Good Parenting

If you are like me, you may be amazed that one kid can send 6,473 text messages in one month. But what I find even more surprising are the number of young people involved in “sexting” – this is the new popular term for sending and receiving messages and images with sexual connotations. In a revealing study titled “Sex and Tech” conducted by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and Cosmo Girl, we learn that

• 37% of teen girls and 40% of teen boys are sending or posting sexually suggestive messages, and




• 22% of teen girls and 18% of teen boys have sent or posted nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves.

Where does this behavior come from? Let’s consider four possible explanations:

1.) Age-appropriate experimentation: Teenagers are in an important developmental stage as they figure out who they are and who they want to be. This is part of their job as adolescents; they are moving out from under parents’ wings and preparing to go out into the world as their own, separate and independent beings. During the teen years they often experiment with various personas… am I like Britney? Am I like my older cousin Jamie? You may see your teen change her look, her friends, her activities during this natural and important exploration process. It makes sense that some of this experimentation will take place over and through the communication channels that they utilize, including texting and on the computer. Just because they experiment with a sexual message or image doesn’t mean that they truly believe this is who they are… they may just be trying the image out to see how it feels. While you may be disturbed by a sexual innuendo or risky image that your teen projects in a message, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve failed in teaching her values, she just might be in need of more discussion and guidance. Some amount of experimentation with one’s image is perfectly “normal” for teens.

2.) Indirect communication: Because texting is not face-to-face communication, it feels one step removed, possibly one step safer than a personal come-on. Consider that even adult communication changes when we are not face to face; I’m constantly amazed at how aggressive and nasty many comments are on public blogs and discussion boards…. the closer we get to anonymity the more we tend to push the limits of acceptable behavior.

3.) Pressure and expectations: Consider the behavior that is modeled on television and in the movies for our teens; kids sometimes feel pressure that they should be engaging in communication that is sexual in nature – it surrounds them all day and all night! They feel pressure in a general sense from these images and they sometimes feel direct pressure from their peers. In the above-mentioned study 51% of teen girls say “pressure from a guy” is a reason they send sexy messages. As a whole 23% of teen girls and 24% of teen boys say they were pressured by friends to send or post sexual content.

4.) Minimal supervision: Teens today can get away with more because parents aren’t watching. I don’t mean this as a value judgment on parents, but rather to point out that few parents actually are aware of the content of many of the text messages that are sent via your child’s cell phone. Monitoring the content of kids’ messages isn’t easy, and even caring and watchful parents wonder what the right level of supervision should be.

Many are conflicted about this activity: Deep in the back of the “Sex and Tech” study I found a fascinating data point that I believe helps to demonstrate the conflict that kids feel about messages with sexual content. Respondents were asked to describe the people who send suggestive messages and images by responding to a list of adjectives. The top four adjectives* kids used to describe those who send sexy images and messages were:

• 72% slutty




• 66% flirty




• 65% desperate




• 55% bold

You can feel the attraction teens sense in this activity by their descriptive terms of “flirty” and “bold,” can’t you? What teen wouldn’t want to be those things? And yet most know it’s not the kind of activity that will make them proud.

So why do some teens do it anyway? Perhaps because of the four explanations above and because they are teens. Because of their stage of brain development they don’t connect actions with consequences.

Hopefully you can find a way in to guide them so their consequences don’t live on in cyberspace forever.

*Net of those who responded “strongly” and “somewhat agree”