About intercourse

In any case, if you and your teen-ager do manage to talk frankly together, sooner or later you will come to the question of sexual intercourse.

Like Betty, your child will doubtless have managed to gather the general facts. So also has Craig.

"The man puts his penis inside the woman," he states concisely. "I know that. But just where?"

Like Craig and like Betty, your child also will be after details. These, as you know now, you'll do well to explain in your own simplest and most comfortable way. Don't be afraid to draw from your own experience. And when you don't know, don't be afraid to say so, with a promise to consult book or doctor to find out.

"Which hole?" . . . You know now that to either boy or girl it's important knowledge that a woman has a third opening with a special channel or tube leading up from it to the uterus where her babies will grow. (We've talked about this already.)

"How is it done?" . . . You know this too.

"How often?" . . . It depends . . .

"But" said Nell, "you can't have that many babies."

"It isn't done every time to have a baby," her mother assured her. "It makes two people who love each other dearly feel closer and more intimate, more at one with each other. It's done for love many times . . . How often depends on how they both feel."

"How do they feel?" . . . Here is the tough one, the one at which the boy or girl invariably seeks to arrive if he dares.

But after you've considered it, you'll see that this one isn't too difficult either!

You'll need first to recognize what the adolescent is really after.

Actually he knows how it feels. He has known a long time.

The answer that your teen-ager usually wants to this question is not information or fact, but sanction for the feelings he has had in touching himself. For he intuitively knows inside him that these feelings are like those he will have in intercourse. He is now after reassurance; to know that his feelings are normal, healthy and good.

When Betty came to this question, her mother answered, "Those feelings? You know them. They're like when you look at a romantic scene in the movies or like when you touch yourself. Only even better. Because you're together with someone you love."

In this simple way of putting it, Mother shows Betty once more that Betty's experience with similar feelings has been wholesome and sound.

Betty gazed thoughtfully out of the window. And then she said an astonishing thing.

"That helps a lot, Mother. I'd been wondering whether I could hold out till I got married. Lots of girls don't. I think they're curious. Now that I know what it feels like, I won't have to do so much research."

"My!" thought Betty's mother, "haven't both of us grown up tremendously since we've talked on and off about these things over the last couple of years?"

How to help these adolescents not to be driven to do so much research? How to help them feel secure and satisfied enough to maintain controls? This is probably the biggest of all questions in the minds of parents. It, too, is part of what must be included in the sex education of today's youth.

So let us turn to it next and consider it in the context of rising interest in each other that boys and girls feel at this age.