would you tell your folks if you were in trouble?
Unpublished post, originally written 12/24/08 for my now defunct state of sex education blog on gURL.
If you were in the middle of a crisis, who would you talk to about it? Would mom and dad be at the top of your list? Or would it be a sibling, friend or stranger?
Everyone is going to have a different answer, yet parents often assume that their kids aren’t talking to them–even if they are. I know my parents thought that! In fact, to this day, I still try to convince my dad that as a teen I wasn’t harboring a secret life that he knew nothing about. But he assumed that because I copped to smoking cigarettes and sleeping over at boyfriend’s houses, then I must have been hiding the more serious stuff.
I didn’t tell my parents absolutely everything, of course, but I also wasn’t secretly giving birth at prom, or hiding a drug addiction.
And I’m not an anomaly. Plenty of teens are talking to mom and dad about plenty of things. For example, according to the ACLU,
“Even in the absence of any legal requirement, most teens who are pregnant and seeking an abortion involve a parent in their decision. The younger the teenager, the more likely her parents are to know about her decision: ninety percent of adolescents fourteen or younger report that at least one of their parents knew of their decision.”
And the one’s who don’t tell a parent? Well, they usually have a pretty good reason for avoiding the subject—say, because they are a victim of incest or fear being kicked out of the house.
It’s not just the biggies like abortion of course, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about what you share with your folks and what you don’t. If you don’t share with them, why not?
