Free Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex by Amy T. Schalet Page B

intercourse. She hopes that when the time comes, it will be “more than only that.” If it were “like in a brief con- tact with a girl or boy, then that would trouble me. Because I hope that for them it means more than a brief fling, that it is more than that. But if they really have something special with someone and then it happens, well then who am I?”
    Parents who belong to the upper-middle class typically draw distinc- tions based on the quality of the interaction between partners rather than on the duration of the relationship. In fact, as we will see later on, some professionally employed mothers have misgivings about relationships that are too steady. Daphne Gelderblom supports sex education at school as long as it is about relationships and not “sex pure . . . I think the relation- ships—learning to interact with each other, learning to understand each other—that I think is excellent.” Christien Leufkens is more liberal than most: had her son or daughter wanted to start such experimenting in their mid-teens, Christien would have let them “as long as they think that they
    can do it in a good way.” She explains that a “good way” means: “You are careful with each other. That is really important, that they simply take each other into account, and that it is not the case that one of them has a pain- ful experience.”
    “A good way” of relating not only determines whether parents approve of their children’s sexual activities. It also determines whether or not they will permit the sleepover. Granting her daughter such permission depends, Corinne van Zanden says, on “who it is and what [the relationship] is and how he is. Where he comes from doesn’t matter a bit to me.” What does matter to her is “how they behave toward one another.” Notably, like Marga Fenning at the start of the chapter, several mothers apply the same criteria of relationship-based sexuality to their sons: Jacquelien Starring would have serious objections if her son Hans were to “do it with that one and then that one and. . . . But if it is a girlfriend that he has known a bit longer . . . and she comes over to our house, and she sleeps over. I don’t think I would have problems with that.” Nienke Otten experiences the sleepover as a bit of a stretch, but she explains “you permit it when you see that they really care about each other, that it isn’t just a passing fancy.”
    But while parents like Nienke Otten are heartened to see their children form relationships which are not just “passing fancies,” they do not neces- sarily expect those relationships to last forever. Dutch parents do not want to see teenagers form “mini marriages.” They want to see sex embedded in connections that are mutually nourishing. And before permitting the sleepover, most want to have formed a relationship with the partner in question. But they recognize that young people often learn to relate well through a succession of romantic relationships before they are ready to settle into a life-long romantic attachment.

(Self)-Regulated Sexuality
    A third frame that recurs through the Dutch interviews is that of self- regulation. Parents describe their teenage children as capable of being self- regulating sexual actors. They illustrate this confidence in their children’s capacity for self-regulation with their use of the term er aan toe zijn , which translates as “being ready.” Their use of the term demonstrates an assump- tion that young people are the best judges of when they are ready, although it is the job of parents to remind their children, especially daughters, not to do anything before they feel ready as well as to take the precautions neces- sary to be ready.
    Katinka Holt believes being ready is “whenever they feel it themselves, ‘I am er aan toe .’ And really feel ‘Now I dare do it.’” She told her sixteen-year- old daughter Marlies not to do it because “the other person wants it, but because you