The Sex Lives of Our Teens & Pre-teens
(Monroe)
I’m not shocked by what I read in today’s Detroit Free Press. It does, however, sadden me. Teenage girls are having lots of sex with multiple partners. Sexual intercourse is now the new norm for “dating.”
The article is about teen girls who came together for a conference in Detroit featuring Bill Cosby. The article says:
“Many girls who were 13 to 16 years old were having sex and have had anywhere from 10 to 15 sexual partners — most they don’t know by name.
Some girls in that same age group are “dating” men as old as 30 because the men can give them things — love, money, presents — that their parents cannot.
They talked about girls who are being raped and feeling powerless to do anything afterward, blocked by a sexual irrevolution that has made feelings irrelevant and intercourse the new dating. They feel that these encounters are their fault, and they are ashamed to tell anyone. They are not seeing doctors. And some are getting pregnant.”
The article’s author, Rochelle Riley, reflects: “Days later, my head reels from the things I heard. I have never felt more frightened for our children than while learning what passes for normal life for teenagers now. With vulgar music making objects of girls and gangsters of boys, with teen fashion being designed by seeming pedophiles — and with standards for behavior being set by veejays on a half-dozen TV stations, a few dozen radio stations and thousands of Web sites — it’s no wonder our children don’t know where to turn or how to act.
And sadly, increasingly for many girls, as some said Saturday, they are not turning to their families.”
What about “Christian” girls? My guess is there’s not a whole lot of difference. There should be, but I bet there’s not, just like Christian marriages should divorce less but in fact the divorce rate for Christians is no different than that of non-Christians.
We now live in a culture where fewer and fewer children have biological parents that are still married. Riley is correct in her observation that the media feeds and lives off the glorification of sex outside of marriage.
I’ve done lots of premarital counseling over the years, especially when I was a campus pastot for 11 years at Michigan State University. I’d like to tell all these girls that there is a God who is a loving Father, and that God can heal the scars gained from parents who didn’t have the courage to keep their vows, from fathers who abandoned their mothers and them, from mothers who themselves never matured beyond adolescence and was more of a teenaged peer than an example and mentor of what love really is.
Watch this. Parents divorce. Children are devastated. Children need help. Media says “have sex.” Children need love. Children look for it in shallow sexual relationships. Children make babies. Babies born to children who won’t stay together. Babies grow up without both biological parents. Lack of role models of healthy marriage and family. They go looking for love…
Pray for our parentless generation…