Why Cervical Cancer Awareness Month Matters to Your Teen Daughter

cervical cancer awareness month

Of all the STDs that I discuss with teens and parents, HPV is the STD they know the least about.

I want to make sure that's not the case for you and your daughter.

Not to mention, January is Cervical Cancer Awareness Month and the two go hand in hand.

How so?

According to the CDC, the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) causes most cervical cancers.

And Cervical Cancer is the most common HPV-associated cancer among women. 

But please don't think this is an issue that only adult women have to worry about.

The fact is HPV and cervical cancer can impact your daughter too.

What you don't know could hurt her!

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Three A+ Tips to Help Your Daughter Have a Distraction-Free School Year

Mother and Daughter

Time to kick-off the new school year with my #Back2School with Jackie B blog post series!

I am as excited about this series as I am about returning to the classroom.

Why? Because I get to share strategies you can use to help prepare your daughter for life at school.

Like the following three A+ tips you can implement to help your daughter focus on what's important and steer clear of distractions. Especially the "cute" kind. smiley

1. Help her write a vision and create goals.  

I find it counter-productive to tell students they should abstain from sex until they get married or even hold off until they’re adults, without helping them envision what they want their future to look like.

When teens can visualize what they stand to gain in the future (achieving their goals), they’re much more receptive to putting off unnecessary distractions in the present (having sex).

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#Back2School Burdens or Blessings: Which Will Define Your Daughter’s Year?


back to school after summer vacations, two teen real girls in classroom with blackboard painted together close up

Wow! It’s hard to believe that next week, July 31st to be exact, is the first day of school in the two counties where I spend most of my days speaking.

My how times have changed! Never in a million years could I have ever imagined starting school in July.

The teachers like to spend several weeks with the students before I come in to speak, which means I still have a few more weeks to get my voice ready for the four to six hours of speaking each day.

As the new school year begins, I’m looking forward to seeing the light bulb go off on teens faces when they hear a truth for the first time, causing them to connect the dots between their current choices and their future realities.

Most importantly, I’m looking forward to seeing how God will continue to answer all our prayers over the next school year. You know the prayers that I’ve been requesting from you over the years?

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It’s Not Responsible. It’s Not Fashionable. Anal Sex is Risky Teen Behavior!

About 9 or 10 years ago, I’ll never forget how shocked I was when I received multiple questions from 8th grade girls at a private middle school about the safety of anal sex.

They wanted to know whether they would still be a virgin and whether they could get pregnant by having anal sex.

Fast forward to today and it’s difficult for teens to shock me with any question they ask.

They’re teens. Their brains aren’t fully developed.  Which means they don’t always associate the potential consequences with their behaviors.

I do however continue to be shocked when I hear or read about adults encouraging risky sexual behavior, as was the case recently.

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Teen Vogue magazine published a disturbing article in its July 7th issue titled, "Anal Sex: What You Need to Know (How to do it the RIGHT way)."

Yes, you read that correctly. An article normalizing anal sex in a magazine specifically written and marketed to teen girls.

In case you don’t have time to read the entire article, the following gives you an idea of what it says:

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Consider the Cost: How to Teach Your Teen Freedom is Never Free. Especially When It Comes to Sex

Happy 4th of July!

Any American like myself, celebrating  “Independence Day,” should know our “independence” has and always will come with a price.

Soldiers sacrifice their lives for us to have our freedom. So, freedom is never truly FREE!

The Lingering Costs of Sexual “Freedom”

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During the 1960’s there was another  “freedom movement” called the Sexual Revolution. At the time there were only two sexually transmitted infections that we knew about, gonorrhea and syphilis. Today, there are 25+ known STIs/STDs.  This generation is paying the price for all of the sexual freedom that was ushered in during the 1960’s.

I share the above in the classroom before I begin to speak with the students about the cost they may have to pay for the sexual decisions they make during their teen years.

A few months ago, I received the following email through my website:

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Can You Really Teach Selflessness to the Selfie Generation?

The answer is yes, you can! Granted, selflessness is not a topic students expect to hear when they take my Sex-Ed class, but I’ve found it to be quite effective once I break it down for them.

Teen Sex is as Selfishness Does

Every school year I introduce a new approach that becomes the focus for my classes. Last year it was selfishness vs selflessness.

As with tackling any new approach, there are a couple steps I take to introduce it:

  1. Define the Approach/Idea. I always like to begin with a definition that students can understand on their level.

“Selfish is when you make a decision that benefits you even though it hurts someone else.”

Sometimes even concepts that adults deem “simple” are anything but for teens, so I never assume they already know what I mean.

  1. Paint the picture. Let’s face it, when it comes to talking about teen sex there’s not a lot of “painting” required. Oh they get it!

