The age of younger sex

Editor's note: Alterations were made to this story after it was published in print and online to address a miscommunication between the reporter and a teenage source.

It was a love story of miniature proportions. Ashlie Cumpton and her kindergarten hubby bragged they were boyfriend and girlfriend. They even kissed to prove it to the other kids on the playground. Six years later, the couple had their first date. In another year and a half, it got serious.

Ashlie was less than a week shy of her 13th birthday when she made love to her first boyfriend for the first time. But in a way, she was much older.

As a nurse practitioner warned her parents, Tracy and Keith Lewis, Ashlie wasn’t likely to act her age. As early as 9, her body and her mind trampolined their daughter into ripe adolescence, and suddenly the Lewises found themselves on the receiving end of a safe-sex talk.

“I’ve never hid anything from my parents,” Ashlie, now 15, said. So when she made the decision to have sex, Tracy and Keith were the first to know. And they weren’t happy.

They asked Ashlie to reconsider, to wait, to abstain. But given the choice of ignoring or protecting their daughter’s sexual health, they nervously chose the latter.

“First, I asked them to explain anything I didn’t know,” Ashlie recalled.

Then Tracy bought a pack of condoms, tore the wrapper and explained the steps to her daughter. “Watch him put it on,” Tracy urged, tugging the latex. “Don’t just let him do it, watch him. Make sure he pulls the tip.”

Like it or not, the Lewises were raising a sexually active teen. Keith brushed up on the pros and cons of hormonal contraceptives. Tracy took her daughter for annual checkups at the Family Health Center.

The decision to switch Ashlie’s birth control from semi-annual injections to the patch was made as a family, just as they negotiated chore schedules or school dance outfits.

What separates the Lewises from many other Missouri parents grappling with their child’s sexual development is that they talk about it. A lot.

Nearly half of American teens ages 15 to 18 are sexually active, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in its 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

The poll, conducted every other year, found that in Missouri, the percentage of sexually active teens is slightly higher than the national average. In fact, of the sexually active teens in Missouri, 15 was the most common age to have sex for the first time.

That’s about the same age students first face their health teachers’ district-sanctioned pleas for abstinence.

In many schools, it’s also when students first learn about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS.

Navigating through adolescence is no easy feat for children; nor for their parents. Both boys and girls today reach puberty earlier than ever before — the average age that American girls get their first period is 12, compared with 14 or 15 a century ago.

Some parents, such as the Lewises, consider puberty a warning bell to start talking about sex.

Other parents say they feel uncomfortable or uninformed and leave the talking to others.

There is no shortage of sources. Beyond media messages and homeroom whispers, teens get sex guidance from health teachers, doctors, youth pastors and guest speakers from local health departments, crisis pregnancy centers and Planned Parenthood.

Maureen Coy, a social service specialist with the Columbia/Boone County Health Department, said ninth-grade health class — the typical age for sex education in the Columbia Public School District — is too late for an intervention. Every six months, Coy piles her stacks of pamphlets into a room at the Activities and Recreation Center and awaits the crowd.

Since 2003, she’s hosted Hot Topic Nights, a series of after-school seminars targeted at middle school and junior high teens.

In lesson three last fall, students gasped through a graphic slide show of sexually transmitted diseases and debriefed with a role-playing exercise.

Coy handed out name plates and asked the labeled teens to read from their signs.

“Let me introduce myself,” said a petite girl twirling the tie string on her jacket. “I’m gonorrhea. I can be cured with antibiotics.”

“My itching and burning sores will show up 20 days later,” a shy, shaggy-haired boy murmured. “I will go away, but don’t worry. I will show up again, over and over again. And don’t forget my cousin, oral herpes.”

Syphilis, played by a lanky, embarrassed girl, burst out laughing, infecting everyone from genital warts to chlamydia. Then the diseases spread across the room and blended in with the other teenagers.

Pledging purity

In November, Ashlie crowded in to Coy’s classroom along with 20 of her peers, grabbed a plastic neon yellow bracelet and took a seat in the back of the room. Pretty soon, most of the students flashed the fluorescent bands across their wrists.

On the inside the bracelets declare “I pledge to keep myself pure by pursuing a sexually abstinent lifestyle until marriage,” and leave room for a signature.

Two girls from West Junior High School scribbled their names and fastened the plastic seal for each other.

“I don’t do that nasty stuff,” one of them giggled.

Her friend spread her fingers into a “Star Trek” V and pounded it against her chest. “Virgin. Represent!” Their giggles betrayed an adolescent ambivalence about wanting to appear cool but not knowing which sexual choice would do the trick.

Ashlie crossed out the abstinence line and pledged to use protection until marriage. Then she signed her name.

A study published in June in the American Journal of Public Health found that more than half of the adolescents who said they pledged to abstain denied doing so a year later, often after they had become sexually active.

