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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About 9 or 10 years ago, I’ll never forget how shocked I was when I received multiple questions from 8^th 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.

Teen Vogue magazine published a disturbing article in its July 7^th 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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If 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 8^th 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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