In one of the courses I enrolled in college, I was once part of a group assigned to make a documentary film on pre-marital sex and its attendant problem, teenage pregnancy. I hated my teacher for that because filmmaking, or so I thought, is reserved only for MassComm students. What has an education student got to do with filmmaking? But the hate was supplanted by appreciation, for the exercise gave me an opportunity to take a glimpse of the life of a teenage mother.
If there’s anything I learned from the documentary we made, even though it’s amateurish by any acceptable standards, it is this: Sex is a make or break experience—make because it can give instant euphoria; break because it can wreak endless havoc especially to young people who are adventurous and in constant search for excitement.
Do most of the youth know it?
I guess not. In an attempt to live their lives the way they saw fit, seldom do they listen to their parents. And that’s I believe where the problem lies. Where parents counsel against pre-marital sex, the youth experiment on it. They delude themselves into believing that parental advice is what they needed the least. They rather would listen to their friends or to somebody else but their parents. As a result, they fall prey onto their reel world.
To avoid that sorry state, I think the youth need to have a knowledge especially on so sensitive a matter as sex—one that is based on real life experience, not on reel life that reeks of fairytales and false promises.
What better way to have it than to simply listen to our parents. They can teach us lessons that we need to learn before we plow ahead. They may sometimes nag, but their views and opinions are undoubtedly more honest compared to others.
I remember my mother used to tell me not to have a girlfriend just yet, until I finish college. Now I am about to graduate, my mother still echoes the same message, this time with a different condition: No girlfriend just yet, until I have a stable job. Of course, it’s a tall order, and my mother knows it is. Yet she insists. There’s nothing wrong, she told me, to have a girlfriend. But the problem is, given the daredevil attitude of today’s youth and the present milieu in which they live, having a girlfriend would open the floodgates of possibilities. That includes impregnating someone else at an early age.
I keep my mother’s advice because I know she’s not speaking out of the vacuum. She knows whereof she speaks. She experienced it herself, having dropped out of college, passed through a couple of miscarriages and spent most of her life rearing four children.
I can not deny that my generation is described as adventurous, daring, and wants to live a- me-against-the-world life — defying authorities, reversing time-honored traditions of society and experimenting on things that seemed unthinkable to the grown-ups. However different our generation might be from the generations now past, we can still learn from them. The sheer boldness of our spirit does not make us any better. As far as they are concerned, we are still relatively inexperienced. But many of us would still insist on doing their own thing—of having sex—without listening a word or two from people closest to us: our parents. It’s a little wonder, then, why the rate of teenage pregnancy is on the rise and why it is becoming more of a norm than a taboo.
When the youth seemed to blur the line that divides the two worlds—the reel and the real world—parental guidance is indeed recommended. After all, our parents also went through the same period of wondering and wandering. They’ve been there, done that.
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