Talking the talk
A mother begins the difficult talk with her kids
Story by Anya Litvak
July 28, 2006
It's often said that people are sexual beings from the moment they are born to the moment they die. That's an unsettling thought for Demetria Brown, 28, whose 10-month-old son Jamarrion is still in diapers, and whose eldest Javante, 11, is coming home with love letters. Life has changed for this young mother in the last decade.
A St. Louis transplant, Demetria moved to Columbia when she was 13. By then, most of her friends had lost their virginity, and one girl was pregnant.
"Everyone had sex before me," Demetria recalled. "I knew I shouldn't have it earlier. But then I got me a little boyfriend."
She was 15 at the time, and the couple dated for a year before Demetria made the decision to have sex. Two weeks after her first time, she knew she was pregnant.
Nine months later, she gave birth to Javante and, two years after that, to her daughter, Jaanna, 9. In another two years, Jametrius, 7, was born.
How would she explain teen pregnancy to her kids, Demetria thought. How would she even start the conversation?
In her dark living room on an afternoon in March, Demetria gently rocked her sneezing baby to sleep and reminisced about classroom whispers and first loves. She thought back to when her younger sister accused her of sleeping around before she was sexually active, and how her parents believed the rumors.
"Since my friends were having it, my parents thought I was," she said.
They're fast girls, Demetria's father cautioned. And the conversation ended there.
"But now that I think about it, why didn't they talk to me about (sex)?" she wondered. "Why didn't they supply me with condoms or ask me if I wanted to go on birth control?"
That's what they should have done, she says. But the question now is how Demetria will approach her own children.
Just as Jamarrion's cough quieted to a stuffy snore, the front door exploded with after-school excitement. Javante, Jaanna and Jametrius sliced through the house, book bags flying, and the most popular word in the room became "MOMMMMM."
Jaanna ran into the bathroom and emptied Demetria's box of tampons into the toilet. For months now, her daughter's been fascinated with "women's things," like growing breasts and getting her period. In a way, her mischievous act accomplished its goal to bring Demetria into the bathroom and talk, if only for a second, about what Jaanna had done and what it meant.
Demetria hasn't talked to her children about sex yet, and like many parents, she's not sure what to say. The part about puberty doesn't seem too intimidating. But talking about dating and relationships and, gasp, sex, sounds brutal.
Studies show that parents who talk to their kids about sex early, honestly and often have children who are more likely to postpone sexual activity and use contraception when they decide to have sex.
While parents are often the first to acknowledge the influence of the media and school-yard gossip on children's attitudes about sex, it seems many underestimate their own.
Most tip sheets for parents embarking on "the talk" advise them to use the occasion of a sexual reference in a movie or a euphemism overheard in school to set the record straight.
Even in this hypersexualized culture, the power of parental sway is strong, Kim Webb, a health educator at the MU Student Health Center, assured a group of parents at an April meeting of the Parent-Teacher Association at Lange Middle School. Nine families attended the event, a veritable how-to seminar for parents and teens attempting to reason with a different generation.
"Know what your kids are reading," she said. "What they're watching, what they're doing on the computer."
One mother shared that she allows her son to keep profiles on the popular social networking Web sites, Xanga and MySpace, but knows his password and regularly checks to make sure his activity is safe from virtual predators. Another parent suggested keeping Internet logs to track which Web sites teens access.
Two months earlier, Webb had led a parent focus group at the Boone County Health Department, where 15 adults, including Demetria, vented frustrations with their children's erratic maturation.
"It's almost like they need a support group to talk about this," said Maureen Coy, a social worker with the Columbia/Boone County Health Department who organized the focus group.
As one of the youngest parents present, Demetria said it helped her to hear how others dealt with curfews and dating etiquette. For now, she's set the dating age at 16, but Javante seems anxious to negotiate.
For 10 years, Demetria's word ruled the house. As a single mom with little help from her mother and sisters, Demetria dispensed rules and values as she saw fit. But last year, she married and the dynamics changed. She and her husband, Termaine Pittman, don't always see eye to eye about sex education.
"I want my kids to wait until they're married," Demetria, a Jehovah's Witness, said. "I want them to know about the bad side of all this stuff and what the risks are. I want them to have Bible values."
Like many parents, Demetria wants her children to learn about contraception and make healthy decisions; in her own life, she's had four unplanned pregnancies, one of them while taking birth control pills. But she worries that kids may confuse sex education with encouragement.
Termaine is less insistent on abstinence and teases Javante: "If you listen to your mama, you gonna be a virgin for the rest of your life."
"I was so mad," Demetria later fumed. If it were up to her, the kids would still be using cute nicknames for their body parts and thinking of the opposite sex as gross.
...
That's not something parents like Demetria hear every day, but sometimes it's right there in front of her.
You can see it in the way Jaanna invents excuses to always be at her side or the way Javante brags that his mom taught him to rap and write poetry, which he now performs in public. You can see it when Jametrius comes home from school and heads straight for his mother, to give her and the baby a little kiss.
With all the awkwardness and uncertainty of a parent going through puberty all over again, Demetria said she will try to be as real and honest with her kids as she can stand.
"I have to teach them," she said. "I'll be disgusted, but I'd rather they come to me, cause I'm their mama."
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