Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex

"I love this book. Amy Schalet compares how Dutch and American families manage their teenagers’ emergence into sexual adulthood. “Not under my roof” is the parental refrain we hear in America when people talk about teens having sex. “Not under my roof” is a denial of young people’s sexual citizenship. It means on a park bench or in a car instead. In the same way that Risky Lessons points out the role of educational institutions in informing sexual citizens, Not Under My Roof Lifts up the crucial role that families have in acknowledging young people’s sexual citizenship. There’s no more powerful way that parents can convey their message that they want their child to have a relationship in which desire and emotional connection and respect and care are part of the same package than allowing them to have sex at home once they’re ready. That means when your kid has a partner in a caring relationship who they want to bring home for dinner, that partner can stay for breakfast. I can tell you from experience, that is the most awkward cup of coffee you’ll ever have but it’s walking the walk. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Schalet’s message about how parents fail to provide a moral education around sex is important. In the United States, children become sexually active when they’re 17, on average, which means some have sex at 15 and others when they’re 19. If parents look away and refuse to acknowledge that fact, they’re allowing pornography to form their children’s sexual values. Children are going to get their sexual values somewhere. So, the question for parents is are you going to let pornography and popular media be the foundation of your child’s values around sexuality and intimacy or are you going to step up? The limitation of Schalet’s analysis is that it’s comparing white middle class people in one country to white middle class people in another country. In Sexual Citizens , we tried to look at student experience from the full range of backgrounds that comprise the Columbia-Barnard undergraduate student body. We show how whiteness operates socially and sexually. I can’t think of other books to recommend."

"It’s a terrific book because it points to a really important difference in the values of, I would say, most American parents and most native-born Dutch parents (I want to emphasise that most of the people she interviewed grew up in Holland and so are immersed in its culture). It points to a fundamental difference in the way these two groups approach the question of teenage sexuality. To most Americans it is a danger zone. Adolescents are very loth to communicate with their parents about it precisely because it is so charged and the communications themselves are deeply charged, and very negative. I thought of Schalet’s book when I was on an aeroplane the other day and was doing something I don’t usually like to do which was read my own book—I was going to give a talk about it and I’d forgotten what it said. This guy sitting next to me saw the book had condoms on the cover and he saw what the subject was and we started talking. The guy’s got a teenage daughter and the story he tells me is really confirmatory of Schalet’s thesis. He says his sixteen year old comes home one day and says ‘I’m dating this guy and I really like him and I think I’m going to sleep with him’ and he doesn’t say anything, he just says ‘let’s get in my truck.’ They drive to the poor part of town where the people live in trailers. He doesn’t say anything, he just drives through the trailer park and at the end the kid says ‘OK Dad, I get it, let’s go home.’ So what’s been communicated here? It’s all about the danger of the act and that if you engage in the act these are the negative consequences that might ensue. I think that’s precisely the value that’s communicated in so many American homes, which is precisely why there’s so little communication about the question. What Schalet finds in Holland is that this is not the case. The book is called Not Under My Roof because the larger point is that, in Holland, people want it under their roof. That promotes much more communication and I think, ironically in a way, much tighter families and much stronger—to use a loaded term—family values precisely because the issue is less charged and more openly discussed. It doesn’t break families apart, it makes them closer. The thing about the American model is: after that car ride my friend on the plane described, if the girl decides she’s going to have sex, she’s not telling Dad. In fact, she’s never going to talk to him about it again! He’s made his own position clear, so what else is there to talk about? I think Schalet’s larger point is that he’s also not going to meet the guy. Why would he? The teenagers are going to have to be completely surreptitious about who they are and what they do. It’s harder to discredit them when you actually listen. It’s harder to render them as products of impersonal forces: immigration, industrialisation, urbanisation. Those forces are real but I think the larger point is that we’re not rocks or fish, we’re people. We all react to them and negotiate them in different ways. The effects are enormous. I should tell you—to use a very personal story—they were for me. My Mum was a family planning educator and when I was about sixteen years old she showed up with big bags of condoms that she bought home from the office. This is in about 1976 or so, a long time ago. She says ‘I don’t know what you and your friends are doing, but if it involves that it’s got to involve this.’ I did a lot of dumb stuff as a teenager growing up in the seventies, I’m not alone in that. But the one dumb thing I never did is I didn’t have unprotected sex. So there’s got to be a reason for that and I’ve got enormous respect for the way my Mum bought me up on this question. I think it absolutely influenced the way that I think and behave and the way that I’ve raised my own daughters. But, again, it’s not about me: that’s my own story and it made sense for me. But I think all of us have to resist the impulse to think that what worked for us will be and should be normative for somebody in another part of the country or in another part of the world."