Picture this:  It’s a Saturday night in 1987.  I’m 14 (and clearly not so popular), wearing my favorite Benetton sweater, silver hoop earrings that almost reach my shoulders, and bleach-faded Guess jeans, and I’m folding laundry with my mother (as I said, not so popular). My 17-year-old sister comes downstairs from where she’s been hanging out with her boyfriend of maybe a year (her second serious high school boyfriend if memory serves me correctly).

“Hey Mom,” she says, “Can Dave sleep over? He has to work in the morning but his parents are having a party and he doesn’t think he’ll get any sleep if he goes home.  He’ll sleep in the study.” 

“He can sleep over,” my mom says without looking up from the towel she is folding, “but he might as well sleep in your room.”

My sister does a double take and then runs back upstairs quickly; presumably to deliver the good news before our mom has a change of heart.  I stand, opened mouthed, staring at my mother in disbelief.

“What?” she says, a tiny bit indignantly, “I don’t feel like washing an extra set of sheets and who are we kidding anyhow?” 

This is one of my favorite stories about my mother and I tell it often but I was a little worried that she would be embarrassed by my telling it in such a public forum.  Not so.  When I reminded her of the laundry incident this morning she laughed: “Good for me,” she said, “After all, that’s how I made sure you weren’t doing it in the back seat of some car.”  

An op-ed in Friday’s New York Times suggests that my mom made just the right call that night.  For her upcoming book, Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex, Amy Schalet, an assistant professor of sociology at the UMass Amherst, interviewed 130 families – some here and some in the Netherlands – looking specifically at teenage sex and family life.  She writes: “My look into cultural differences suggests that family life might be much improved, for all, if Americans had more open ideas about teenage sex.” And she points to “the sleepover” as a key point within “the larger world of culturally divergent ideas about teenage sex, lust and capacity for love.” 

In the United States, she explains, “we see teenagers as helpless victims beset by raging hormones and believe parents should protect them from urges they cannot control.”  Not allowing teenagers to sleep with a boyfriend/girlfriend at home is part of this protection. In contrast, Dutch parents “…regard teenagers, girls and boys, as capable of falling in love and of reasonably assessing their own readiness for sex.” She argues that: “Normalizing ideas about teenage sex in fact allows the Dutch to exert more control over their children.” She goes on to credit the sleepover, at least in part, for giving parents the opportunity to discourage promiscuous behavior, encourage contraception, and get to know their child’s partner. 

Having grown up in a household that more closely models the Dutch attitude about sex than the American one, I would have to agree.  My parents’ openness about sex did not start or end with allowing boyfriends to sleepover.  When my sister and I were four and six we apparently waited until our mom went out so we could ask our dad about sex (and he answered).  We discussed puberty and periods and tampons at the dinner table. My sister and I laughed at the commercials for douches and occasionally asked our mom (in random places like the cereal aisle at the supermarket) if she “ever got that not-so-fresh feeling.” On the suggestion of a gynecologist, my mother bought me my first container of contraceptive foam and together we were flummoxed by the instructions (neither of us realized it came with an applicator). When I was diagnosed with mononucleosis, also known as the “kissing disease,” and the pediatrician said there was a lot of it going around, my mom laughed at my joke “oh really, maybe I know them?” even when the doctor did not.  And, when I called my mom hysterical from my sophomore year of college, she asked, as gently as she could, “Is there any chance that this could be the birth control pill playing with your emotions?”  I denied it vehemently, “No, it’s not the pill, it’s my life, I hate my life,” but went back to the health center and asked to change to a different brand which cut significantly down on the water works.

In many ways, I credit their openness about sex with the closeness of our relationship. Don’t get me wrong, it was not the only conversation topic in our house but it set the tone.  Nothing was off limits.  And as such, I never lied to my parents.  I know that sounds unbelievable but I really cannot remember ever lying to them, certainly never about where I was, who I was with, or what I was doing. 

I am now the mother of two girls and many people tell me that I will feel differently when they grow up and start having sexual relationships.  Maybe these people are right.  Maybe I will want to lock them in their rooms, buy some chastity belts, and throw away all the keys.  But I don’t think so.  I think teen sex is an inevitable, important, and not inherently bad part of growing up. And, like my mother I would prefer that they do it here where they are safe than in the back seat of some car.