Based on this and other research like it, many sex educators put little faith in abstinence pledges, while some argue they may even pose a health risk.

“The continued insistence on adolescent abstinence only serves to make condom use and other measures for preventing infection less and less likely, as adolescents are not encouraged to view themselves as sexual and thus take precautions,” argued Chris Mayo, assistant professor of education policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in her 2004 book “Disputing the Subject of Sex.”

Kim Webb, who is now a health educator at MU and who formerly lectured across the state with MU Extension under the department of human development and family studies, found that staying within the boundaries of talking only about abstinence alienated and shamed teens who had been sexually abused.

In addition, a common critique of abstinence-until-marriage programs is that they excludes homosexuals.

Polls consistently show that adolescents appreciate abstinence more when they feel like they’ve chosen it for themselves.

That schools should do more, start earlier and give the latest medical

information without moralizing dominated teen focus groups at the

Columbia/Boone County Health Department in February.

Avis Kopcha of the Boone County Teen Pregnancy Prevention Coalition observed the 30 teens who participated, half of whom were in high school and the other half in junior high.

“All felt education should start earlier,” Kopcha jotted down. “Fourth grade. (They) said that sixth-graders are, ‘giving it up and don’t know what they are doing.’”

Everyone wanted more information about protection and an approach to teen sex that is more updated than “just say no.”

“Kids feel patronized when adults tell them they are too young to be in love or that a person is wrong for them,” Kopcha wrote. The most prevalent complaint among the teens was their health teachers’ discomfort with the topic.

The sex-education debate

Today’s education guidelines require that sex somehow be addressed in the classroom. So the current debate boils down to proponents of comprehensive sex-education programs and abstinence-only advocates.

Abstinence supporters worry that schools might infringe upon the role of parents in guiding their child’s sexual development. Some argue that talking about contraception is permissive and creates a false sense of security against the physical and emotional pain that can accompany sex. And many parents simply find the idea of adolescent sex to be unnerving and dangerous.

Perhaps musician Butch Hancock summed up parental ambivalence best, when he said “sex is the most awful, filthy thing on Earth, and you should save it for someone you love.” The quote reached stardom when it appeared in the “Education of Shelby Knox,” a documentary about a teen sex-ed activist in Texas.

In taking on the dissonant subject of teen sexuality, schools and parents straddle their own ambivalence.

“It’s hard to have gone through a lot in your life and not be preachy,” Kopcha said after the February focus groups, where parents said they needed to be strict and decisive and teens rallied against both.

“The point is not to prevent teens from having sex,” said Elise Link-Taylor, a member of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Coalition. “It’s to make sure that they make responsible choices and are safe.”

Link-Taylor said that blanket policies of abstinence alienate those teens who are already sexually active and need information about protection.

“Well, I guess I’d have to disagree with that,” said Rebecca Chitima-Matsiga, a health department volunteer sitting in on the meeting. “Because these are teens, I think the point is to prevent them from having sex.”

“Well, in an ideal world, all teens would be abstinent and we can all relax,” coalition member Shawna Kelty conceded. “But we can’t avoid the fact that they are having sex.”

Among the entire “at risk” population in Columbia — that is, those at risk for STDs and unwanted pregnancy — almost half of the teens become sexually active before their 15th birthday, according to a Columbia/Boone County Health Department study of 116 local teens last year.

Last year, the coalition branded 65202 the most “at risk” zip code in Columbia for unsafe sexual behavior among teens, and more specifically, for the students of Smithton and Lange middle schools and West and Oakland junior high schools. While struggling to gain attention and class time in schools, the coalition will begin targeting these adolescents in a new after-school program at the Columbia Boys and Girls Club and the Armory Sports and Community Center in the fall.

Ashlie Cumpton doesn’t fit the profile. She wasn’t born to a teen mother. She’s never used drugs or alcohol. She’s a good student, spends Sunday mornings at church and plans to attend MU to study nursing. And as for parent-child communication, well, she couldn’t ask for more.

So why did she have sex? Simply: because she wanted to, and she decided that she was ready.

“I trusted myself enough,” said Ashlie, who has considered Keith her father since before her mother remarried five years ago. “My parents didn’t want me to regret it, and I don’t regret it.”

With that responsibility comes her parents’ power in setting the rules. It used to be that before Ashlie could even say yes to a date, the Lewises had to screen him. Now, they still must meet the guy before Ashlie can leave the house with him. And if Keith or Tracy have objections, their daughter stays home and holds her peace. But that hardly ever happens because, as her parents are quick to note, Ashlie chooses her prospects wisely and has her own adult standards.

For example, if Ashlie decides to have sex, she always backs up her birth control patch with a condom. And she expects her partner to get an STD check before she even considers getting close.

“If you ever want to do anything with me, you must have paperwork showing you’re clean,” she said.

