Top 10 Reasons to Talk to Your Daughter About Sex While She's Still Young

If your daughter is comfortable talking to you about sex, then she's more likely to come to you for help when she needs it. How can you make her more comfortable? By showing her that talking about the birds and the bees isn't such a big deal.

Parents who don't just do one big sex talk, and who instead frequently communicate with their children about sex questions and their bodies as such topics come up, have kids who are more comfortable talking to their parents about sex.

That comfort is important, because you don't want your kids to be so frightened about talking to you about their sex lives that they can't come to you if they need help in an emergency. Coming to you will hopefully never be scarier than facing their problems alone.

The big STD headline in the news in 2009 was the CDC's announcement that one in four teenage girls is infected with an STD. In their national study of 14- to 19-year-olds, they found that the two most common STDs were HPV and chlamydia - but the most important word in that sentence is common.

The sheer number of young women who were infected with STDs is simply mind boggling. A full half of all African American teens who were studied were infected with at least one STD, one in five Caucasian teens were infected, one in four overall... that means we have a serious problem here in the U.S.

Scientists call STDs the "hidden epidemic" because so often people don't have symptoms, but these days the word to focus on may not be hidden but epidemic.

One quarter of all young women in the U.S. are infected with STDs, but the news is even more depressing if you just look at those young women who are actually having sex. Late in 2009, a study found that half of young women will end up with chlamydia, trichomoniasis, or gonorrhea, within two years of starting to have sex. Not only that, but even those who get tested and treated will often be reinfected within a few months.

It is possible to reduce the number of STDs in young women, but it requires active sex education to get girls to change their habits and practice safe sex. It can be even more difficult to encourage them to get their partners into treatment. As it turns out, testing positive isn't motivation enough.

One of the things that many parents are concerned about is that, if they have the sex talk with their kids, answering their children's sex questions will encourage them to go out and have sex. Fortunately, and unsurprisingly, research on comprehensive sex education in schools shows that that simply isn't true.

When you talk to your kids about making smart sexual choices, practicing safe sex, and the emotional and physical risks of sexual behavior, it doesn't encourage them to go out and start experimenting. They don't start having sex earlier than kids who haven't gotten their Sex 101 course, and they don't have more sex partners. What they do become more is likely to practice safe sex and less likely to end up pregnant or with an STD.

Start out as you intend to continue, that's what I always say, and it's as true for practicing safe sex as it is for anything else. When people get into the habit of using condoms and other barriers from the very first time they have sex, it's easier for them to practice safe sex consistently through their sexual lifespan.

Don't believe me? A 2007 study in the American Journal of Public Health, which followed more than 4,000 teens for an average of 7 years, found that teens who used condoms from the very first time they had sex were 30% more likely to have used condoms the last time they had sex and half as likely to have ever been infected with chlamydia or gonorrhea.

According to the CDC's Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance Survey (YRBSS), in 2007 almost one third of high school girls had tried out sexual intercourse by the end of ninth grade. Nearly 70 percent had had intercourse by the time they finish 12th grade.

It's time to face the fact that teens have sex, and many of them start doing so before they even get into high school. The same survey found that four percent of girls and 10 percent of boys have sexual intercourse for the first time before the age of 13.

In other words, if you wait to have the sex talk until your kids are teenagers, it may already be too late to help them start off their sexual lives on the right foot.

It's not always easy for kids to say no. Peer pressure can be hard to resist, whether it's pressure to smoke, cheat on tests, or have sex.

In some groups of teens, certain types of sexual activity are status boosters. It requires a solid dose of self confidence for a young girl to say "no" to sex when all her friends are telling her that it's the cool thing to do or when her boyfriend is threatening to leave her if she doesn't do what he wants.

Building that kind of self confidence takes time. It requires a girl to like herself enough to do what is best for her, even when it won't make her the most popular girl in school. Having supportive parents can help her get there.

The idea of a virginity pledge is simple: Teens promise to remain sexually abstinent. Sounds harmless, right? Unfortunately, virginity pledges may be anything but.

Programs that focus on virginity and abstinence pledges frequently do so at the expense of talking about both the practical ways to make sex safer and how to make smart sexual decisions. They tell students to say "no," but don't give them the tools to make that choice in their own life.

Worse, virginity pledges often cause students to focus on pregnancy as the sole negative outcome of pre-marital sex. This can encourage them to try alternative sexual practices - like anal and oral sex - which won't get them pregnant but may put them at increased risk of STDs.

Many parents' nightmare is that their daughter will come home one day and announce that she's expecting.

According to the CDC's final birth data for 2006, the birth rate among 15- to 19-year-old girls was 41.9 births per 1,000 teens. Most of those births were in older teens, but 15- to 17-year-olds still had a birth rate of 22 per 1,000. That's a much smaller number than the 250 out of 1,000 girls who have an STD, but it's still a serious problem.

Teenage pregnancies can be prevented, but not by parent's wishful thinking. Girls who are sexually active need to be counseled about contraceptive options, something less likely to happen if they're afraid to tell their parents it's something they need.

It may seem like the most common STDs aren't such a big deal. After all, they're so often asymptomatic that many girls won't know that they're infected for years... so why are they something that parents need to worry about?

When left untreated, seemingly innocuous little STDs like chlamydia and gonorrhea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility. If a young woman becomes sexually active early in her teens, but doesn't start getting screened for sexually transmitted diseases until she's an adult, a seemingly mild STD could scar her for life.

It may be hard to talk about safer sex and the birds and bees with your daughter, but it's important - especially since young women can be particularly susceptible to certain infections.