Jackie Brewton left a thriving corporate career over 20 years ago to follow a higher calling. For over two decades, Jackie has been on a mission to empower teens and equip parents with the essential knowledge and guidance they need on the topic of love, sex and relationships.
She has authored two books for teens, 7 Secrets Guys Will Never Tell You: A Teen Girl’s Guide on Love, Sex, and Relationships AND The Truth About Sex: Real Stories from Teen Guys Like You, and a free e-book for parents, 7 Things Every Parent Needs to Know Before Having The Talk. She has also created a number of engaging e-courses for teen girls, guys, and moms. Jackie has dedicated the past 22 years of her life to equipping parents to become the dominant influence in their teen’s life so it will be possible to drown out all the other voices that their teen hears.
Join Dr. Lara and Jackie Brewton in this revealing conversation for teens and parents to help raise them to have a healthy understanding of relationships and keep them safe in a world that is not speaking life into them. This content is for educational purposes.
FREE eBook: 7 Things Every Parent of a Teen Needs to Know Before Having “The Talk”
FREE checklist to: 10 Ways to Raise a Daughter Who’s F.A.B (Focused. Authentic. Brave.)
Podcast Episode 29 Transcript
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole-person approach to your well-being, spirit, soul, and body. Join me, your host, Dr. Ana Lara, a naturopathic doctor, entrepreneur, and servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body. We are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician Heal Lay Self, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Ana Lara. This is episode 29, and I have a very special guest to have a conversation with, which is so important and so prevalent. In today’s time, we’re going to talk about having a real talk about having conversation on birds and bees with teenagers. Jackie Bruton is joining me. She’s a health educator and a teen relationship expert. We’re going to be doing two segments, so this is one of two.
You want to listen to the complete version of this episode and follow up with a second version of it as well. So, I want to read Jackie’s bio. It’s very impressive. Jackie Bruton left a thriving corporate career over 20 years ago to follow a higher calling. For over two decades, Jackie has been on a mission to empower teens and equip parents with the essential knowledge and guidance they need on the topic of love, sex, and relationships. Having received over 17,000 heartfelt letters from high school students garnered millions of views on her transformative videos across YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Jackie is a beacon of wisdom and understanding in the realm of adolescent growth and decision-making. She authored two books for teens. One is called The Seven Secrets Guides Will Never Tell You, and the other is A Teen Girl Guide of Love, Sex, and Relationships, and the Truth About Sex, which are real stories from Teen Guides like You. She has a free ebook for parents called The Seven Things Every Parent Needs to Know Before Having the Talk. She has also created a number of engaging e-courses for teen girls and guys and moms. And Jackie has dedicated the past 22 years of her life to equipping parents to become the dominant influence in their teen’s life. So, it will be possible to drown out all the other voices that their teens hear. So please help me welcome Ms. Jackie Bruten. Hi Jackie.
Hi. I was so excited when you commented on my post on Facebook, and I was like, finally, a doctor who gets it.
I knew that this was like a divine intervention. It’s almost been a couple of years since I ran into your content on Facebook. I saw one of your posts, one of the reels, and I was equally impressed with you. I thought, wow, what a powerhouse. The way that God is using you to speak life, really to speak life into these young, both men and women, young boys and girls, and into the parents in this time that seems so dark and evil and full of chaos and so much misinformation. So I know that God is just moving in your life in such a beautiful way and you’re truly authentic. You’re very authentic, and that’s what really draws and captivates the young people when they see you.
One of the things that they comment about in their letters the most is number one: I kept it real, I didn’t sugarcoat it, and they could tell that I cared.
Yeah, I’ve seen enough of the videos that you put out when you’re speaking to young people, and what I appreciate a lot about you is that you’re speaking to them like they’re adults. They’re intelligent, they’re capable of understanding. You’re not watering down your conversations with them. You’re going in a very professional way as well, and that’s key. I always say we can’t keep doing the baby talk to teenagers. We need to. One of the things you say a lot oftentimes is how we raise adults. We have to raise them up to be able to enter life, to be in relationships, to be in healthy marriages, to be healthy parents themselves. And so I get it that maybe not every parent had that foundation, but we live in a time that we have so many resources available at our fingertips, and you are definitely the number one resource that I point my parents in my clinic to go there, get her book. You need to listen to this person and how she’s having these conversations. Before we get into our conversation, I always like to read your bio and what you’ve done, but I always like to ask a question from my guests: Who are you? Who is Jackie? What are some of the things that you like that you enjoy that people can connect with you on that human level? Right.
