Read Online Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex by Amy T. Schalet - Free Book Online

Situation in My House”
    A few miles further out of town, in one of the bedroom communities south of the city, lies the home of Marga Fenning, a part-time nurse, her second husband, a small business owner, and Marga’s children Thomas
    (18) and Rachel (16). A few years older than Jolien Boskamp and dressed more formally in a calf-length skirt, Marga Fenning makes a stately impres- sion. Nevertheless, like Jolien Boskamp, Marga Fenning has permitted her sixteen-year-old daughter Rachel to spend the night with her boyfriend.
    When Rachel’s boyfriend visits, he sleeps on a mattress next to her bed. The arrangement is not entirely to Marga’s liking. She thinks her daughter is too young to have sexual intercourse.

    Yes, last week she came to me, “Mama, I kind of want to go on the pill.” You know, I think that is sensible. I am glad about that. I say, well then you have to go to the doctor. And then we talk about that, of course. [Rachel asked] “Do you think it’s all right. I’m a little scared.” I say, “The doctor will give it to you.” “But what if he thinks I’m too young?” I say, “Rachel he’ll definitely give it to you. That is totally not a problem.” So we went over there together and I stayed in the waiting room. . . . But I did tell her that I think she is much too young.
    Although Marga thinks Rachel is much too young, she did not say, “You may not do it.” The doctor, whom Marga had visited for another matter a little while ago, had strongly recommended this approach. “Never say that they are not allowed to do it,” he had told her. “Because then it will defi- nitely go wrong.” Forbidding is not Marga’s style anyway: “I don’t tell them very quickly that they can’t do something. I always try to talk about things and then usually it works out, you work it out together. And I have to say my daughter is pretty sensible.” And indeed Rachel seems to be steering a cautious course. “I am totally not ready ( er aan toe ) yet,” Rachel told her mother. “But, you know, just imagine that [at some point] I am.” To under- score Rachel’s sensibility, Marga relates a story of Thomas, Rachel’s older brother, teasing her: “When she’s about to go out, he’ll take a condom and say, ‘Here Rachel, take this just to be safe.’ And then she laughs and blushes a little and we also laugh about her, because she won’t take it with her.”
    Although Marga doesn’t usually put her foot down, recently she did. Thomas asked whether a male friend and two girls could spend the night. One of the girls would sleep in his room, the other with his friend in the guest room. After thinking his request over for a few days, Marga decided: “I just don’t want to have such a go-as-you-please kind of situation in my house. So I told him, ‘No, I would not like it if you do that. I won’t feel comfortable in my own house.’” Marga added that she would feel differ- ently if the request concerned his girlfriend:

    I can’t have such an old-fashioned reaction that the girlfriend has to sleep somewhere else. Then I would be fooling myself, because at night they’ll sleep together anyway. [Insisting on two bedrooms] would feel childish. But, if it’s just a girl he’s going out with and next time it’s another girl, and then another girl. No. I don’t find that pleasant. No, I don’t want that.

The Sleepover and the Normalization of Adolescent Sexuality
    In permitting their sixteen-year-old teenage daughters to spend the night in one room with a steady boyfriend, Jolien Boskamp and Marga Fenning are hardly unique. Of the twenty-six Dutch parents interviewed, only two are certain they will not permit a sleepover. The other Dutch parents say that under the right circumstances, they will permit, or consider permitting, a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old teenager to spend the night with a romantic partner. Six have indeed permitted such a sleepover already. How are we to understand this