I think this is a bad idea and I don’t know what it accomplishes, though I can speculate.
What teens need are for adults to create safe spaces where they can practice testing their personal limits in a place where adults can intervene. If necessary. Sometimes the mere presence of an adult is all a young person needs to make a healthy decision. Adults easily become the ‘excuse’ they can use to put the breaks on a situation that may be going farther than they are ready for.
I was always asked by the high students from my after school program to chaperone their school dances and their proms. And I would happily spend a Friday night in the school cafeteria with 300 hormonal teens. My attitude about chaperoning high school dances was that I’d rather have teens ‘bump and grind’ (as it where when I was chaperoning dances), in the presence of adults, where their clothes were still on and where with just one look shot across a dark dance floor, I could usually separate even the tightest pair. If that didn’t’ work, then I could make my way across the dance floor and dance my way right in between them to let them know they needed to step back off each other. Being there gave me the chance at the end of the dance to capitalize on a teachable moment and have a quick conversation with someone on the way out about maybe that type of dancing lets someone think they are ready to do something they may not be ready for.
But the truth is sometimes dancing up close on someone is exactly what teens are ready for. And that may be as far as it needs to go. I would often wonder, would that very situation of the two teens twerking go further if instead of being in the cafeteria at the high school dance, they were at someone’s home and there wasn’t an adult to intervene or be the excuse a teen needs to slow things down? Or if they were at someone’s home and there was a small group of other teens; we know that teens are more likely to take risks in the presence of their peers. What if the twerking gets ‘egged on’ and there isn’t an adult there to intervene or be the excuse needed to slow things down?
My experience has been that many adults are afraid of teen sexuality and they often think that sexual expression automatically means teens are having sex. Which of course is not true. As a former health educator, I’ve always worked with teens to help them understand there is a continuum of sexual expression and I want them to think creatively of all the things they can do INSTEAD of having sex.
I think that twerking is one way that teens can express themselves and while I may think it looks silly or suggestive, etc. I do know that I’d rather find the teachable moments in situations like this or offer alternatives instead of continually trying to control kids and how they express themselves.
How do you create spaces for teens to test their personal limits?
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