The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com.

This is from a Time magazine article, "The Real Truth About Teens and Sex," by Sabrina Weill, who was an editor at Seventeen magazine. She has the advantage of having spoken with thousands of teenagers, and she also interviewed hundreds of teens in partnership with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Here’s what she reports:

She says that parents have this view that all their kids are out there having sex parties and just messing around. And some of them are—some of them are. But a lot of them are not. However, something else is going on in this culture, in this generation, which is dangerous, and that’s that kids are not valuing sex the way we used to. It’s so free, it’s so rampant. You can get on the internet, and kids can go to porn sites—and they do this. They can do this in school even. Kids learn terms such as, “Oh, we’re just hooking up,” or “We’re just having friends with benefits.” And that’s scary stuff because they may not know how to distinguish “friends with benefits” from true intimacy if they just use their bodies promiscuously, have a very promiscuous sex life. They won’t know how to form a real, solid bond with one person.

So, what to do? What do you do if you’re a parent and you’re worried about your son, who you find has been on the internet, or your daughter who’s been on the internet looking at porn sites? Most parents just say, “I don’t need to teach my kids anymore because, you know, it’s everywhere. They’re taught about sex in school. They’re taught about sex on the internet. They’re taught about sex from their friends or sitcoms—you name it, it’s all over the place.” Well, Sabrina Weill says that’s a lot of misinformation. Kids get a lot of misinformation out there, and that parents can have a tremendous influence on their kids, even when their kids pretend they’re not listening, even when their kids do what I said earlier—they throw up their hands and say, “Okay, whatever, ma, dad.” They’re listening. Even if they have long silences, put up with their long silences.

You don’t want to go on the attack. You don’t want to lecture. You want to listen to your kids. Ask, “What do you know about sex? I want to know your thoughts on abortion,” or “I want to know your thoughts on taking precautions or having sex early,” and sit and listen to your kids. Be careful; parents will always want to throw in their two cents, and you do need to set the norms, but you don’t do it by lecturing. You don’t do it by saying, “Well, this is what I’d suggest,” in that type of tone, because that comes across as lecturing. You want to show respect and caring. Ask, “Well, what are your concerns, honey?”

A child might say, “Well, I’m worried I’ll get pregnant if I have sex early. Then what would happen?” Then they’d say, “Well, then I’d have to support a child, and I still want to go to school, I still want to have a career, and I don’t want to have a kid at this young age.” You help your kids see inductively why it’s bad to have promiscuous sex at such a young age—14, 15, 16—and if they are having sex, how to take precautions. If you can’t stop them, then you definitely want them to take rational action, to play it safe, not to get diseases, or to deal with an unwanted pregnancy.

Okay, now, switching to a different topic, this is an email that I mentioned earlier from Derek. Derek is a young kid. I don’t know how young—his English was broken, so I cleaned it up a little bit. He says:

"My name is Derek, and I’m from California, and I have a problem. I watched the September 11, 2001 documentary, and it made me scared of life. Then my mom helped me feel better, and now I’m scared of growing up. Is there a way for me to feel better? Please answer my email, and thank you for reading it from Derek. P.S. Does making friends help me feel better?"

And I would say yes, making good friends will always help you feel better. But here’s what happens: I’ve dealt with many abused children, and many of them were exposed not only to horror stories in their personal lives but to horror movies. They were traumatized by them. Watching the September 11 documentary for a young kid—he doesn’t have the context to put that in. And it is scary, and it is factual, so it’s additionally scary, but it’s not the norm in life. If that were the norm in life, we wouldn’t make such a big deal of it. It’s like a horror movie, but a real-life horror movie.

So, what happens when a young kid sees that movie in vivid, bloody detail—the horror, the pointless destruction? What happens is that a kid will question, like any of us would, his deepest assumptions about the world and about other people. Questions come to his mind: Can this happen to me? Can I feel like I’m happy-go-lucky, and somebody suddenly pulls the rug out from under me, or kills me or hurts me? Can I trust other people? Should I always be looking over my shoulder? Should I stay at home to be safe? Am I even safe at home? Could the terrorists come in here?

Now, this is precisely the result that the terrorists wanted to achieve, and I hope you don’t let them do it, Derek. You see, the terrorists are really thugs. They’re very bad people, and they’re not the norm in life. Most people are very good, or they’re a mix, but they’ll never be that bad. They’re thugs who concocted the September 11 attacks, and they wanted to scare the whole world. They wanted everyone to feel, just as you do, afraid of people, afraid of the world. Don’t let them ever win. Don’t let them win. You want to go out there and make friends. You want to see that there are a lot better people in the world, including adults. And you want to learn firsthand that the good guys outnumber the bad guys. We are much smarter and much more rational than them, and we have a right to self-defense. If they attack us, we have a right to attack them, to jail them, and to kill them—the most evil ones, we have a right to kill.

So, what can you do at this point? You need to remind yourself of all the healthy people in the world. You need to remind yourself of the good ones, the ones who built the buildings or designed computers or made the airplane that you enjoy flying on, or made a light bulb, or your sports heroes, or the doctors who have learned how to cure diseases. Listen to better documentaries if you want to listen to documentaries, and also learn that ideas matter. You would never want to hurt good people, and you have a right to self-defense rather than just cowering with these very bad people.

So, ideas matter. Your life matters. Your happiness matters. Make good friends and realize that you may even want to go into law enforcement or the military someday to fight these bad guys and show yourself firsthand that the good guys can win. You don’t have to, but you can also pursue your own rational goals. You always have a right to self-defense.

Here’s a little more from Dr. Kenner:

“And those bloody English cricket players threw me out of their club like a dog. I never complained. On the contrary, I vowed that I would never play again. Who suffered? Me. But I don’t want Jessie to suffer. I don’t want her to make the same mistakes that her father made of accepting life, accepting situations. I want her to fight, and I want her to win.”

That’s from Bend It Like Beckham, a fabulous movie—a great movie to watch with your kids too. It gives you that motivation not just to give in if you, in quotes, "fail" at a sport or if you fail in a particular career. You want to be able to fight for your values, to fight for your own happiness, to fight for your personal goals. Do it rationally, of course, but never be passive and just say, “Whatever.” That passivity—that “whatever” attitude—you don’t want to have that approach towards your own life.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com.

Here’s an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner:

“A romantic partner to avoid is someone who tries to fake their self-esteem by using defense values. People may use values that they possess or aspire to as substitutes for genuine self-esteem and to cover up self-doubt. Examples are money, looks, intelligence, popularity, fancy clothes, expensive cars, large homes in wealthy neighborhoods, social status, and sexual conquest. Not all these values are necessarily irrational. The problem is that they are held compulsively and even desperately. An expensive car can give you pleasure, but not if you just want to own it to show off. You are still the same person with or without the car. Whether others approve of you or not does not change who you are.”

You can download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com, and you can buy the book at Amazon.com.