First and foremost, I love to travel, so people always ask me how I handle it. Sometimes, it can be very, very hard to handle the stories that I hear from kids,
And sometimes I wish I could bring them home and they’re like, how do you decompress? And so I love hiking. I love traveling chasing waterfalls, but I’m actually the youngest of 10 and from a really close family, I grew up in South Carolina, went to Furman University, and went to corporate America. It was my first career, but always knew when I was there that wasn’t why God created me. I always knew that this was just a means to an end. And so I always knew that what I was passionate about, because I always did it on a volunteer basis, even when I was in corporate America, was working with teens between teaching Sunday school at church when I lived in different cities to Boys and Girls Club to adopt a school. I always did that, and then I think it was in 2000 when I had this divine; it’s a long story I won’t get into, but when God let me know that it was time, I actually did not leave to do what I’m doing now.
I left to start an afterschool program and God probably laughed at me when I had this plan. I had a 501 C3, and I had a business plan because my goal was to start out with 10 girls a year and follow them through high school, starting in middle school through high school. I may have reached maybe 200 kids by now, and I would’ve thought that would be great. Instead, I ended up meeting a woman at a conference less than 30 days after I left corporate America, and she sent speakers to the schools where she was with the organization, sent speakers in the schools, and the rest is history. I connected with her, never did my afterschool program, but the impact that I’ve had has been 10 times more because God knew that it was bigger than just these 200 girls.
Wow. That’s an amazing story. It’s interesting how God will just, you said, he laughed at you. This is really what you’re going to do, and you were obedient to it. You just went with the flow.
Yeah. Well, let’s get into this conversation because there’s a lot of great stuff that you’re going to be sharing. You sent me a couple of pointers here that are really important. What do you see in teens today in our culture? What are the common things that you hear when you’re having these conversations with Emma on this topic?
Well, the first thing is kids are hungry for truth, and they don’t always even know the truth that they’re hungry for. They just know that what they’re settling for is not it. They’re dealing with mental health issues, they’re depressed, they have suicidal attempts. They’re trying to fill voids with all the wrong things and still coming up empty.
And so it’s leading down a path of making a lot of poor choices. A lot of teenagers are having sex, and it’s not what they want to do. It’s because they don’t think they have a choice. And I’ll tell you one interesting thing that I hear from boys, because we’ve always thought, and I have not seen a difference in the last 20 years, I can tell you that when I started out 20 years ago, it was I thought as everybody else thought, we need to teach these girls that if a guy says, if you love me, would, this is what you say. So we teach girls refusal skills. The biggest difference I’m seeing is that I have to teach guys refusal skills because girls have become so empowered that they think that they have often become the aggressors.
So boys are saying things to me like, Ms. Jackie, we’re caught between a rock and a hard place. If we don’t try to have sex with our girlfriend, she’s going to think one of three things. She thinks we’re cheating. She thinks we don’t find her attractive, or she thinks we’re gay. Whenever guys say that there’s always a girl in the class who will say, yeah, that’s true. I would think that you have a teenage boy who doesn’t really want to have sex. But his fear is, if I don’t ask, is she going to think one of these three things? Then you have the girl who doesn’t really want to have sex, but her fear is if I say no, I might get broken up with. And what I say to the girls is, you’re right. If you don’t have sex with the person you’re dating, you might lose somebody that you really like, but you will never lose anybody who really likes you.
And so she’s agreeing to do something that she doesn’t really want to do just because he asked, not knowing that he only asked because the culture has made him believe that he’s supposed to. So you have a teenage couple having sex, and it’s not what either one of them wants to do. And I just find that so tragic. I share a lot of these examples and stories when I go to the classroom. When I started sharing that story, I started getting letters from students saying, you’re right. I went back and talked to my girlfriend and told her I wanted to stop having sex. And she says, well, that’s fine. I didn’t really want to have sex anyway. I was only doing it because I thought that’s what you wanted. And so there’s this no communication because they’re buying into what the culture has made them believe, which is teen sex is normally expected, and it’s a crazy world out there.
But I will tell you, when I have this conversation with them, I see a weight lifted off their shoulders because they’re like, you mean I don’t have to do it? And it’s like nobody’s telling them that you don’t have to.
