

Andy: Both very highly educated populations and middle class.

Amy: Yeah, so why is it so different? So there was the why question, but then there was always also a motivational piece that had to do with well, this Dutch way might be able to help in some ways Americans who, as a country, individual families, there might be something there that could help make this be less difficult and experience. Just going back to that friend of mine, I noticed that they would have a hard time talking about it at home and did it have to be like that? So there was kind of the intellectual piece and then there was also the like wait, maybe there's something that could help.

Andy: I just think that's so interesting and it's such a huge difference. This came up actually when I was interviewing Peggy Orenstein and she specifically mentioned your work and we talked about this same issue, and that's what inspired me to want to talk to you about it and go straight to the source because it's so fascinating and it's such a big difference, and when you actually start to look at it, the American view kind of breaks down in certain ways.

Andy: Something in your book that was really interesting to me, you talk about the fact that the U.S. medical establishment views teenage sexual intercourse as a health risk. I guess it makes sense because there's lots of potentially negative side effects that can occur as a result of it, but what are the implications of that?

Amy: Well, I think that's a good question because I think when we look at parents and sort of where do they get their ideas in both countries, one of the places where parents get their ideas of how should they approach this part of their children's lives, it comes from how do doctors react and how does the research frame it when you see it in the newspaper?

Amy: So what happened in Holland, I think fairly early on in the 1970s, was that the doctors, especially the ones who provide routine care, family physicians, decided to make contraceptive counseling a routine part of what happens for adolescents. And as a result the teen pregnancy rate went down radically and so it's one of the lowest now in the Western world. And it is an important piece. I'll get to the Americans in a moment, but the reason that's so important is that if you associate teen sexuality, teen sexual intercourse with pregnancy, that is going to be part of it, then of course, you're going to be a lot more afraid.

Amy: Whereas if you associate it with well, this is part of the developmental process and when teens are ready … When I grew up there several decades ago, we thought of teen pregnancy as something from the past, like that's not really there anymore. In the U.S. things went differently and for all kinds of reasons, not just having to do with the medical establishment, it also had strong political reasons that it didn't go that way, but it didn't and as a consequence, when you think of teen sexuality as per definition, a risk, ironically you're less able to deal with the risks that you're confronting.

Amy: And one of the arguments I've made and I'm not alone, but in interfacing with doctors is that sexuality is a developmental process, it's part of what people learn about it within themselves. What is my sexuality? What do I want? What do I not want? How do I learn to relate to those feelings in a way that I feel good about myself?

Amy: If you kind of understand teen sexual development, or as a developmental process, then having clinicians help young people understand that process and then prepare so that their actions don't have unnecessary consequences, then you have a completely different experience of that. And you're actually ironically more able to prevent the risks that do exist.

Andy: You talked briefly about how you notice these differences in attitudes in America, and that's kind of what first made you get interested in this topic. So then I guess once you started looking into it and researching it, did you discover statistically or scientifically that there were big differences and what did those look like?

Amy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. So I did, of course not just go on my personal experiences, I and then I actually interviewed people and I tried to understand like how is this possible? How is this possible that as you said, sort of in the U.S. and as I also found, there's a kind of gut reaction of like no, this is not a good idea, not under my roof.

Amy: Whereas in the Netherlands, the parents tend to respond, not necessarily like, "Oh, this is great. Let's have the boyfriend spend the night tomorrow." But that it's a more nuanced process of have they had a relationship for a while? Does that look like a positive relationship? Does the son or daughter feel ready? Are they ready? Are they able to kind of protect themselves? So it's kind of much more of a nuanced decision making process where the parents often will decide if there's been a relationship that they've gotten to know the partner and feel good about it, that a sleepover is possible.

Amy: So you do have these cultural differences, I found that in my research and then well, why? And part of the answer I found is that parents understand teenage sexuality differently. They have different ideas about what it is, and in the U.S. there's a tendency to interpret teen sexuality as this hormonal process. Your raging hormones is a very common term that I heard in the interviews and that teenagers can't control that process. So therefore then, they need their parents basically to say no, because someone needs to control it.

Andy: Yeah, right.

Amy: There's also a tendency in the U.S. for the parents to really look at relationships in adolescence as a battle where …

Andy: Antagonistic. The boys versus girls kind of a mentality.

