Teenage Sexuality
Speaker: Dr. Claire Brindis (click here for biography)
Soap Summit 1

Transcript of Proceedings
June 4, 1999

SONNY: We're going to discuss the matter of teenage sexuality and from a point of view which is not usually dealt with, which is the point of view of the young male. Most of the research and most of the programs down through years have dealt with the young mothers. Absent from the quotient, has been the role of the young fathers, who have been labeled pretty much as irresponsible people who have walked away from what they've created. We're going to see whether or not that's true. But before we get down to that specific, we've invited somebody been helpful to us in summits past. Dr. Claire Brindis is a professor in the Department Of Pediatrics Division Of Adolescent Medicine At The University Of California, San Francisco and is the executive director of the National Adolescent Health Information Center. She is known as one of the prime authorities on that subset of our culture known as teenagers. Without further ado, here is Dr. Claire Brindis. Thank you.

DR. CLAIRE BRINDIS: Thank you, Sonny, very much for all the hard work that you have put into bringing us together for these very important summits, not only today, but for the several summits in the past. I think that the ability to talk about these topics is very, very important, I thank you very much.

I'm really delighted to be here because I think of the power in this room. If there's one message I'd like to be able to give you today, it's the necessity for us to start reframing the way we look at adolescents in this country. Not as problems, but as our assets, and as our future. It's really important that we not marginalize them and not given them roles and responsibilities, which they desperately want to have in our society.

Now, because we represent different ages in this room, I find it important to spend a couple minutes reflecting on your own adolescence. So, I'm going to ask you, just put down your pencils, and sit, you know, as comfortably as you can in your, in your chairs and close your eyes for a couple minutes and I will give you a very safe fantasy. If you can think back to one year during your adolescence and focus on yourself as you were that year. Remember what you looked like. You might close your eyes and really think about looking at yourself in your mirror. Remember what you looked like. What you wished that you had looked like. What kinds of things were important to you. Why was this a special year in your life? Either positive or negative. Remember who were special people in your life then. Now, consider whether it was during this year that you got your first or most important message about sex.

And if it wasn't that year, please go back in your timeline machine and chose the year when you first remember hearing messages about sex. Who was that source of information? Was it your parent? Was it a brother, a sister? A pamphlet? Was it the menstrual class in the fifth grade? Was it before you reached puberty or after? What made the information so memorable to you? What were the circumstances of the conversation or the situation of which you were in that made it so distinct for you? And what impact has that information had on your behavior, even today? Did that information affect the relationships you've had with people in your life? And if you could replay the scene from scratch, would you change any of that script? What kind of indirect messages did you receive regarding sexual behavior, why it was the right thing to do, why it was the wrong thing to do?

I think it's really important to remember that, while you may see adolescence dressed in very different clothes today, with earrings in different parts of their bodies, that many of the emotions that you just

I will share two stories with you from my own research working with young people throughout the State Of California. The first relates to the fact that now condoms are coming in all sorts of different colors. How many of you have seen blue condoms? Or red condoms? Or purple. Green. There are number of manufacturers who actually manufacture them in strips of plastic with these different colors. And in couple of family planning clinics in California, we were finding that a lot of the young people were not taking the condoms home. And when the counselor started to talk to the young people and asked, and started making balls of blues and greens and yellows and reds so that the young people could chose the color they could take home. How come you're not taking these condoms? The young women said, I can't. Why not? Because those are the colors of the other gang. Now, imagine that teenagers have to even think about that issue, when it relates to sexuality.

Let me give you one other example of a story having to do with violence. A young woman in a family planning clinic had just gotten her pregnancy test and her pregnancy test is negative. She starts to cry and the counselor said, aren't you relieved that you're not pregnant? Why are you so unhappy? And the young woman said my boyfriend's putting a lot of pressure on me to have a baby. He's afraid of being killed and he wants to have a baby to grow up, to take care of his mother. Just think about the fact that this young man is afraid of his own life, but culturally, feels the responsibility that as you grow older, you take care of your elder parent. So concerned about his own life, that he wants to have a child to replace himself to take care of his mother.

