“IT’S A TEEN’S WORLD: wired for sex, lies and power trips” illustrates how important it is to talk to your daughter about healthy relationships.

Lynn Glazier’s project “IT’S A TEEN’S WORLD: wired for sex, lies and power trips” gives teens a voice—and they use it to tell us how living in a sexually charged world affects them and influences their choices. The teens made short films about sexual gossip, the pursuit of popularity, and abuse of trust in dating relationships.

“IT’S A Teen’s World” explores the price teen girls pay to be cool, hip and popular in a sexually charged social world. It lets us see what our daughters are not clear about—how to respect themselves and others while getting their needs met, for example, and how to get others to do the same.

I wrote Frog or Prince? The Smart Girl’s Guide to Boyfriends for my own teenaged daughter, with those goals in mind. I wanted her to build herself a beautiful life—meet her own needs, become the person she wanted to be. When we know better, we do better—it’s that simple. In a healthy relationship, her most important needs would be met, there would be heart-to-heart conversations, and the respect—self-respect, respect for others, and the expectation to be treated respectfully—would be mutual.

Glazier’s documentary is a call to action—for parents. First, schools need to address the sexual harassment in their anti-bullying curriculum (mothers, contact your local school administrators and let them hear you roar). Second, we need to help our daughters understand who they are, and how to apply character and respect within this sexually charged culture. Teens today believe they’re different from us when we were teenagers. Yes and no. The challenges shown in the documentary—struggling with identity, lacking character, saying no, standing up for oneself, setting boundaries—are the same ones we faced in adolescence. They’re just exacerbated by the sexually charged teen culture.

Teens can’t make good choices without the self-knowledge and self-respect to do so. How can we mothers help? First, educate your teen about her needs. A big part of self-respect is knowing what our needs and wants are, learning to recognize what it feels like to get them met, and using that self-knowledge to make deliberate choices to meet them.

As the film titled ‘Pursuit of Popularity’ makes clear, teens are confused about how to get their needs met while respecting themselves. An age-old adolescent mistake is to use sex to get love. A newer version, it seems, is using sex to get popularity. Instead of being liked for who she is, what she enjoys, and how she communicates with others, a teenaged girl today might get attention by being “hot,” and willing to do sexually for a guy. Sounds like 15 minutes of popularity to me. 

What makes a girl strong? The fulfillment of her genuine needs: to be familiar with, to accept, to forgive and value herself and another, to expect the same in return. Does she know herself? Say you asked her to describe herself—would she list the same traits you would (funny, thoughtful, dependable, for example)? Probably not. How to help her? Let her know when you see her being dependable, demanding, a good listener, funny, happy, patient, responsible, sensitive, thoughtful, selfish. . .

By looking at her traits, at what she likes and how she communicates with others, she’ll get to know herself better and develop self-respect. The positive consequences? She’ll acquire the strength to resist compromising herself just to fit in with a popular group.

You can also educate your teen about how to get her needs met using character—to say what she means, do what she says, know right from wrong. The film ‘Under Pressure’ about sexual gossip shows how confused teens can be about how to get their needs met while respecting others. Teens make up stories—so-and-so is pregnant, getting an abortion, has already had sex with four guys. Why?—to meet their need to be interesting. Without the sexual gossip, they don’t feel that others are curious about who they are or what they think.

A girl who makes up stories to be interesting, to be more popular, lacks character because she’s compromising her sense of right and wrong. In exactly the same way you guide her to become familiar with herself, guide her to do the same with others. Suggest she ask her friends get-to-know-them questions, or what-they-think-and-feel questions. She’ll probably find that they reciprocate. And that they find her interesting, after all. 

You can also help your daughter set a bar—a standard for how she should treat herself and others, and for how she expects to be treated. Wouldn’t we have made better choices if we’d understood that meeting our own needs engenders self-respect, and that asking (not demanding) to get our needs met engenders respect for others? Or that sticking up for ourselves, making others aware of when they’re not treating us with respect, is a way to respect ourselves?

Talk to your daughter about healthy relationships—it’s important. Help her understand the difference between a Frog and a Prince. Give her healthy relationship criteria to make better choices amid the cultural pressure Glazier’s documentary reveals. Healthy relationship criteria will help her understand her own experiences and those of her peers. They’ll help her learn and grow—and make better choices next time. They’ll help her make choices that align who she is with what she does—and build self-esteem one deliberate choice at a time. And they’ll help her articulate her mixed, confused and hurt feelings in conversations with others—and stand up for herself. 

PS: The TV broadcast “Wired for Sex” was a short version of  “IT’S A TEEN’S WORLD: wired for sex, lies and power trips”.  An enhanced DVD is available for purchase at  http://www.itsateensworld.com/index.htmlpurchase