Speaking with Teens About Reckless Behavior.



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It is important to talk to teens about reckless behavior: According to experts, the adolescent brain is not fully developed until a person’s mid-20s. Regardless of gender, teens lack the ability to make informed, impulse-free decisions. Due to this lack of impulse control, teens can make decisions that are not good for them. It is important to address behaviors before they get out of control. Social media is often filled with images of dangerous behaviors including drug use and stunts.
Talking to teens about such sensitive issues can be daunting for many parents. Sometimes, it seems easier to ignore these other influences and hope for the best. Yet, it is important to arm yourself with facts and information that you can share. One conversation may not be enough to keep them from making poor decisions.

Dangerous Stunts Can Lead to Serious Injury: Several websites encourage young people to engage in dangerous behavior. There have been instances involving homemade bombs, setting oneself on fire, and even stunts involving moving vehicles resulting in severe injury.

Experimenting With Drugs or Alcohol Can Lead to Addiction: For many teens, fitting in with their friends can seem like the most important thing in the world. They want to be accepted. They want to be “cool.” When it comes to experimenting with drugs or alcohol, your teen might see this as a way to become part of the “in” crowd. There is no way to predict whether experimenting with drugs or alcohol will be a crazy thing someone did once or something worse. When an individual consumes drugs or alcohol, the substance changes the way the brain works.

Dabbling Can Lead to Dependence: Dopamine is also responsible for our learning process, to some degree. As teens experiment with drugs or alcohols that affect these types of communications within the brain, they learn that using the drugs makes them feel better. This learned behavior leads to repeated exposure to the drugs of abuse. The brain becomes used to having drugs in the system. Tolerance means higher doses of  drugs are required to achieve the same euphoric experiences. As teens ingest more drugs to achieve the “high” they seek, addiction can take hold. When this happens, the drugs of abuse may become necessary to ease the withdrawal symptoms that can cause severe discomfort, pain or illness.

Talking to Your Teens About Sex: According to the Kinsey Institute, one-quarter of teens will have their first sexual experience by the time they are 15 years of age.  According to a 2007 study, two-thirds of all teens who have engaged in sexual activity have done so with more than one partner. More recent information has found that 15 percent of high school students in 2011 indicated they had had sex with four or more partners. There are a couple of important aspects to teen sexual activity that parents might wish to discuss with their children. The first, obviously, is the risk of teenage pregnancy. In 1991, four out of 10 teenage girls who became pregnant were under the age of 18. The good news about is that the most recent data indicates birthrates among teenagers are declining. The birthrate for American teenagers fell 17 percent in just three years, from 2007 to 2010. This does not mean however, that teens are no longer engaging in sexual activity. It could imply that teens are taking greater precautions or have more access to birth control.

Pregnancy is not the only risk involved in irresponsible sexual behavior. There is also a risk of disease ranging from a minor irritation to life-threatening illness. According to the CDC, new cases of HIV in 2009 affected more than 8,000 teens and young adults between the ages of 13 and 24 years.

Teens often possess the notion that nothing bad can happen to them, as if they are immune. It is important to inform teenagers with statistics concerning irresponsible sexual behavior. Keeping open lines of communication with your teen can be beneficial. Therefore, let them know you will be there to help them make informed, responsible decisions.

Where to Find Help for Your Troubled Teen: If you fear for your teen’s safety, now is the time to get the help you need. Parenting is challenging enough. Sometimes, reckless or destructive behaviors require treatment. You don’t have to do it alone. Our staff here at Newport Academy specializes in treating teens who suffer from mental illness and behavioral issues. We have treated kids at high risk. We offer a safe and sober environment and the peace of mind that comes from knowing you have a team of experts on your side.

Courtesy of Newport Academy.

When Knowledge Overcomes Myth.

SOLOMON DURU WAS employed as a private teacher to take Julie in Mathematics. A young university graduate in his late twenties, Solomon, as he was often called, was scheduled to come in every Saturday afternoon to prepare the seventeen year-old girl for her forthcoming West African School Certificate examinations.

   As she stepped into the living room, the young man noted that Julie wore no bra under her shirt. The skirt, on the other hand, was the briefest she had ever put on her body. It barely concealed any underwear she might have on her. And as soon as she sat down opposite him, Solomon’s guess was confirmed. 

   The girl wore no underwear.  

“For heaven’s sake Julie…” he protested, his body already at the peak of arousal. “Why are you dressed so provocatively?”

“Hey, mister teacher...do you mind?” a smiling Julie retorted seductively as she stood up.

   Now, she beckoned to the mesmerized man.

   “Come, Mr. Duru…there is something I’ll like to show you.”

   Consumed by his own insane desire, Solomon stood up like a robot to follow her. It was inside her room that he realized her objective was in consonance with his desire after all.

   Smiling coyly, she began to undress. To be very sure, he waited till she had discarded her shirt before he commenced to remove his own clothes.