So, I think it's very important when we are dealing with adolescent sexuality not to be just thinking about the day in and day out of just the pressure that young people have as their bodies change radically. It's also to think about the context in which young people grow up.

We have good news in adolescent sexuality and adolescent pregnancy. Our country now has experienced a 12 percent decrease in the numbers of adolescent births. And it's happening across all ethnic and racial groups. Among African-Americans, the drop has been 21 percent, among whites, it's been an eight percent drop. Among Latinos, it's five percent. But let me just point out to you that, while we're making some very good inroads, the issues of poverty and the issues of who decides to continue a pregnancy continues to be an important issue. We need to talk about poverty as a very important antecedent to a number of the issues that are faced by young people along with class and along with opportunity because it's not just poor kids who are getting in trouble. Sexually transmitted diseases do not look at your bank account. Sexually transmitted diseases occur across all ethnic groups and three million adolescents a year experience STD's, including Chlamydia.

But I think oftentimes, we don't know how to package the message. The message for me is, talk to my fellow adults and say to them do you want to be a grandparent? Because it's often the parent who doesn't recognize that the child could have an STD, a sub-clinical case, and not know about it. And at the time that they want to have children, and may not be able to have a child. So we can't just think about STD's separately from future fertility. The other message that I'm concerned about is the negative images that we're giving about sex. We're selling sex as a negative, terrible thing.

But guess what? Sex is not a terrible thing. Sex is a wonderful thing. Sex is a sensual thing. But the negative images that we're giving to young people as a means of trying to prevent them from becoming and engaging in adolescent sexual behavior, I think, will fall flat on its face because young people realize that's not the truth. In fact, when you interview adults, 30 percent of men and 40 percent of women say that they don't feel good about their own sexuality. Well, I feel that the messages that we give to young people in this society are impacting our own adult behavior.

Now, a major shift that's about to happen. This country's going to experience a youth-quake. Between now and the year 2005, the US is going to have a 13 percent increase in the number of young people. In the State Of California, it's going to be a 34 percent increase. And among teenagers of color, there's going to be even a more dramatic increase. For example, among Latino/Hispanics, there's going to be a 44 percent increase while among African-Americans there will be a 17 percent increase. And among whites, it will be 11 percent increase.

I recently saw an article in the newspaper from the Screen Actors Guild, which I wanted to point out, given the demographic profile of young people, which pointed out that in 1998, the percentage of roles going to Blacks, Latino and American Indians has dropped significantly. Blacks fell from 14.1% in 1997 for all SAG jobs to 13.4%. Latinos declined from four percent to three point five, and American Indians fell from point four to point two. I have to say that I'm very concerned about young people's images and their inability to see positive role models for themselves in the media.

Let me talk for a moment about the power of the media from my vantage point. I need to share, again, another story. We had a number of articles in the newspapers as well as television indicating that teens were no longer going to have access to abortion clinics. It was actually something that was never implemented. It was a policy that was just being discussed. And in a school-based clinic that I evaluate, we actually had a young woman come in with a fishhook inside of her. The young couple had read about, or heard about, the fact that abortion wasn't going to be feasible anymore and they decided that they were going to try to do their own abortion. And in their own adolescent minds, this fishhook was going to solve their problems. So I have to tell you that the power of the media is unbelievable. Recently ER had a very brief segment on emergency contraception. They had a 1-800 number at the end of the show. There were approximately 3,000 phone calls that came in as a result of that show.

