Customer Reviews

The Real Truth About Teens and Sex: From Hooking Up to Friends with Benefits -- What Teens Are Thinking, Doing, andTalking About, and How to Help Them Make Smart Choices

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I loved this book and wish all parents would read it! Ms. Weill had my complete attention when she started out by saying that "teens nationwide are suffering from a lack of honest communication from their parents and other pivotal adults around them..." She later says that it is dangerous to rely on schools to provide sex education and that parents have to be the primary educators of their children. She is confident that despite the horrified looks on their faces when we bring it up, teens want to talk about sexuality with adults they trust - and that they want adults to know what is going on. Teens are vulnerable emotionally and physically and susceptible to regret as their feelings emerge after sex. We can help them avoid those situations in which "sex just happens" and the consequences that follow.

Far from inducing fear, Ms. Weill constantly reassures parents that research shows talking to kids about sexuality does not make them have sex earlier and that there are positive trends reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggesting youth are having less intercourse as well as using more contraception, and that there was 30% less teen pregnancy between 1994 and 2004. She is matter of fact about the risks of the Internet, early sex, pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, but never lets parents off the hook. The more parents know, the better equipped they will be to help their teens avoid "sexual risks" including sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy.

Ms. Weill reminds parents throughout this book that we [adults] have the power to have an enormous influence on the behavior of our teens and although I cannot endorse her statement that "teens should be pulling away from adults" I do agree that they need to take on more responsibility and that they still need our supervision and guidance. Teens need to know that 66% of teens and 81% of 12 - 14 year olds regret their first sexual experience and parents and teens need to know that teens have the knowledge and strength to "make good decisions."

Parents being in denial will not help and it will undermine our relationships and make them superficial. I appreciate the fact that Ms. Weill respects youth and is very clear that sifting through their emails or reading a diary or blog is a major invasion of privacy and it will take a long time to rebuild the trust and credibility lost by the action. There is no substitute for putting the time into developing a strong and positive relationship with our child!

Parents need to be able to talk honestly with their children about sexual rights, pleasure, and risk. Teens need to know that it feels good to be excited, but that sexuality should be protected, consensual and planned with someone they love to feel great. For parents who do not think they can talk easily with their kids, Ms. Weill includes resources and wonderful examples throughout the book and there is even a discussion about developing a safety plan with your teen.

My favorite quote from this book is "good parenting is always inconvenient for the parent."

This book explains it all in regards to what is going on with our children today. I think parents of pre-teens also should read this to prepare for what is ahead. It was a real eye-opener because all the information came directly from teens.I keep it as a reference for talking to the kids and also to understand what some of their slang words are really meaning.

A fabulous, well-written book with practical and sound advice for anyone who cares about teens and their sexual and mental health. It's great to get hard, accurate data about what teens are thinking and how to get through to them. Especially helpful are the sections "Your teen will listen if you say this".

As a person who works closely with teens and also reads a lot about teen sexuality and teens in general, I found this book to be too simplistic and very very basic. It reads as though the author is still writing one of her teen advice columns when her audience is primarily adults. The tone of this book very condescending. Weill constantly repeats her qualifications to write this book ("teens trust me," "I have spoken to 1000s of teens in my career"); while those qualifications are good, the constant mentioning of them gets old and can be insulting to the reader.

The statstics sprinkled throughout the book were interesting and I wish more of the text was spent talking about their implications. What does it mean that X percent of 13 year olds have had sex? Have had 4 or more partners? The text was quite separated from the survey results and was too simplistic and not very insightful. I understand that this book was supposed to be accessible, but I found it so basic that it offered very little that was new or even interesting.

Her quotes from teens were also suspect to me. If she got responses from 1000s of teens about their sex lives and beliefs, why these quotes? They seem to come from the same mold and offer little diversity. Basically, they all say that a person should wait for sex or talk about negative experiences with sex. Where are the stories of teens who have healthy sexual experiences? I am not necessarily advocating teen sex, but I do believe that people should be exposed to the idea that some teens do like to have sex and have it responsibly.

If you have never read anything about teen sex before, this might be useful. If you have, it's simply a sensationalized summary in a condescending tone.

A must read for every parent

This is a great, fast read that offers insight into the issues teens are dealing with and practical advice about how parents and others who care about teens can talk with them effectively.

This is one more example of a book by a journalist posing as a sex expert. The media create so-called "experts," and Sabrina Weill is one of them. All the tired cliches and ideas can be found: losing virginity (when it is really a gain in freedom) and the fuzzy place of not recommending comprehensive sex education while walking the line with abstinence "education." Weill simply speaks the fuzzy line of the National Campaign to Prevent Teenage Pregnancy, which has failed to come down clearly in favor of comprehensive sex education. We don't need a thousand more studies to indicate that telling the truth is better than preaching.

Unfortunately, the truth is not always obvious in this book. The study carried out by the author is not particularly well designed and the sample is not much. Weill has some helpful observations about discussions with parents, but most of her book is not relevant to today's teenagers, who are active sexually. She is biased against friends-with-benefits, but this is actually a more balanced choice than possessive dating or hooking up for many.