Maybe because they intuitively sense (as I certainly did at that age) that a lot of the shit we tell them "for their own good" is just us trying to make up for our own retrospectively perceived failings? We look at ourselves and think, "I'm not where I'd like to be, I haven't accomplished what I wish I'd accomplish," and we embark on a program of self-examination to determine why. We look at the foolish things we did as teenagers and conclude that they are the cause of our failure to live up to our potential. It's almost certainly a massive
post hoc leap of fallacy to assume that if we'd just consumed a couple of fewer adult beverages, kissed a couple of fewer girls, and gotten a few more hours of sleep, that we'd be farther along in life; but that's the most convenient explanation our heuristic minds can concoct, so that is what we settle on. And then we try to impose it on our kids. But our kids can sense the falsity and shallowness of our analysis.
And they're probably right. A sociologist once observed that the Christian Right's biggest triumph came in going secular and convincing the world of the evils and dangers of sex.
A number of research studies have shown that young people who engage in these behaviors (in particular, premarital sexual activity) are no more likely to be unsuccessful in life than abstinent teenagers, and in fact, a few have indicated that experimental teenagers may actually turn out to be better-adjusted adults overall. One longitudinal study of tens of thousands of sexual-abuse victims, released in the late 1990s, caused a media uproar with its conclusion that there is no evidence that, as a group, victims of sexual abuse show long-term negative effects -- and that in fact, on the whole, they may actually turn out to be socially better adjusted than their peers. The reaction to this study was so vehement that Congress actually passed a joint resolution condemning it, not on methodological but purely on ideological grounds, and it faded into obscurity.
Likewise, there is no evidence that becoming pregnant as a teenager condemns one to a life of poverty (again, the research indicates the opposite,that teenage parents often have slightly higher-than-average incomes), but all we ever see in the media are images of poverty-stricken "welfare mommas." Of course, what no one ever stops to think is that those women were not condemned to welfare by getting pregnant -- they made the conscious decision to live off the welfare system as their primary mode of livelihood. I know plenty of college students at my university alone who have children, and most of them have impeccable GPAs.
Last year over 30% of children in the United States were born to unwed mothers. Are you going to tell me all these women are condemned to lives of poverty? What an insulting assumption to make!
Even as far back as the early 1970s (that's when my encyclopedia was written, so I'm guessing the research was released earlier), research showed that the trauma associated with consensual childhood sexual abuse resulted not from the physical experiences themselves -- which the majority of children confessed to finding pleasurable! -- but to the fiascoes surrounding the discovery of the abuse: horrified parents, lamenting relatives, medical examinations, photographs, police interrogations, court questioning, media exposure. It was these traumatic experiences -- the misguided attempts to help -- that left the lasting scars, not the experience of being fingered by the 16-year-old boy across the street. Obviously, we're not talking about rape here.
Am I advocating teenage irresponsibility? No. But I do know my parents' frantic attempts to shield me from sex simply drove me underground and cultivated in me a morbid curiosity about and obsession with sex. I'm convinced now, looking back on it, that if I'd been allowed a little harmless outlet, instead of being forced to keep it all pent up, I'd have been a much better adjusted person when I first hit college in 1999. And the research would back me up on that.