Yeah, it’s really amazing. Obviously, the root cause of these issues is a lack of communication, but there is a lack of communication from where. And I’ll tell you that growing up in a very conservative Mexican family, my mom did have these conversations, and it came from a different approach. It came from an approach of respect, and you honor yourself as a woman, and you wait until you get married to have sex. God was brought into the conversation, and she had those hard conversations with me as a young girl about why not to do it. So, I’ve always told my patients, audience, and everyone that I’m very open and transparent. I didn’t grow up in the greatest community. There were a lot of gangs and teenage pregnancies and crime and drugs, et cetera. Those were the influences in my social environment. So oftentimes people ask me, how did you not get involved with any of that stuff?
Why didn’t you not follow the crowd and the peer pressure? And I always say, Jackie, it was my parents’ voice. That was the loudest in my head. Every single time I encountered any situation where there might’ve been peer pressure to do something, it was my parents’ voice. It was that communication that my mom had with me continuously and constantly. But we’re going to leave that for the parent section. So these are the things that you hear from students when you first start talking to the teens. What are some of the things that you typically start talking about when you start off the conversation with them?
I think one of the reasons why I have been so effective is that my conversation is so much bigger than sex for them. And I think parents could take a note from that too because I tell them if the only thing that you hear during the time that you hear me speak is that you shouldn’t have sex and I didn’t do my job. I say because this is so much bigger than sex. This is about helping you live up to your fullest potential and be the person that you were created to be. And so when I start out like that, it’s not like I’m this person that’s just trying to keep them from having fun.
I start out depending on where I am, sometimes, I start out by apologizing to them for my generation because I think we failed them. And I say we didn’t role model appropriate behavior. We should have. Some didn’t parent as they should have, and some didn’t provide guidance like they should have. And so I say, I’m sorry if you did not get what you should have gotten. And even when I know that it’s a population that may not have come from a healthy family, I say, even if you didn’t come from a healthy family, make sure a healthy family comes from you. And so I put it in a thing about selfishness. We live in a selfish society. Selfish is when you make a decision that benefits you, even if it hurts somebody else. And I say, I think one of the things that you could see written besides selfish in the dictionary is teenage sex.
I said because teenagers say it’s my body. I’m not hurting anybody. I can do what I want to do. I said, but the reality is, in many cases, somebody else is attached to that decision, and oftentimes, it’s a kid. And so one of the surprises that I think I have found is we often talk about teenagers being selfish, and I’m not going to say they’re not to a degree, but one of the most successful approaches is to ask them, what do you want for your future kids? And many of them will say in the letters, I never thought that what I’m doing now won’t just impact me, but it could impact my future kids. And so I think that’s one of the things that’s made me successful or effective, I should say, is talking about something bigger than sex, but also talking about what love really means. And how do you know when you love somebody? And I’ll tell you one of the things that I start ou,t and they ask me sometimes, do you have a psychology degree? How do you get inside of our heads like this? And I’m like, no, it’s called My brain is fully developed, and yours is not. It’s not that deep.
But one of the things I will ask them is I’ll say, is it the best choice for teens to have sex? Is that the best way for you to succeed and reach your dreams and goals? And even the ones who are having sex will admit, I agree, it’s not the best choice. But sometimes they’ll say it’s not the worst choice, but let’s start with that. It’s not the best choice. And then I’ll say, how can you tell when you love somebody? And I get different answers like, oh, you can’t stop thinking about them. You get butterflies when you meet them. All those things. And I say, you know what? Those things are called chemistry. I said, and that’s a part of love. It’s just not the most important part of love. And I said, but that’s what y’all settle for. You settle for a feeling instead of the most important part of love, which is the selfless nature of love, where you will always do what’s best for them and won’t do anything to hurt them.
And I said, can we agree that when you really love somebody, you’ll always do what’s best for them? And they say yes. And I say, okay, that’s interesting. If both of those things are true that y’all just agreed to that, you say it’s never the best choice for teens to have sex. And you say, when you love somebody, you’ll always do what’s best for them. I said, if both of those things are true, then how is it possible for a teenage couple to have sex and truly love each other? And they’ll say, Ms. Jackie, you asked trick questions. You should have told us what the second question was before we answered the first question. And so then they start to have these things rolling in their head about, well, you know what? She has a point. And so I like for them to come to the conclusion themselves that sex doesn’t make sense. I don’t like to scare them out of sex even though I talked to ’em about STDs and the risk of pregnancy and all that. But I tell them if the only reason you’re not having sex is out of fear, fears can be conquered.