   Soon, they were in bed, where they both fumbled and wobbled awkwardly for some minutes without any progress.

   Suddenly, Julie shrieked in agony. A few seconds afterwards, the painful, crushing exercise was over. Completely disappointed, a tearful Julie could not hide her disgust.

   “Is that all?” she sneered.

“Eh…that’s all…for now.” an embarrassed Solomon stuttered in feeble explanation. “But, if you can just wait for a few more minutes…”

    Hissing amidst uncontrollable rage, Julie sprang up from the bed to dress up. Then she saw the bloodstains on the bed sheet. But as she made to scream in panic, Solomon quickly explained the source of the bloodstains, attributing it to her broken hymen.

   Shortly afterwards, the two were out of the room. For the day, however, the Mathematics lesson was out of the agenda. An apparently ruffled Solomon loitered awkwardly around the teenager in the living room for a while before leaving for home.

   In the meantime, Julie lay crumpled on a settee like a piece of used clothe, wondering if what she experienced was the sex she had heard so much about. She had imagined and expected a glorious trip to a land of erotic pleasure. But all she got was a brutal, crushing torment in the hands of an inexperienced man who went about the exercise like a beast in heat.

   Julie throbbed with some pain on the settee for a while before scrambling up towards her room. There, the girl lay restlessly in bed as she gritted her teeth in reaction to the irritatingly throbbing pain in her groin.

   “So, that was sex?” she soliloquized in anger. ”Jesus…no, it was absolute rubbish.”

Excerpts from the book, The Price of Ignorance; http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Ignorance-Femi-Olawole/dp/0615842968

A Stitch in Time.

Some years ago, Queen’s College, the top notch girls-only high school in Lagos, Nigeria held its PTA meeting. The meeting had barely ended when many of the parents, panic-stricken, dashed toward the dormitories to bombard their daughters with a cacophony of queries and threats of “fire and brimstones”.

The cause of this uproar had been the disclosure that some of the students were found with contraceptives. As a parent of one of the students who was following the events on phone over 10,000 miles away, I could appreciate the official concern of the school authorities. But the hysterics and the moral posturing of the parents were absolutely uncalled for. These reactions, if anything, were terribly flawed.

It’s amazing to behold the "fire department" manner by which a great number of parents worldwide react to the upsurge in sexual promiscuity among teenagers. If they are not blaming the TV, the movies and the other usual scapegoats, these parents are ever busy placing all emphasis on the female child. Alas…they are as ignorant as the kids for whom they seem to be concerned.

Governments, mostly in the Third World and even the United States, especially in the Bush era, have been demanding for total abstinence. The situation is worse in Middle-eastern authoritarian societies where political and religious leaders are not only demanding for total sexual abstinence but also have often relied on draconian laws to discourage female teenagers from premarital sex. In the global community however, individual parents and largely more so, in the western hemisphere, have simply resolved to leave kids to their devices.

It’s very important for every parent to have, at least, the patience to provide a basic understanding of the fast-evolving human physiology to their kids. In the 21st Century, there are several preteen girls (as tenderly young as eight years old) who have begun to menstruate. Going further, many of these girls, with their male counterparts, are already experiencing raging hormones that baffle them. But how many parents are up to the task of providing these confused kids with appropriate education and guidance?

On the subject of sex, many youngsters are so ignorant that they can only fumble and wobble into maturity. Most parents, on the other hand, are either playing “the ostrich” or (and) playing the role of a moral judge. To these parents, the mere sight or mention of a condom to their kids by anyone (even on the TV) is enough to send the parents into fits of rage and righteous indignation.

Ideally, the ultimate panacea to the dangers of sexual recklessness among our young people is abstinence. But to stubbornly insist on abstinence without a consideration of other worthy options is akin to assuming that teenagers are immune to “weakness of the flesh”.

There is a strong need for every family, community and society to strike a reasonable balance between the pursuit of sexual abstinence and safe sex. And this is where sexuality education (sex-ed) comes in as the only effective tool in the attainment of this feat. It’s shameful though that some parents, out of ignorance, view sex-ed as an avenue for indiscriminate sex.

Sex-ed recognizes but goes beyond a mere sermon of sexual abstinence. It’s “a stitch in time that saves nine” with comprehensive information on self-awareness, reproductive organs and preventive measures. No amount of stubborn demands for abstinence can help a fully-blossomed twelve-year-old girl who doesn’t understand the fixation of boys’ attentions to her chest. And neither can this rigid doctrine enable the same girl to grasp the implications of being called a “sweet sixteen” by some leering, dirty old men.

Equipped with sex-ed however, such a fast-growing preteen will get to understand the purpose, cause and effect of her natural endowments. And with this understanding, she is bound to survive, unscathed, the many destructive social pestilences such as unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and self-imposed infertility. Better still the preteen is spared a future laden with regrets, physical and emotional scars.