Jason Evert - Raising Pure Teens - 10 Strategies to Protect ( or Restore) Your Teenagers Innocence

Introduction

A teenage girl in Florida sent and received a total of 35,463 text messages in a single month according to the Associated Press. Thats 1,182 a day, or nearly one per minute, if youre counting. Although she had tallied more than 30,000 monthly messages before, she attributed the most recent spike to the fact that she needed to keep in touch with friends during cheerleading camp.

How is a parent to keep up? Its easy to feel overwhelmed by a teens fast-paced life. But monitoring a thousand texts per day is the least of our worries.

Whats worse is that the average age at which a child is first exposed to pornography is 11 years old. Among 15- to 24-year-olds, approximately 9 million of them will acquire a sexually transmitted disease (STD) each year. Todays teen will be exposed to more than 300,000 advertisements by the age of 19. One such advertisement in San Diego was a billboard promoting two popular television sitcoms. Located a few blocks from several elementary schools, the neon billboard simply read: Have sex with friends!

In the midst of such a war against innocence, how are parents to guard the mental, spiritual, and physical health of their children? Odds are, when you were a teenager your parents never offered you a detailed and convincing explanation of the Churchs teaching on chastity. Yet here you are as the parent, needing to provide what may never have been given to youduring a time in history that makes purity more difficult for teens than ever before.

While you were growing up, you were probably expected to be abstinent... or else. Perhaps your father would brandish a firearm when your dates came over to the house. Such efforts may have instilled fearand may have kept you in linebut times have changed, and todays youth need far more motivation to maintain their purity.

Although you may feel helpless when it comes to transmitting a message of self-control and purity to your teenager, you have more power than you might imagine.

Theyre listening

If youre like most parents of teens, you probably feel as if your teenagers would be just as excited to walk through a shopping mall holding your hand or to download your favorite songs onto their iPod as they would be to listen to your advice on chastity.

Dont be so tough on yourself. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy surveyed more than 1,000 teenagers and asked them what the number one factor was in shaping their decisions about sex. Was it their friends, their siblings, sex educators, or the media? Actually, the most common response was my parents. Interestingly, when the parents were asked how teens would respond to that question, fewer than one in four answered correctly.

The Catholic Churchand, apparently, your teenagerrecognizes you as the primary educator of your children when it comes to the topic of sexuality. Neither the state, nor the schools, nor even the Church can claim that responsibility. Not only do you possess that role as a right and a duty, you are also the most qualified for the task. You know your children better than anyone else. In fact, you probably know them better than they know themselves. You know their virtues and vices, their maturity level (or lack thereof), and you have an ability that they often lackto understand how their sexual behavior today can shape the rest of their lives. You have the power. Make sure you use it!

Whats at Stake?

Some adults assume, I didnt save myself for marriage, and I ended up just fine. Kids today are going to be kids and theyre going to do it anyway. Lets be realistic and make sure they have protection. Interestingly, while a parent might have this permissive attitude toward sons, it seldom extends to daughters. Regardless of the double standard, such a cavalier attitude is more naive than realistic because teen promiscuity carries enormous consequences, even if it is done as safely as possible. Heres whats at stake:

The body: Women are especially at risk for disease. A woman is more likely to become infected with STDs than a man, because her reproductive system is more susceptible to infection. Also, a young woman is more likely to be infected than an older one because the cervix of a teenage girl is immature and biologically more vulnerable to certain STDs. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association , 40 percent of sexually active girls between the ages of 14 and 19 are currently infected with human papillomavirus (HPV), which, even with vaccines, sometimes leads to cervical cancer. As a result of the STD epidemic, diseases of the female reproductive tract have contributed to countless cases of infertility. Boys, too, are contracting STDs at alarming rates and can also suffer life-long consequences as a result.

The heart: Girls who are sexually active are more than three times as likely to be depressed as girls who are abstinent. Even if a girl experiments with sex once, research shows that shes more likely to feel depressed. The rate of suicide attempts for sexually active girls (aged 12 to 16) is six times higher than the rate for virgins. For these reasons, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine recommends to doctors: [Girls who are engaging in] sexual intercourse should be screened for depression, and provided with anticipatory guidance about the mental health risks of these behaviors. Sexually active teenage boys also suffer from the emotional consequences of premarital sexual activity. When compared to abstinent teens, young men who are sexually active are more than twice as likely to struggle with depression and are more than eight times as likely to attempt suicide.

The future: Those who are sexually active prior to marriage have a significantly increased risk of divorce. When a man gets married as a virgin, his divorce rate is 63 percent lower than a non-virgin. For girls, its 76 percent lower. There could be several reasons why virgins have lower divorce rates. One reason, according to the journal Adolescent and Family Health , is that Those who have premarital sex are more likely to have extramarital sex (affairs)and extramarital sex contributes to many divorces. In addition to marital problems, the younger a girl is when she becomes sexually active, the more likely she is to live under the poverty level, as well as to experience more breakups, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and abortion.

The mind: Teenage sexual activity is detrimental to academic achievement in both boys and girls. According to a study of 14 thousand teenagers, those who were abstinent in high school were 60 percent less likely to be expelled from school, 50 percent less likely to drop out, and nearly twice as likely to graduate from college. The success was not because the teens avoided pregnancy or came from better families. Rather, the abstinent teens suffered fewer distractions and emotional turmoil, and were prone to show greater impulse control, perseverance, and other positive attitudes. Or simply put: sexually active teens are not going to school thinking about math. The researchers noted, Because they are more successful in school, teen virgins can expect to have, on average, incomes that will be 16 percent higher than sexually active teens from identical socio