UMass researcher Amy Schalet finds teen sex not taboo in the Netherlands
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Though she was born in Manchester, Conn., to American parents, Amy Schalet grew up in the Netherlands and says she learned to speak Dutch without an American accent. And when she speaks English, she sounds a bit Dutch.
In some ways, Schalet, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, still finds herself looking at things from a Dutch perspective. For one thing, she believes the Dutch have a sensible attitude toward adolescent sexuality that helps account for a teen pregnancy rate much lower than that in the United States - an approach that nevertheless is anathema to many American parents.
Schalet is the author of "Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex," which has created a buzz in parenting and health circles and the media since its release last November. The book suggests many Dutch parents have built stronger connections to their teenage children - and more overall family cohesiveness - by allowing older teens, under certain circumstances, to spend the night with their boyfriends or girlfriends in their homes.
Schalet, 43, who's done a series of interviews about the book, including with CNN and the BBC, says that sleep overs are just one part of the equation in the Dutch approach to adolescent sexuality. There's also a national emphasis on sex education, and contraceptives are readily available to teens.
"In the Netherlands, there's a belief that teenagers - not just girls, but boys as well - can be in love, can have a serious relationship, and in a lot of ways that seems to make sex safer because it takes place within that kind of relationship," Schalet said in a recent interview at UMass. "There's also a belief that teens, with guidance from supportive parents, can make a mature decision about when they are ready to have sex."
By contrast, she said, many American parents assume that teenagers are victims of "raging hormones" and cannot control their desires - making sex "a risk, a threat to their safety, something that parents should actively discourage and work against."
Schalet's book has sparked debate in the blogosphere and among U.S. health care workers and social workers, with many praising her research and insights. Others disagree: An Ohio adolescent and child psychiatrist, Stephen Grcevich, said in a letter to The New York Times that promoting teen sexuality is a mistake. "I see far too many teenagers with symptoms of anxiety or depression, problems with substance abuse or self-injurious behavior because they are not yet mature enough for sex."
Probing attitudes
As part of her research for "Not Under My Roof," which she first contemplated writing when she was an undergraduate, Schalet interviewed 130 people - parents and teens - in the United States and the Netherlands. In the United States, she concentrated her efforts on white, middle-class families of secular or moderately Christian bent, to ensure a correlation with a Dutch population that largely fits those descriptions.
In the Netherlands, most parents Schalet interviewed said they would allow, or consider allowing, their teenager to sleep with a boyfriend or girlfriend in their home if the relationship was a steady one, and if they had gotten to know the other adolescent. This wasn't a decision parents came to easily - "I am not going to jump up and down with joy in front of their bedroom," one Dutch mother said - but most felt it was better to have the teens at home, using contraception, than sneaking around having sex elsewhere, perhaps without protection.
Most Dutch parents, Schalet writes, felt such sleep overs were appropriate for 17- or 18-year-olds if the other requirements were met. Some parents said they would allow the behavior for their 16-year-olds, while 15 was generally considered too young.
Her American interviewees, by comparison, gave Schalet her book title: Parents overwhelmingly rejected the idea of allowing sleep overs for teenage boyfriends and girlfriends, even when they considered themselves socially liberal and supported sex education in schools. Many parents who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s expressed regret at their own early sexual coming of age and didn't want to see their children follow in their footsteps.
As one California mother put it to Schalet: "No way, José!" The woman added that she'd told her teenage daughter and son that premarital sex at their age was "sort of like the Ten Commandments: Don't do any of those because if you do, you know, you're going to be in a world of hurt."
Schalet, who does not have children, says she does not want to speculate on how she would handle the issue if she had teenagers, or to comment on her own life as a teen. Her focus, she says, is based "on the research I did - I think people should make their own decisions, not on what I might do."
Telling statistics
Schalet was a toddler when her late father, a biologist, received a two-year appointment in the early 1970s to teach and do research at Leiden University, in the Dutch city of the same name. Cultural shifts stemming from the sexual revolution in the 1960s were already afoot, she says, changing what had been a fairly conservative country into a more liberal one: National health-care policies were revised, for instance, to make contraceptives much more accessible.
The teen pregnancy rate in the Netherlands dropped steadily between 1970 and 1996 to become one of the lowest in the world, Schalet writes, and more recent studies have shown that about 6 in 10 teenage girls there are using birth control pills at the time they first have intercourse. Rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among teens are also noticeably lower in the Netherlands than in the United States, she writes.
Schalet's family ended up staying in the Netherlands, and she attended Dutch schools before enrolling in Harvard University to finish her undergraduate degree in the early 1990s. But during trips to the United States when she was growing up, Schalet began picking up on a different vibe about sex.
"I remember [as a teen] reading a Judy Blume book an American friend had given me, and she said the book was passed around so that everyone could read the 'dirty parts.' I was like, 'What are you talking about?' I hadn't noticed anything."
At Harvard, she saw that teen sex had also become a political issue in the United States, with many conservative commentators linking it to social ills like poverty and arguing that giving adolescents access to contraceptives simply encouraged risky behavior, or was morally wrong. The replacement of school sex education courses with abstinence programs was also growing, she said. "The whole discussion was taking place along very different lines than what I was familiar with."
Her growing interest in the topic led her to pursue a doctorate in sociology, specializing in adolescent sexuality and culture, at the University of California Berkeley. She did some of her research at that time and also as a postdoctoral student.
Negative vs. positive
As Schalet sees it, many American parents, when they talk to their teenage children about sex, emphasize "forbidding" messages such as unwanted pregnancies and STDs, as legitimate as those concerns can be. Most teens, as a consequence, keep their sexual lives hidden, she says.
One teen boy told Schalet that about the only thing his parents had ever said to him about sex was "Don't get a girl pregnant." He didn't tell his parents he was having sex with his girlfriend during high school because "I just didn't even want them to know ... [or] to be in my life."
Schalet says prevailing U.S. attitudes about adolescent sexuality often seem based on stereotypes: Boys are only interested in sex, girls just want to be loved, and neither gender is capable of experiencing mature love. In the Netherlands, she maintains, a boy's desire for emotional intimacy is considered normal, as is a girl's sexual desire.
In the United States, she says, an important first step for many parents should be to "acknowledge the emotional intimacy that both genders are capable of, and acknowledge the sexuality of girls." That last point is particularly important, she said, given the way the term "slut" is so often thrown at American teenage girls who are thought to be sexually active.
"The use of that word is just awful," she said. "Girls face such a hostile environment."
Other factors
Schalet believes other cultural differences contribute to a higher teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. - eight times higher than the rate in the Netherlands as of 2007, she writes, though that figure has since dropped. Sex is often presented in a more titillating fashion in the U.S. media, she says, and she also thinks Dutch teens and parents generally have closer relationships than many of their U.S. counterparts.
"In the Netherlands, parents maintain control through connection with their teens, by keeping involved in their lives, including by talking about sex and permitting sleep overs," she said. In the United States, she noted, it's more common for parents to "re-establish connection through control - you have this emotional separation, then the teenager does something against the rules and the parent says, 'You're grounded,' and you re-establish connection."
None of this, adds Schalet, is to say that every Dutch family is at ease with teen sexuality, or that Dutch teens don't clash with their parents about it, or that U.S. families cannot enjoy greater communication on the topic. The issue, she notes, is more complicated than "cliched images of puritanical Americans and permissive Europeans."
But if "sexual maturation is awkward and difficult," she writes, the Dutch experience "suggests that it is possible for families to stay connected when teenagers start having sex, and that if they do, the transition into adulthood need not be so painful for parents or children."
