The Wisdom of Girls: Teens, Sex and Truth

Admit it. You’ve watched at least one episode of MTV’s series16 & Preg­nant or Teen Mom.

I watched my first episode out of curios­ity. Would the show com­mu­ni­cate the chal­lenges a teen mom faces, or will it just glam­or­ize teen pregnancy/motherhood?

Both.

I won’t say that TV makes teen par­ent­ing look easy, but it’s obvi­ous that the show is NOT caus­ing teens to stop hav­ing sex.

Just in my state alone, the sta­tis­tics are startling:

Every 10 min­utes, a Texas teen gets preg­nant.
Texas has the third high­est teen birth rate in the United States.
Texas has the high­est pro­por­tion of teen births that are repeat births.
In Texas, 3 in 10 girls get preg­nant at least once by the age of 18.

Of course, Texas isn’t alone. Nation­ally, over 700,000 teens get preg­nant each year.

In honor of May being National Teen Preg­nancy Pre­ven­tion Month, I had the priv­i­lege this past week to pre­view a copy of the doc­u­men­tary The Wis­dom of Girls: Teens, Sex & Truth.

This is an all-girl doc­u­men­tary where teen girls, rang­ing from vir­gins to teen moms, dis­cuss why teen girls have sex even if they aren’t ready, cop­ing with peer pres­sure, and the con­se­quences of becom­ing sex­u­ally active.

Unlike Teen Mom, this isn’t a drama-filled, camera-crew enhanced story of one girl’s pre­ma­ture jour­ney into moth­er­hood. It’s focus groups of real teen girls being authen­tic about their choices regard­ing sex and the con­se­quences of their decisions.

Most of the teen moms in this doc­u­men­tary come from bro­ken homes or have expe­ri­enced a sig­nif­i­cant loss lead­ing up to their deci­sion to becom­ing sex­u­ally active. They were so des­per­ate to feel love, they used sex to try and get it. And as most of them reported, their attempt failed miserably.

Girls today need to hear that mes­sage. Sex does not equal love.

A few girls in the doc­u­men­tary reported get­ting preg­nant while tak­ing the pill or using con­doms, so they did com­mu­ni­cate that even pre­vent­ing or prac­tic­ing “safe sex” doesn’t guar­an­tee you won’t get pregnant.

There’s only one way to 100& pre­vent becom­ing a teen mom:

ABSTINENCE.

I remem­ber sex edu­ca­tion when I was in school, and they hit the basics: STDs, pre­ven­tion, and pos­si­ble complications/risk fac­tors for hav­ing a baby at a young age. There was very lit­tle cov­ered about the emo­tional side of what girls expe­ri­ence regard­ing sex.

If you’re a school teacher or par­ent look­ing to begin a dia­logue with your pre-teen/teen about sex, I encour­age you to click the link above and get your own copy.

Watch this clip for a pre­view. Pay spe­cial atten­tion to the last girl who speaks. I wish every high school girl could hear her words.

Related posts:

1. TrueYou Girls Con­fer­ence: The *Real* Orange County
2. Mean Girls in the Church?