When your teenager is having sex

You are cleaning your teenager’s room and you discover condoms and E-pills under the bed. Evidence that someone is eating the forbidden fruit. It takes Solomonic wisdom and tact to correct such a wrong, writes Maureen Akinyi

Sex… sex… sex… It’s all over the place; you want to cover your child from it. But you can’t. Thanks to the Internet, the media, peers … sex has been unwrapped and it’s brutally nude. That’s the global naked truth.

But you never realise how close this reality is until it hits home — when you discover that your adolescent child is eating the forbidden fruit.

Walk with me as I take you through the ever-dreadful nightmare for every parent whose child has hit that ‘hormone-pumping’ stage aka adolescence.

Jane Mwangi a single mother of a 13-year-old girl knows too well what it means to have an “are you having sex?” conversation with your teenager.

Sex conversation

Jane takes us through her experience: “I was cleaning Wendy’s room one day and I got a packet of condoms under her bed. My blood froze.  I mean, I have heard the sex conversation with her since she started having her periods at 12 years. I always told her that sex was meant for married people. But with the discovery of condoms in her room, it looks like all my teaching was thrown over the roof.”

Jane tried to rebuke her daughter but the teen shot her down with a heart-piercing answer: “You discovered men earlier than me; that’s why you became pregnant with me at 17.”

Jane sought the intervention of her mother (Wendy’s grandmother) who is still trying to resolve the touchy issue. Interestingly, when Jane told her chama members about it, the know-it-all bunch told her that she should count herself lucky because her daughter was at least using protection.

“What protection, this is a girl who should be concentrating on her studies not sneaking into a chemist to buy condoms?” Jane was outraged by her friends’ reasoning.

Amina Fakii has also had to go through this sex conversation with her daughter.

“One day, I was with my girl in a bus and when she opened her purse to remove her lip-gloss, she accidentally dropped emergency pills. I was aghast. We alighted from the vehicle immediately and had a woman-to-woman conversation. She was defensive saying all her friends were doing it. I warned her of the consequences and my prayer is that she has stopped,” Amina says hopefully.

Indeed, this is a silent hope and prayer for many parents of adolescents — that their child is not eating the forbidden fruit.

Hope aside, what if the child is having sex? What to do? Where to turn to? How do you preach the message of abstinence to a child who is already having sex?

Preach abstinence

As children shed off the innocent skin of childhood and wear the mature skin of adolescence, it is a cocktail of feelings, reactions and counter-reactions. From the hormones, to the body changes, mood swings coupled with the peer pressure and media influence, an adolescent can give into the pressure losing his or her innocence too early.

That is why parents are always advised to have open conversations with their children.

It is imperative that before a child is misinformed by her peers; she needs to be given accurate information about sex from her parents, especially by her mother.

But what happens if you did everything right but they still went ahead and fell into the pressure?

How do you undo such a wrong?

Sheila Wachira, a leading relationship counsellor in Nairobi shares some tricks on how to bring the teenager back on track:

• Accept the facts on the grounds. Denial will hinder the process of dealing with the issue; acceptance opens your imagination on the various ways of dealing with the moral issue and prepares you for dialogue with your teen.

• Don’t allow your feelings of disappointment, shock, or even shame to bring you to a passive position. In as much as you may seek the perspective of a counsellor or pastor on the best approach, the responsibility of facing your teen is yours.

• By the time your teen has engaged in sex, various forces have shaped the perception of sex including media, soaps, peer pressure, adverts that ride on sexual themes to drive sales, or built in desire to feel good about themselves.

• Face your teen in a non-judgmental way to find out for how long she has been doing it. Is it the first time? Is this with the same person? Or are there other sexual partners? Any other motivation for engaging in sex? How did you learn about it? This is to help you do a proper situation analysis.

• Get him/her to visit a voluntary and counselling centre for a HIV test and other STDs. Talk to him/her about the consequences of having teenage sex. I advocate for abstinence.

• From a religious point of view, the rule of thumb should be no sex before marriage. So there is no discussion like putting a teenager on contraceptives, which is common in the West.

• Let your teen know the consequences of sex: Regret, bad reputation, risk of contracting diseases, pregnancy, low self-esteem and sin against your body and God.

• Pray with your teen and counsel with her to overcome some desires by encouraging her to take an audit of her social life. Could the literature they are reading bring about sexual arousal and excitement?

• Much as society may root for safe sex talk and all, as you talk to your teen, the message you pump tactfully into them should be abstinence.

• Give your teen the godly concept of sexuality as a gift from God to be used in the confines of marriage for a fulfilled relationship, enjoyment and for procreation.

• Finally, make it a habit to have ‘sex talks’ with your teen on regular basis. You can do it in the outdoors.