Tips for Talking a Teen Daughter About Sex as a Single Father

Everyone knows that they need to have the sex talk with their teen eventually but having to have the talk with your teen when you are a single father can make the talk even more difficult.

Since you didn’t go through the same changes during puberty that your daughter is going to, it can be hard to know how to have the talk with her.

Sit down and take the time to consider what you are going to say before you have a talk with her. You need to be sure you are ready to answer questions and ready to hear anything that she has to say to you. The following guide provides a few tips that you can use to make the talk a bit easier.

Do Research before the Talk

The last thing you want to do is have the talk without any proof of what you are saying. Taking the time to do research to make sure that you can back up any claims that you make could better your chances of getting through to your teen.

When we are teenagers, we often think that our parents are out of touch with what’s going currently because of how much older they are. Your teenager will more than likely think that you don’t know what you are talking about and ignore your advice if you can’t show her facts about the claims you make.

Print out statistics, graphs and even diagrams if you think that it will help you to explain the things you want to tell her in an easy to digest format.

Don’t Try to Scare Her

Many parents make the mistake of trying to use a “scared straight” approach. They think that showing their children pictures of the damage that STDs can cause will help them to be able to scare their teen so badly that they won’t have sex any time in the near future.

This approach doesn’t often work with teens. You don’t want your teen to fear you. You want her to feel comfortable coming to talk to you about anything that happens in her life so that she doesn’t have to go through scary situations on her own.

Try connecting with your daughter and explaining to her in the most positive way possible why she should wait to have sex.

Try to Educate Her About Her Body

During puberty, your daughter will go through a lot of changes physically, as well as emotionally. These changes can often send her on an emotional roller coaster that she doesn’t understand.

You need to let her know that the changes she experiences are completely normal and that she doesn’t have to worry. Be sure to help her understand how and why her body is changing and prepare her so that she knows what to do when she starts her period.

It’s best to have pads in the house readily available for your daughter to use on the day that she starts. It’s best to start young teens off using pads instead of tampons because they are often not responsible enough to remember to replace their tampons often enough to prevent them from getting sick.

If a tampon is left in the body for too long, it can lead to toxic shock syndrome. This can cause major illness and thus it’s best to wait to allow your teen to use tampons until you feel she is ready for the responsibility of tampon usage.

Explain How Easy it is to Get Pregnant

Most teens are knowledgeable about how sex really works. They assume that it is a joyful experience like what they see on television and that they can have sex without having to worry about getting pregnant as long as the man doesn’t ejaculate inside of them.

It’s important to let your daughter know that she can get pregnant from precum and that the only way to truly protect herself from pregnancy is to practice abstinence. You also want to give her peace of mind that if she were to get pregnant that she can come to you and talk to you about it.

Pregnancy health is essential for the mother and the child to have the best chances at a healthy birth possible. If your daughter feels that she can’t talk to you she could try to hide the fact that she is pregnant from you until the baby is delivered. This could create a very dangerous situation because neither she nor your future grandchild would get the medical care that they need during the pregnancy.

STDs Can be Spread Through More Than Sex

Many teens don’t know that they can get STDs without having sex. They don’t know that oral sex can lead to the transmission of STDs and that many of them aren’t treatable. You need to explain to your child what the different STDs are, how they are contracted and how they are or are not treated.

 Knowing that they could come into contact with someone who has an STD without having any visual signs of it could be enough to deter them from having sex with someone casually.

You also want to be sure that your child knows that she can come and talk to you if she feels that she has been violated in any way. You need to instill in her that her body is her own. She doesn’t have to do anything with anyone unless she truly wants to. Let her know that there is nothing that she could wear or situation she could put herself in that would justify someone doing something to her that she didn’t want to do.

Tell her that she can say no to any action that makes her uncomfortable and that having sex with someone doesn’t mean that they love her. She needs to know that someone who loves her will wait to show their love in that particular way.