Speaking of Psychology: How to talk to teen boys about dating and sex

Chances are parents know they need to tell their boys something about sex but aren’t sure where to start. As a result, television, friends and the internet often fill in the gaps, leading to confusion and misconceptions about what it means to be romantic and masculine. In this episode, Andrew Smiler, PhD, talks about his new book, a guide aimed at teen boys, in which he challenges the “myth of manhood,” and gives advice and tips on how to encourage boys to become sexually responsible and mature in their relationships.

Andrew Smiler, PhD, is a therapist and author residing in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Smiler holds a PhD in developmental psychology from the University of New Hampshire and a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Towson University.

Smiler’s latest book is “Dating and Sex: A Guide for 21st Century Teen Boys” (Magination Press). He has also authored more than 20 journal articles and book chapters relating to boys, men, sexual development and identity issues. He co-authored the book “Challenging Casanova: Beyond the Stereotype of the Promiscuous Young Male.” Smiler is an associate editor (2015-2016) of the APA journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity and he was president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity in 2011.

Audrey Hamilton: The sex talk is never an easy conversation. For boys, the questions about sexual consent, average penis size, how to ask someone on a date and how to decide when to have sex are often not asked and thus, unanswered. As a result, boys get their information from the Internet, the movies and their friends and end up coming to their own conclusions about what most guys think. In this episode, we speak with a psychologist about what most guys are really thinking and how that challenges masculine stereotypes. I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is Speaking of Psychology.

Andrew Smiler is a therapist and writer living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A developmental psychologist, Dr. Smiler is the author of the new book “Dating and Sex: A Guide for the 21st Century Teen Boy,” which is published by the American Psychological Association. He has also authored more than 20 journal articles and book chapters relating to boys, men, sexual development and identity issues and is currently an associate editor of the APA journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity. Welcome, Dr. Smiler.

Andrew Smiler: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Audrey Hamilton: So, the common assumption about teen boys is that sex is all they think about, right? All of the time. But there seems to be very little discussion out there about how to talk to boys about sex – romantic relationships. And just being a boy. Juggling various demands in their lives. Based on your research and your work with adolescents, do you think boys want more information that goes beyond your typical school health class? How do they juggle all that’s being thrown at them?

Andrew Smiler: That’s a great question and they absolutely want more information than what they’re getting. First off, we know that only about half of American teens get any kind of sexuality education in their middle schools or high schools. So, there’s a lot of kids that never really have that health class that talks about biology. And we know that most of those health classes don’t talk about relationships at all. At the same time, survey after survey, regardless of whether we’re talking to eighth graders or tenth graders or twelfth graders, about 80-90 percent of teen boys and similar numbers of teen girls tell us that they’ve been in a romantic relationship of some sort. That’s a much higher percentage than the number of kids who have had sex at any given time or any given age. So, there’s a whole lot of dating going on and only a fair amount of sexual activity, of course, the more they get older.

One of the things that I find when I talk to teen boys – one of the things that comes across pretty clearly in the research is that boys don’t have a good sense of understanding about how relationships work. This makes a lot of sense if you look at into the media content that’s geared toward teenage boys and compared to what’s geared toward teenage girls. If you’re watching shows or your sons are watching shows like “The Sweet Life of Zach and Cody” or if they’re watching “Harold and Kumar” or even the Avengers movies –there’s never any point in there where the guys actually talk about how relationships work. Certainly in the “Avenger” movies and “Ironman,” we see Tony Stark having all of these problems with women that he slept with and we get moments of his relationship with Pepper Potts, but there’s no kind of detailed discussion about relationship dynamics, about how does this relationship work. Do I trust you? Why do I trust you? Anything like that. If you look at shows that typically have female audiences, whether we’re talking “90210” or “Gilmore Girls” or “Pretty Little Liars,” that’s a substantial part of the conversation. Do I trust this person? Do I want to be physical with this person? How physical do I want to be with this person? I used to not like this person, now they’re trying to be my friend. How much did I trust them? Should I believe them? So boys are really kind of lacking a whole piece of education around how relationships work that girls get. And boys want that knowledge because they are having relationships and they want to know how they work.

Audrey Hamilton: Your latest book, again “Dating and Sex: A Guide for the 21st Century Teen Boy” is written for boys who are coming to terms with, like you say, the complex sexual world around them. As a therapist, what are some of the most common questions you get about dating and sex? And I’m also curious how parents can use this book as a way to talk with their sons about this?