Kaiser Family Foundation had also done a pre-testing and a post-testing for information. Before the ER segment, only 50 percent of the public knew about emergency contraception, and after ER, it went up to 67 percent. This secret, though, is that when they repeated the survey, two and a half months later, to do the same study, guess where the knowledge level was, then? It had dropped to 50 percent. The concept

Many of you may know that teenagers really identify with the characters that you have in your shows. They begin to feel like they're friends with the characters. And so, when they begin to go through their own rapid development and are going through so many physical changes and psychological changes as their bodies mature, they turn to the characters that you personify in your scripts with how are they handling these kinds of things. It would be wonderful if some of these scripts could ask them or have characters that said something like, what's the matter with you? What has suddenly got into you? These are some unanswerable questions for adolescents when they are going through some of these stages. Even if they knew what was going on, he or she could not say, look, Mom, I'm torn by conflicting emotions. I'm engulfed by irrational urges. I am living with unfamiliar desires. Now, don't get me wrong, teens don't want to have instant understanding, either. When troubled by conflict, they feel unique. Their emotions seem new, personal and private. No one has ever felt this way before. And they're not convinced when they're told, I know exactly how you feel. At your age, I felt the same way.

Let me point out, though, for parents and for families, this is a difficult period as well. Many families are going through their own family life cycles. So a third desire that we have from you, is to have more scripts that actually are able to depict the relationships between parents and their teens with the kinds of issues that adults are going through. Many of the parents are, in themselves, in some kind of mid-life crisis. One or both parents may have reached the point in their lives where they've begun to question, is this all there is? It's not uncommon point for adults to experience that in their forties and fifties. When their adolescents are reaching the point of really having sort of this new, fresh sexuality, it begins to be very threatening. It's a sense of competition sometimes. There's regret, there's depression and there's a storm of feelings. It doesn't surprise me that the adolescent period creates a ripple effects in the life-cycles of the family.

Also, for younger parents who may have had their children when they themselves were much younger, often the time of adolescence reaches a point where the mothers themselves trying to deal with some of their own issues. They want to have the opportunity to go for a better job, or education. And sometimes they're not there, available for parents.

Probably, as a parent of two adolescents, I received more sympathy and empathy about being the mother of a teenager than I did when my child was three months old. And I find that this lack of ease about young people, and the lack of preparation for parenting of adults or teenagers, creates a really difficult situation for both adults and their teens. Often, parents just give up. They say, I don't have a role to play with them. The reality is our young people want us to be in their lives, and want us to very involved.

I want to point out two things in adolescent development, the sense of Personal Fable and Imaginary Audience. Personal Fable begins with a tremendous amount of magical thinking that happens during adolescence. They feel that they're infallible. They have an unrealistic sense of risk. If you say to a teen, you might get pregnant the first time you have sex, and they don't get pregnant the first time they have sex, they begin to say, maybe I'm not able to get pregnant. I don't have to take contraceptives. I don't have to be confined with condoms because I'm not really at risk. And I have to say that this Personal Fable is not just something about teenagers. I think all of us carry some kind of infallible sense around us.

The second has to do with the sense of Imaginary Audience. How many of you remember having that pimple on your face and feeling like everybody was staring at your face? It's very common that teenagers feel that everyone cares about what they're doing. This level of egocentrism is extremely strong. How do we use young people's egocentrism to be able to move them ahead and so they can begin to project what they can do about all of these challenging issues. These young people are getting many messages from their church, from their parents, from their peers, from the media and they have a hard time reconciling each of these.

I asked you at the beginning to start thinking about how we can begin to break some of the stereotype images of young people. I want to tell you about the teenage pregnancy and parenting program and leave you with this one last story.

The program was trying to attract young men to teach them about parenting skills. They decided that one of the incentives would be to offer them a pair of Nike shoes if they came for all eight sessions. And, needless to say, the Nike shoes were a great success in terms of tracking of people. The young men came for everyone of the sessions, they felt extremely involved. And in the last session, the eighth session, when they were ready to get their Nike shoes, several of the fathers came up to the leader and said, you know, I don't want those Nike shoes. I'd rather get some money to buy diapers and food for my baby. So, I want to say to you that I think we need to think seriously about how we handle young people. What kind of guidance and lessons we give them. And that they are the future for our country and we need to invest in them. Thank you.