Finding the Right Words: Talking with your Teen About Sex

Hillary Ibarra reviews Julia Sadusky’s excellent Catholic resource for talking with your teens about sex. 

Talking with Your Teen about Sex: A Practical Guide for Catholics

By Julia Sadusky
Published by Ave Maria Press

Talking with Your Teen about Sex: A Practical Guide for Catholics is an incredible resource for parents. It encourages healthy communication between parents and their teens to counter unhealthy messages from peers or media. It also provides practical tips for understanding and navigating the digital age at your teen’s side, highlighting vital skills to protect your teen’s physical, mental, emotional, and sexual health. 

Comprehensive and easy to read

This book is comprehensive and yet easy to read because of how it presents information. It covers multiple topics compassionately and pragmatically including parents’ hesitation to begin the sex talk, puberty changes, practical advice for having the sex talk, masturbation, pornography, dating, gay and transgender people, unwanted sexual experiences, and navigating technology usage.  

Talking with Your Teen about Sex acknowledges challenges while adhering to Catholic teaching. Read in its entirety, it prepares parents to guide teenagers toward recognizing sexuality as a gift to be stewarded on the path to holiness. It emphasizes learning from mistakes instead of carrying shame. It is also a reference book for parents to revisit before vital conversations with teens. Employing the thorough and thoughtful Talking with Your Teen about Sex helps parents to build trust with their teens and to invite and navigate important discussions without judgment. I have already shared some of its wisdom with my teens and hope to continue the dialogue. 

Sadusky’s insights are valuable as a psychologist who has worked with many teens, adults, and families experiencing an array of circumstances. Her clear steps to listening and communicating well while striving for humility, compassion, diligence, and collaboration will improve every relationship, not simply that of parents and their teens. While reading this book, I recognized my propensity for lecturing and how it undermines my message. However, many of the sample conversation starters in this book feel unrealistic and unattainable. They offer illumination on how to begin or proceed, but, personally, I have yet to convey information about sex in an easy and beautifully articulate way to my teens, and it’s my job to work with words. I would say instead, expect this book to equip you for those conversations but expect awkwardness.  

Like every family, there have been difficult moments while my husband and I have raised our teens, two of whom are now adults and two of whom are still teenagers, and I wish we had had this book to help us prepare for and then navigate through them. No parent wants to flounder while helping their teen in a painful situation. Talking with Your Teen about Sex is a beautiful tool for parents to use to prevent a crisis or to help their teenager to heal after it.  

We know we cannot protect our children from suffering, and when the world promotes a consumerist attitude toward other people’s bodies for one’s own selfish sexual pleasure, despite inevitable consequences, we cannot expect that our teens will entirely escape the havoc of such a society. But we can and must be there for them again and again, equipped with great love, attentiveness, mercy, and knowledge such as can be found in Sadusky’s book. 

The two chapters that surprised me most in Talking to Your Teen about Sex pertained to gay and transgender people. I appreciated Sadusky’s gentle approach and perspective. Throughout the book, she explains Church teaching and the need for compassion and a commitment to listening to and asking questions of teens. Engaging your teen in a respectful discussion is more productive and better for your relationship than battling.  

The importance of praying with your teen

One of Sadusky’s greatest suggestions is praying with your teen, not as a means of reinforcing a parent’s view but to gratefully invite God into every question, situation, and challenge our teens face. This models the reality that God and the Church want to be present with and for us throughout our lives: in our doubts, after mistakes, and in the quest for understanding and truth. God does not abandon us just as we do not abandon our children in difficult and confusing situations. 

I was grateful to have the opportunity to read Talking with Your Teen about Sex: A Practical Guide for Catholics by Julia Sadusky. I pray it blesses many parents as it has me and gives them the tools to guide, protect, and talk with their teens better in this technological age of exciting blessings and terrifying pitfalls. I highly recommend looking for this excellent book to help you talk with your teen about God’s plan for sex today. 

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Copyright 2024 Hillary Ibarra
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