Andrew Smiler: Wow, those are really good questions and I’m going to try not to get too complicated with the answer. With the boys I work with and even with the adult men I work with, there’s a lot of questions about how do I tell if someone’s interested in me or my partner and I had an argument or things aren’t going so well. How do I fix it? And again for boys, it tends to be about fixing things, because we tend to raise boys to be problem solvers and not so much about how they feel about what’s going on or how they feel about their partner that something’s going on. So as a therapist, I have a lot of conversations around those topics. Again, how do relationships work? How do feelings feed into those relationship dynamics?

One of the ways that parents can use the book is to give them ideas for how to start conversations. The book is written for kind of average, run of the mill teen boys, so there’s acknowledgement of stereotypes – acknowledgement of the things that teen boys get pushed into, like sports. And we know that somewhere north of 60 percent of teen boys play sports. Something like 80 percent follow at least one professional sport. So a number of examples throughout the book of the kinds of things that boys tend to be interested in. This is how a relationship might work in sports but here’s how it might be different if we’re talking about a romantic partner. And parents can use that kind of framework in those examples as they’re having conversations with their sons.

In regard to what are the most common questions that boys have about dating and sex, I actually start the book with an FAQ, a frequently asked questions list. One of the biggest ones that boys ask of any sexuality educator is about penis size. The average is about six inches. There’s much more detail in the book. The FAQ questions get answered in two or three sentences right there in the beginning with additional references to sections later in the book that provide additional detail.

Audrey Hamilton: I imagine the sex question is rather difficult for any parent, really. I know some mothers say, well, should I be having this conversation with my son? Should I leave it to my husband? Or what if I’m a single mom and I don’t have a husband around to help talk to my son about these issues? I’m not sure what your patients, your young patients say about that, but how do you address those types of difficult conversations?

Andrew Smiler: I’m going to start with the parent piece of that one. One of the things the research tells us – I certainly see this as a therapist – is that boys want information from someone that they can trust. For the vast majority of boys, the gender of that person doesn’t really matter. There is a small segment of the teen boy population that really wants that to come from a male. But for most boys, what is much more important than the biology of the person they’re talking to is their trust in that person. Whether or not they’re going to get good information. Whether or not that person is going to respect what the boy says as the conversation progresses.

When it comes to what to talk about regarding sex, we as adults are supposed to work with teens. We need to remember that there’s a large range of behaviors that fall under this umbrella of sex or sexuality, as I tend to refer to it. We can start with where most of our boys start, which is with things like kissing and holding hands and then work up to or down to (depending on how you want to think about it), more physically intimate kinds of sexual contact. But starting with, what does it mean to hold somebody’s hand? What does it mean to kiss somebody in public and kiss them like that in public? How do you know if you’re ready to kiss somebody or if you want to kiss somebody? If we can start with those discussions when our boys are maybe in fifth or sixth grade and there’s often a round of crushes and kind of dating. I remember having to apply to a group of girls to get a kissing license in fifth grade. That was how it worked in my class. That’s the point when we can start this conversation. And if we’re starting by talking about how do you know when you’re ready to hold hands. How do you know when you’re ready to kiss? Then, a couple of years down the road, we’re just changing the specific behavior. How do you know when you’re ready for oral sex? How do you know when you’re ready to be naked in front of somebody? How do you know when you’re ready to have your penis inside somebody? So we can kind of scaffold this and make it a conversation that goes across years, but is really focused on the behavior that seems most likely for the boy to engage in at the time.

Audrey Hamilton: All right. So we’ve gotten to the point now where my teenage son is either having sex or wants to have sex. Maybe he has a girlfriend or a boyfriend. I’m concerned about sexually transmitted diseases or an unwanted pregnancy. I’m guessing the best way to approach this is not to just leave a couple of condoms next to his breakfast. How do parents approach this? I think that’s the really big question. How do you start the conversation?

Andrew Smiler: There is no best way to start that conversation. I don’t think leaving condoms on the table when there’s cereal around is a good idea. Especially if your son puts banana slices in there.

For conversations about protection, conversations about disease or unwanted pregnancies or unplanned pregnancies, there usually isn’t a good way to start it. It’s just going to be an awkward and difficult conversation and what I often tell parents is you got to do it. You know, it is not pleasant but there’s not really a good way to get there. Some parents who watch shows that their teens also watch might be able to find something on one of those shows where they get into that discussion and so it’s kind of an easy opening. If you happen to be watching a show or a movie with your son and a couple is talking about an STI or is talking about an unplanned pregnancy, that’s a fine place – fine starting point for the conversation.