But as you’ll see in the clip below, I do paint the picture of the selfishness of teen sex, especially given the very real possibility of a baby being conceived. Despite what some reality shows would have teens to believe, teen parenting is never ideal for the baby or the parents.

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The Gift that Will Benefit the High School Graduate for Life

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Wondering what to get for all of those high school (HS) graduates you’ll be receiving invitations from? Well, what better choice than a gift that is one-part knowledge, two-parts inspiration and motivation? My two DVDs, The Sex Talk Every Teen Girl Needs to Hear and The Sex Talk Every Teen Guy Needs to Hear, would make the perfect gift for your HS grad.

As I’m getting ready to go to college, I think this information is even more important. Reading tweets, articles, and hearing personal accounts of many college students makes it seem like you have to have sex in college if you want to be in a relationship. Since I never had a boyfriend in high school, I was looking forward to one in college. Thank you for reminding me that sex isn’t necessary. –High School Senior

Just because they are graduating, doesn’t mean they have to stop learning. As a matter of fact, there are some things they especially need to learn before they embark upon this next phase of their lives—called college.

It’s all in the preparation

They need to know how to navigate in an environment where they’ll have newfound freedom, a party scene complete with exposure to drugs and alcohol, and let’s be real—plenty of opportunities to have sex.  So often as their loved ones, we focus our attention and hard-earned dollars on our high school grad’s physical preparation for college (i.e. comforters and microwaves for their dorm, shopping for clothes). And while those are all great and needed, we often overlook their social preparation, which is equally important to their success in college. How confident are you that your incoming freshman is going to make healthy choices when it comes to his/her college relationship(s)?

Why is it so important for them to be armed with the information and tools to make good choices when it comes to their relationships?

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Scared Straight? Why it Doesn’t Work for Sex

istock Scared StraightIf you’re a woman, I’m sure you can relate to having a bad hair day and all you can manage to do is throw on a baseball cap when you leave the house. Well I had one of those days today, only to have the clerk at the Post Office look closely at me underneath the cap and say, "Hey, you're the 'Sex Lady' trying to hide underneath a cap." [Actually, the only thing I was trying to hide was my “misbehaving” hair.]

After asking about my latest stories from the classroom, she asked me for advice on how to educate her rising 8th grade daughter about sex.  Her plan was to show her daughter pictures of a visibly diseased penis so she would be too afraid to have sex. She asked if I thought this was a good idea.

Don’t judge a penis by its “cover.”

I told her (as I'll tell you); the first problem with showing pictures of visibly diseased reproductive organs is that a person can be contagious from an STD without any outward symptoms. Is her daughter to assume that as long as a guy’s penis doesn’t look like the one in the picture, he doesn’t have an STD? Unfortunately, that is the message that many teens receive when pictures of visibly diseased genitals are used as a teaching tool. In reality, many times the person with the STD doesn’t even know he or she is infected because they haven’t seen any outward symptoms.

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Three Reasons Teen Girls Stay Instead of Walking Away!

conflict and emotional stress in young coupleHave you ever wondered why teenage girls stay in unhealthy relationships?

A recent conversation with a young lady after class provides some insight.

She waited until everyone else left and came back to speak with me. It took her a while to speak because she was trying unsuccessfully to fight back tears. I held her as she cried and I repeated, “Whatever it is, you’re going to be okay!”

She finally pulled herself together enough to speak and said,

Thank you for speaking to my class! Hearing you speak made me realize that I need to end a 2 ½ year relationship with my boyfriend. He pressured me into having sex about 9 months after we started dating. Even though he wasn’t a good guy, I felt like I had to have sex with him to keep him around. I gave him so many chances even when he lied to me and cheated on me. He even gave me an incurable STD and I stayed with him.

Last summer I was diagnosed with HPV, the strain that causes cervical cancer. I’ve already had my cervix scraped twice because the pre-cancer cells had returned. My doctor says I will have to be monitored for cervical cancer the rest of my life.

Listening to you talk about how a guy treats a girl that he really loves made me realize that he never really loved me. I just wish I had heard you before I made the decision to have sex with him. It’s not going to be easy, but I know what I have to do now.

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Is the Goal to Reduce Teenage Pregnancies or Teenage Sex?

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You may have read in the news about the decision in New York City to make Plan B emergency contraceptive available to any public high school student without her parents’ knowledge, as long as her parent did not opt out of the program.

This program was rolled out in five New York City public high schools in January 2011.  By September 2012, the program had been expanded to 13 public high schools. Today, the program is in more than 40 public high schools in New York City.

Last semester, I decided to ask students what they thought about the idea of making Plan B emergency contraceptive available confidentially to high school students.  

At the beginning of each class on the first day, I passed out a slip of paper with the following question on it:

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