You are listening to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You with Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer.

A weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

As always, we are joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, everyone and welcome back on today's episode.

We will be continuing our conversation about teenagers and sex.

This episode is for mature audiences.

So if you have your children around, you might want to hit pause and listen to it when you're alone.

So I have heard statistics that fewer teens are actually having sexual end course.

Less than maybe our generation was.

We've talked a little bit about dating and how the statistics have gone down the number of kids who are dating.

So they're finding different ways to be sexual, like sexting or pornography.

And are you seeing a lot of this in your practice?

And what do you have to say

about that? Oh yeah. You know, the reason we're not celebrating those statistics is because the

reasons why our teenagers are not as sexually active is is not what we were hoping for. The reasons

for less sexual interaction is the rise in pornography, like you mentioned, the

significant reduction in just relationship.

And, you know, like for example, dating patterns, like you go on a date and you have a

relation, you know, this is my significant other, Currently, essentially, seniors in high school dating patterns, frequency and all that, is about the same as it was for eighth graders back in the 70s.

So the structure of relationship, the desire to pursue something that appears romantic is really fading. So you have less overall

sexual interaction, but you also have weirder sexual interaction, kind of hooking up, which is the vaguest term ever,

that she and I hooked up means we either kissed or we had sex and they leave it all vague,

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