Since she started dating, Ashlie’s had five boyfriends, all doctor-tested and parent-approved.

Reaching out

In October, Ashlie handed her English teacher at Jefferson Junior High School a persuasive essay about starting sex education at an earlier age. The argument made a splash in class, and Ashlie set her mind to a bigger plan: to take to the halls of her junior high with condoms and pamphlets that would read “Not abstinent? Use a condom.” One of Ashlie’s school friends lifted the idea from MTV’s documentary show “High School Stories.” The idea was to fill in the gaps left by their health classes, reaching out to the many students who choose not to wait until marriage.

Planned Parenthood and the Columbia/Boone County Health Department, which offer free condoms, pledged their help.

But what the girls really wanted was their principal’s blessing. They wrote a letter to principal Nyle Klinginsmith, outlining their mission, and waited. And waited.

A few months later, Ashlie flagged down her principal in the hall for a response. Klinginsmith was torn. “You appreciate a kid with that kind of social sense,” he said, recalling their conversation. “But for our students to walk around handing (condoms) out to each other would raise questions.”

In a junior high school, where different students mature differently, he said, not everyone would appreciate the gesture. Also, Klinginsmith noted, the well-intentioned plan would likely draw some loud negative feedback from parents and the community.

Even though Ashlie’s dad supported the project and felt equally frustrated by the principal’s response, Keith said, “It’s controversial. Some people think that by handing out condoms in school, it’s encouraging promiscuity.”

“Not everyone is as advanced as you were,” he said to his daughter.

“Well, you can’t wait until ninth grade when they’re all pregnant,” Ashlie replied.

In Ashlie’s schedule, her friends’ baby showers come as often as school formals. Currently, two of her friends are expecting and one gave birth last month. They didn’t intend to get pregnant, Ashlie explained, but either the condom broke or there was no condom at all in the heat of the moment. And months later, Ashlie’s at the mall shopping for baby gifts.

It’s an age-old tale of young people slipping in one moment’s passion. Still, each story seems fresh when a woman telling it locks her tired eyes on yours, rocks her screaming child and pleads that you avoid her fate.

That’s how K, 28, who asked that her full name not be used, made her debut at a Hot Topic Night about teen pregnancy last spring.

In her arms, she balanced her baby, a diaper bag, a soft drink and a bottle of milk. Coy’s students looked on nervously.

“When you’re a teen and you’re pregnant, you have three choices,” K told the class. “And they’re all painful. And I’ve done all three.”

K was 15 when she got pregnant for the first time. She was too terrified to tell her mom and dad, so she asked a school counselor to break the news. Her parents insisted that she have an abortion, threatening to kick her out of the house if she disobeyed. With the baby’s father then out of the picture, K aborted. When she learned she was pregnant again at 16, K delivered a baby boy and placed him up for adoption. At 18, she gave birth to her first daughter, who is now 9.

The newborn girl in her arms survived the beating K took from the baby’s father, his violent attempt to cause a miscarriage.

With teary eyes, K told the students they should wait to have sex until they find someone they trust, maybe not a spouse, but someone they love, someone who wouldn’t leave them if they got in trouble nor try to beat the problem out of their bodies. It’s the same advice she planned to offer her daughter, at the appropriate time, which she wasn’t expecting for a few years. But as K recalled a recent dinner-table chat, it became clear who commands the time in her house:

“Hey, Mommy,” K’s daughter said one evening after school. “I know how (the baby) got in your belly,”

“You do?”

“Yep,” the girl said.

“The stork put her in there?” K asked.

“No. You had sex.”

K gasped. “Do you know what that means?” she asked her daughter, who went on to describe the mechanics of intercourse. “But, you can get pregnant if a boy kisses you, too,” the girl added.

“I was about to cry the whole time,” K said, but she talked through it. It was more important for her daughter to know that she could talk to her mother about anything. So she did. That night, when K dialed her own mother to share the story, all she got was the familiar snub of her youth.

“I’m not gonna have this conversation with you,” K’s mother announced.

As K lamented the communication gap with her mom, she swore she wouldn’t make the same mistakes with her daughter, just as Tracy once promised to Ashlie the honesty she never had growing up.

And when Ashlie has her own kids — she wants no more than four, and she’d have to finish college first — she plans to do the same.

But that’s the distant future for this incoming sophomore at Hickman High School. Now, Ashlie’s busy counting down the months till her 16th birthday and practicing for her driving test. She’s currently unattached.

Sometimes Ashlie’s parents worry that others might not understand or agree with the way they raise their daughter. They wonder how friends and neighbors might react to their story. Will they judge?

“I hope we’re doing the right thing,” Keith sighed to his daughter as the family lounged in front of the TV one Saturday afternoon.

But in the end, the Keith and Tracy said, when they look at Ashlie’s healthy and happy spark, their doubts subside, even as their worries never do.