For American parents, teenage sex is something to be feared and forbidden: most would never consider allowing their children to have sex at home, and sex is a frequent source of family conflict. In the Netherlands, parents aim above all for family cohesiveness, often permitting young couples to sleep together and providing them with contraceptives. And there, teenage pregnancies are far less frequent than in the United States. Drawing on extensive interviews with parents and teens, Not Under My Roof offers an unprecedented, intimate account of the different ways that girls and boys in both countries negotiate love, lust, and growing up.
Tracing the roots of the parents’ divergent attitudes, Amy T. Schalet reveals how they grow out of their respective conceptions of relationships, gender, autonomy, and authority. She provides a probing analysis of the way family culture shapes not just sex but also alcohol consumption and parent-teen relationships. Avoiding caricatures of permissive Europeans and puritanical Americans, Schalet shows that the Dutch require self-control from teens and parents, while Americans guide their children toward autonomous adulthood at the expense of the family bond.
“Schalet’s insightful analyses—grounded in history, sociology, and adolescent development—provide a roadmap for normalizing sexuality and guiding social policy. Taking adolescent sexuality out of the darkness of the back seat and into the light under the family roof has the power to transform adolescent and adult sexuality and family relations.”—John Santelli, MD, Columbia University
My Take on the Book
This is a topic that I am needless to say worried about. As a father of girls, I know that we will have to have "the talk" with the girls and to lay out our rules about what is both expected and allowed and not allowed in our home. This book blew the top off my understanding of the culture of sex in teenage society today, but also about the prevalence of drugs and alcohol and how heavy on the minds that this can lie on young adults today. The world is a different place from the one that I grew up in and I can see through reading this book that the world my daughters will be seeing in the next 7-10 years will be that much different as well. I have a lot to learn but this book was a starting point for me in my journey and it should be for all parents!
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