ADVOCATES FOR YOUTH

Parenting Is a Five-Piece Suit

By Deborah M. Roffman, MS, Sexuality Educator and Consultant, The Park School of Baltimore

Parenting is tough these days, and parenting around issues of sexuality can seem especially tricky. To make things even more complicated, many of us post-sixties parents simply assumed we were going to have a much easier time with this subject than our parents did, only to find that, when confronted with the topic in relation to our own children, we, too, often feel unsure and uncomfortable.

Parents can take heart through the following maxim: Good parenting is good parenting is good parenting. In other words, raising sexually healthy children requires exactly the same set of skills that good parents and other caretakers bring to all other aspects of family life. Truthfully, this topic is really not rocket science! I always find that when I can help parents identify the things they know they do well, and then help them apply what they already know about quality parenting to the topic of sexuality, shoulders drop, tongues untie, and common sense kicks in.

Here's what good parents instinctively know: Children and adolescents—at all ages and stages!—have the same five universal, developmentally based needs. While the content of these needs shifts dramatically as children grow and mature, the basic needs remain constant from cradle to career or college. Here's a thumbnail sketch of each:

• Affirmation: Children and adolescents need adults to recognize and validate their particular stage of (sexual) development.
• Information: Children and adolescents need factual knowledge and concepts (about sexuality), presented in ongoing and age-appropriate ways.
• Values Clarification: Children and adolescents need adults to share their values (about sexuality) and to clarify and interpret competing values and values systems (about sexuality) in the surrounding culture.
• Limit Setting: Children and adolescents need adults to create a healthy and safe (sexual) environment by stating and reinforcing age-appropriate (sexual) rules and limits.
• Anticipatory Guidance: Children and adolescents need adults to help them learn how to avoid or handle potentially harmful (sexual) situations, and to prepare them for times when they will need to rely on themselves to make responsible and healthy (sexual) choices.

This Five Needs Paradigm makes it clear that sexuality is simply another aspect of life and human development, not a "special" topic that needs to be "kept from the kids" until they're older. It also makes the case that if children have five fundamental needs, then parents have five fundamental roles: affirmer, information giver, values clarifier, limit setter, and guide. Parents need to perform these roles in their family relationships—or, as I like to say, they need to wear them in their daily life—as a brightly colored "five piece suit," so that clear boundaries and expectations are evident for both parent and child.

Sexuality is different in one important way. As parents we are typically less knowledgeable about the stages of healthy sexual development (from infancy on); less comfortable with sexual facts; less clear about the values we want to pass on; less assertive about applying sexual limits; and less confident about the kind of guidance we need to provide. So, our first job is clear—to educate and even re-educate ourselves, by doing the "headwork" and the homework that will get us up to par. Then, I promise, our good instincts and common sense will kick right in.

Deborah Roffman is the author of Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent's Guide to Talking Sense about Sex, Perseus Press, 2001, and of But How'd I Get in There in the First Place? Talking to Your Young Child about Sex, Perseus Press, 2002.

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