Amy: Totally, and you see that everywhere. You see it on TV too. I mean, do you know Friday Night Lights?

Andy: Sure.

Amy: So I love Friday Night Lights, as most people do. It's one of the best shows ever and the parents are so fantastic, but the scene that I really just like, and if I had been in charge of that I would have written it differently, but just basically where the father sits down with his daughter and says, "Oh, look out for boys. They're out to get you. Boys this, boys that." Scaring her about boys. In fact, her first boyfriend is like one of the sweetest, most sensitive guys ever.

Andy: Sure.

Amy: But you see it in popular culture too, where there's a real emphasis on the battle and to be afraid of one another. So the Dutch parents do this differently. Well, they first of all, tend to emphasize young people's capacity to have self knowledge and have self-regulation when it comes to sexuality. So one father says, "If she were ready, I'd let her be ready." This is a Dutch father of a 17 year old daughter and what he means is when she feels that she's ready, but he also relates that to being in a relationship, feeling comfortable, and then also again, having those kind of preparatory steps to have reliable contraception.

Amy: So there's a way that Dutch parents expect young people to be able to know themselves, regulate themselves, so that they can not just be overrun by hormones, but the second really big difference, and this is just as important, is a different concept of adolescent love. So the Dutch very much expect young people to fall in love. One of the biggest sex education curriculum in the Netherlands is called Long Live Love, and one of the clips I use to illustrate that is … I should give that to you so you can distribute it to the parents, is this teacher poking with a group of 11 year old's talking about how does it feel to be in love?

Amy: Well, if you actually expect that your adolescence … Now, the Dutch don't allow sleepovers for 11 year old's, by the way. The idea is that you progress in your relationship and that you have …

Andy: Right, there's stages to it.

Amy: … sex in the later teens, not in the early teens. But that if you expect young people to be able to fall in love, but their relationships mean something important to them and to the society, then you're going to have a very different approach about whether or not sex happens, because if love has been an important part of life, then you're going to think that physical expressions of intimacy are part of that. So that's a very big difference.

Andy: You pointed out a parent regulated versus child regulated or teen regulated, that in America parents really feel like it's their job to set the limits and set the boundaries. Whereas Dutch parents feel a lot more like their child is in charge of their own.

Amy: Yes, yes.

Andy: I was just interested in, I guess, does that mean that Dutch parents feel like they just are supposed to step out of the way and let the kids do whatever they want or what's the alternative?

Amy: No, no. Well, one of the concepts you may remember that I introduced is the concept of control through connection. When you look at it from the outside, sometimes Dutch culture, people might think from the outside, but it's an everything goes culture.

Andy: Whoa.

Amy: It really isn't. So I think there is on the one hand the idea that when given the right environment, young people can self regulate, but the key thing is regulate, not do everything they want. And so ironically, I actually think that Dutch parents often get to have more influence on their children's sexual lives than American parents because there's more of a conversation about contraception, about is this relationship a positive one for you, and when you bring it in the home and that is part of Dutch approach, is if you bring it into the home then you can have more influence.

Amy: You can also sort of check out whether you like the partner, whether you think the relationship is positive. You can also ask young people to kind of take into account the rules of the house. It's not like you just get to do anything. The Dutch very strong rituals, for instance, about having dinner together, about celebrating birthdays together. There's all these ways that young people are expected to show up and be part of a family.

Amy: So it's not that there's no control, but that there's a different way of controlling and it is through connection. And I think that's the irony of what happens in the U.S. is that when there is the not under my roof approach, young people, both girls and boys, often have to disconnect from their parents around their sexual life.

Andy: Right, because it doesn't mean that they're going to just stop and turn off that part of themselves, it just means they're going to do it, but just not under your roof. So that means they're going to be doing it out somewhere else and keeping it secret from you and you're not going to be able to talk about it and they're not going to share when things don't go well and there's stuff that they're not sure about and they need help with. You're just going to drive it underground.

Amy: Yeah. I mean, in fact, that is also really, as I said, coming back to that motivational force is partly intellectual, partly kind of wanting to offer something that could be of help knowing that a lot of times teenagers in America, not only around sexuality, but also around alcohol and so forth are kind of off on their own, doing their own thing without adult's help.