But I think when you’re talking to your son about whether or not he’s ready or not to have sex and some of the implications of having sex with somebody, that’s the time when you also need to talk about protection, because we want our sons to be thinking about protection before they have sex for the first time. Some of the research shows that the kids who use condoms at their first sex are much more likely to continue using condoms regularly than kids who don’t use condoms at their first sexual experience.

Audrey Hamilton: Do you notice when you talk to kids about this if their parents do provide them with condoms, let’s say, or tell them that they should get condoms and how to get them? I think a lot of parents are concerned that they’re giving their consent, as in, okay go ahead, this is fine with mom and dad. And that’s not necessarily the message everyone wants to send, right, I mean to their young son?

Andrew Smiler: That’s a great question. The vast majority of 16 year olds out there are able to handle a kind of two-tiered answer or two-tiered value from their parents. It’s “I really don’t want you to have sex until a certain age or a certain condition, like you’re really in love with the person. But, I understand that you might choose otherwise and if you do, I want you to be safe.”

Audrey Hamilton: I definitely want to talk about consent because this is a very timely and important issue. It’s something – you take a whole chapter to discuss in your book. “No means no” doesn’t seem to be sufficient really in communicating what consent means. How would you advise parents and their boys to discuss the issue of consent? Not just getting consent from someone but giving it, as well?

Andrew Smiler: As we are talking to our boys about what are you willing to do and what are you not willing to do – what are you ready to do – whether we’re talking about are you ready to kiss – are you ready to hold hands or are you ready to put your penis inside somebody – you know, their statement of “I’m ready” or “I’m not ready” reflects their level of consent and then point out and in many ways mandate that they get consent from their partner. You know, you wouldn’t want somebody going inside your body without consent. Why would you think it’s okay to put your tongue or your penis in somebody else’s body without their consent?

And so it kind of becomes where we can make it part of the conversation about how do you know if you are ready. How do you know if your partner is ready? Sexual assault and rape are instances where consent did not happen or where somebody did not respect consent. We know that for both boys and girls, there are a lot of negative psychological effects both in the immediate aftermath and downstream – issues related to PTSD and depression and potentially self-harm in various ways – even suicide.

We also know that there’s a lot less public support and in some ways, professional support for boys who had been sexually assaulted or raped. And that among males who have been sexually assaulted and raped, the average time to disclose that event is somewhere around 20 years. That’s a long time to live with those effects. Yeah, yeah.

Audrey Hamilton: I think there are a lot of things boys are dealing with now that didn’t exist when their parents were teenagers. For example, pornography is more accessible thanks to the Internet. There are sites like Snapchat, Instagram, not to mention the prevalence of sexting. Is all of this changing how men perceive sex and sexual relationships? And if so, how do we address that?

Andrew Smiler: There is a huge change for teens growing up today versus those of us who were teens certainly in the 80s when I was -- but even 15 years ago. We might also talk to our teens about I am going to look at your phone or periodically I should see your phone because you leave it face up when we’re sitting at dinner or whatever. And this is what I want to see or not see on your, on the front screen of your phone because most teens set their phones so that their texts come up right on friends. And we definitely need to talk to our teens – both boys and girls – about pressure that they’re experiencing to send naked pictures or half-naked pictures of themselves, the pressure they may be experiencing to share pictures that they’ve received with other kids because we know that happens and help them weed through kind of what are some of the issues. What are the benefits that I gain from sending a picture like this or getting a picture like this? What are the drawbacks or potential drawbacks because they often don’t have good frameworks for thinking about the different pieces of that, in part because they’ve never been asked or told to think about those different pieces, kind of all in one conversation.

And then there’s porn. We know that porn is produced by adults for adults and good to remind our teens that this is really about adult fantasy and kind of you’re not there yet. We should remind them about what’s missing from those videos. We might talk about what body types are present and not present. Because if you look at the guys in most of those porn videos, they’re all incredibly well built. We might also ask about what do the women’s bodies look like? Because it tends to be that standard Hollywood model body there. We can ask them where’s consent? Where’s the relationship in here? This is not reality.

Audrey Hamilton: Well, Dr. Smiler, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a very interesting conversation.

Andrew Smiler: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be here.

Audrey Hamilton: Thanks for listening. If you want to purchase a copy of Dr. Smiler’s book or if you just want to hear more episodes, please go to our website. With the American Psychological Association’s Speaking of Psychology, I’m Audrey Hamilton.