Nurturing through normalizing, endangering through dramatizing

Abstract

Cultural meanings and practices shape how parents and teenagers experience and interact around issues of sexuality, love, and growing up. Qualitative research shows a pattern of dramatization of teenage sexuality in the United States – an emphasis on the dangers of sex, and on conflict within the individual teen, between the genders, and between the generations. As a result, dating and sexual relationships during adolescence tend to be accompanied with strife, friction, subterfuge, and disconnection. By contrast, in the Netherlands, there is a pattern of normalization: a tendency to treat teenage sexuality as a normal part of adolescent development, and to de-emphasize danger and conflict, whether within the self, between the genders, or between the generations. When teenage sexuality is normalized in the family, in schools, in health care clinics, and in governmental health campaigns, it can help parents and teenagers stay more connected. It becomes easier to see girls as the agents of their sexual actions and boys as able and entitled to fall in love. Finally, it makes it easier for girls and boys to reconcile their emergent sexuality with their family roles.