You may be influenced by what you see on the television or the internet, peer pressure and maybe even your newly found girlfriend or boyfriend.
Additionally your body is going through its own changes and as you hear things from friends which make you seem like an outcast for being a virgin, you are soon tempted to break your virginity to fit in with the crowd or to please that first love.
With this mounting pressure, the biggest challenge of them all is that you are unable to go home and ask a parent about sexual education because of our African cultural restraints of young and old communicating about such issues.
You also don’t go to the clinic as you fear being judged by health practitioners, so the only sexual education you rely on is from your life sciences classes, television shows or your peers.
But wouldn’t it make the world of difference if you were getting this talk on sexual education from your own parent, the same way they had taught you about what menstruation is all about.
That way, you would be getting information from someone who knows what they are talking about, someone with your best interest at heart, and the education would be coming from a place of love, rather than you being led astray by friends who are inexperienced and are of the same age as you.
If as parents we are still going to expect everything to be taught to our children by their teachers or the government then we still have a long road ahead, because though teenage pregnancy and sexual diseases have been there for ages, as years have gone by, we have seen an increase in these social problems.
We need to be honest with ourselves and face that things are not like they were in the past, where children where less experimental or could not question issues.
Don’t get me wrong. As a black child I understand fully that it is important for parents to keep to their roles and for children to know their place, but as parents we need to equip our children with accurate information so that they can be able to make proper decisions out in the world.
Give your child enough accurate information so that you will know that if they still go and do something which is outside your teachings, you have played your role as a parent.
And if your child is not opening up to you as a parent, ask yourself where they are getting their information from, how accurate it is and how that information from the streets is going to affect their present and future.
