Discussing Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Safe Sex With Your Teens

Nowadays our kids are learning about sex at younger and younger ages and the biggest problem for most parents is that a lot of the information they are receiving is wrong and, quite frankly, downright dangerous. For this reason it is vitally important that parents talk to their children about this whole subject, earlier rather than later, to ensure that their children are safe and do not either end up as parents themselves before their time or with a nasty, if not life-threatening, disease.

Now this might seem a little strange, but the first piece of advice for any parent who is about to tackle this subject with their children is to take the time to learn about it yourself. You cannot give your child the right information unless you have it yourself and things have probably changed dramatically since most of us learnt ourselves, possible many years ago. Thankfully, there are several trusted and well respected organizations today that are only too willing to give you the up-to-date information you need and also to provide you with information which you can communicate to your children in a tried and tested form which they will both understand and accept.

The accepted wisdom for many years, and still the preferred route for many parents, is simply to teach children abstinence. This is not a good approach and has been shown time and time again to fail. Like it or not as parents we have to accept that there is a good chance that our children are going to have sex before we feel that they are ready to do so and our prime responsibility must be to ensure that they do so safely and responsibly. The important thing to remember is that, whatever our own attitude towards sex, we cannot necessarily expect our teenagers to have the same attitude and can only point them in the right direction. At the end of the day the decision will be theirs and not ours.

Many parents feel uncomfortable about talking to their kids about sex and find a raft of excuses to pass the problem off onto somebody else. For example, a lot of parents feel that this is something which should be dealt with in schools or that there is no real need to deal with the subject at all, because kids today can pick up all the information they need from their peers or from sources such as the Internet. This is simply a 'cop out' and amounts to nothing more than evading your responsibilities as a parent.

You need to ensure that you children get the right information and that they receive it from someone they trust - and that means you. More importantly when your child has a problem, is concerned about something or simply has a question about sex, he needs to know that he can come to you and talk about it openly and easily and without any embarrassment on either side.

If you are still feeling nervous about talking to your child about sex then just stop and think for a moment how you would feel if your fifteen year old daughter came home one day and told you that she was pregnant, or your sixteen year old son told you that he had been to the std clinic because he had been having a problem and has been diagnosed with HIV. Dealing with the consequences of your own failure to tackle sex education in a responsible and timely manner can be devastating, not least to the children you love so much.

Parenting4Dummies.com deals with all aspects of parenting including raising problem teenagers and giving teen sex advice