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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (223656)	3/12/2005 4:47:39 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1572702

Parents need to talk to their kids earlier about issues such as oral sex, which is occurring more commonly in middle school, typically with the girl performing the oral sex and the boy receiving. Many turn to oral sex before they would consider intercourse, because it is promoted among peers as safe, and not really sex. "We haven't done enough to explain to kids that oral sex is a level of intimacy way beyond kissing," Blackburn explains. "It is sex and you can transmit STDs that way. Because of that, kids are engaging in that activity without really understanding the emotional or physical ramifications of it." Blackburn recommends using open-ended questions to start a dialogue with kids. Asking about their friends is a good way to start. She also says that talking while driving in the car eases the comfort level if the kids are in the backseat where you are not looking at each other. Sharing stories from your adolescence helps children know you have been there. For kids, the two biggest buffers against the turbulence caused by their changing bodies are finding a comfortable social group and having an adult role model in addition to the parent, Blackburn says. Help your child find "a sense of risk and a sense of belonging in a place or in a group," she adds. "The risk is important because if they don't find it in healthy ways, they will find it in unhealthy ways. It could be theater, horseback riding, sports or debate club. You look at your child's interests and help them find groups to pursue interests they have." Jolene Gensheimer is a freelance writer, mother of two and a former high school teacher.

To: combjelly who wrote (223656)	3/12/2005 4:50:40 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572702

You are naive, gee NY Times and Washington Post, wow wacko newspapers. The first hint in the popular press of a new "trend" in sexual activity among young people appeared in an April 1997 article in The New York Times.4 That article asserted that high school students who had come of age with AIDS education considered oral sex to be a far less dangerous alternative, in both physical and emotional terms, than vaginal intercourse. By 1999, the press reports started attributing this behavior to even younger students. A July Washington Post article described an "unsettling new fad" in which suburban middle-school students were regularly engaging in oral sex at one another's homes, in parks and even on school grounds; this piece reported an oral sex prevalence estimate, attributed to unnamed counselors and sexual behavior researchers of "about half by the time students are in high school."5† Other stories followed, such as a piece in Talk magazine in February 2000 that reported on interviews with 12-16-year-olds. These students set seventh grade as the starting point for oral sex, which they claimed begins considerably earlier than intercourse. By 10th grade, according to the reporter, "well over half of their classmates were involved."6 This article laid part of the blame on dual-career, overworked "parents who were afraid to parent," and also mentioned that young adolescents were caught between messages about AIDS and abstinence on the one hand and the saturation of the culture with sexual imagery on the other. In April 2000, another New York Times article on precocious sexuality quoted a Manhattan psychologist as saying "it's like a goodnight kiss to them" in a description of how seventh- and eighth-grade virgins who were saving themselves for marriage were having oral sex in the meantime because they perceived it to be safe and risk-free.7 In a July 2000 Washington Post Magazine cover story, eighth graders described being regularly propositioned for oral sex in school. The reporter echoed the assertion made in earlier articles that although overall sexual activity among older, high school-aged adolescents--as measured by the proportion who have ever had penile-vaginal intercourse--seemed to have recently leveled off or slightly declined, middle-school-aged students (aged 12-14) appeared to be experimenting with a wider range of behaviors at progressively younger ages.8