In the heat of the moment, I said that’s the last thing on your mind. And I said it boils down to we don’t have a sex problem. We have a lack of value problem.
Yes. When you value yourself, respect yourself, and have goals in your life, you have a deeper meaning to life. You’re not going to look for sex when you’re ready to enter a relationship. And that’s something that I’ve told you. I have a 14-year-old daughter, and a couple of years ago, she asked me, what’s the right time to start dating? That’s a question I get a lot from even parents, like, what’s a good age for kids, for teens to start dating? And it comes down to maturity. What is the purpose of dating? If you can explain to me the reason for dating, what’s the intention of that?
And it’s a mature explanation, and if you understand what love is and what relationships are for, then you’re ready to, I agree with you that all of us as teenagers, there is that selfish stage, and it’s not just that you’re selfish, but you’re leaving childhood, you’re entering into adulthood, and that’s a transition point. And so yeah, absolutely. Our brains are not fully developed until our mid or late twenties. The prefrontal cortex does not get fully developed. This part of the brain helps with rational thinking, which is why teenagers make irrational decisions or they just do not thoroughly think and process their decision-making. And so, during this phase of a teenager’s life, we’re trying to learn who we are, and relationships become important. We have become more social. All of a sudden, our friends are more important than family. And so they want to live life.
They want to see who they are in this big world that they’re in, and that’s fine. But as parents, we still need to guide them through that. And I am okay with telling my child no and explaining my reasons why. And then, also before we got on the call, I said part of the reason I delayed becoming a mom was I was terrified of when my child entered this stage, that I understood that the battle wasn’t going to be between me and her. It was going to be me, her, and the world, everything. Her friends are influencing her. And then, of course, those influences come from home life. So if her friend’s parents are not having these conversations that me and my daughter are having, she’s going into that pond of influence
And then all of a sudden, she’s going to question, is mom even right? And it doesn’t matter what my title and my background are. None of that. All of a sudden, moms know nothing. So this is why I tell parents, and we’ll talk about this in the parenting part of it, when is a good time to start talking and having those conversations? But when you’re talking to these teens, I know they share a lot with you, and you’ve shared some very revealing, shocking scenarios that young people have shared with you. What are some of the most shocking trends that you see right now that are completely unhealthy?
I think the thing that breaks my heart the most, and it has been the most shocking, I’m not shocked by it anymore, is the amount of kids who have been molested or raped teenagers. And it doesn’t matter where I am. I mean, it doesn’t matter the socioeconomic group, race, or population we’re serving, but I do it every time. Now, whether I’m in an assembly with hundreds or whether I’m in a classroom with 30, I’ll ask the students to raise their hand if they know somebody who has been raped or molested. In almost every school, at least half the class will raise their hand or have the auditorium. And I’ve had to report situations. I’m a mandated reporter. I’ve had to report where a biological dad had been molesting his daughter. The daughter said she sat on the floor the summer before and had a gun pointed at her head when it was time to go to his house, her parents were divorced. I’ve had to report a girl who said her grandma molested her since she was a little girl, and these were in high-income, affluent areas. And so sometimes we think that would never happen with my child. And I just think that parents don’t understand, and now we’re not talking about the parents piece, but that has shocked me. The other thing that has shocked me is the amount of kids who are watching porn.
Oh, my goodness.
And even children, small children, who are coming across this content online. And not just boys. We’ve always thought it was boys, the number of girls. That’s the other question that I ask, especially when it’s a co-ed auditorium, what percentage of teenagers do you think watch porn? And some of them say a hundred percent. I’m like, well, we know what you’re doing, but I’ll then say, do you think there’s a difference between boys and girls? There’s a letter that I share in an auditorium with a ninth-grade girl, so that’s what, 14, 15 years old who says she’s addicted to porn. I have multiple letters from girls who are in middle school or ninth grade who will say that they are addicted to porn. Like you said, many of them happen upon it by accident at very, very young ages. So I think that’s the molestation of rape. Pornography is another one that is really shocking. I think the other is differences in how aggressive girls have become, and that many of the girls are the ones who are initiating the sex and breaking up with boyfriends because the boyfriend won’t have sex. I think those are probably the three biggest differences I’ve seen over the last 20 years.
Wow. Yeah, those are definitely shocking. Once again, it’s terrifying. As a parent, or even if you’re not a parent, what do you think is influencing young people, especially like you said, and I agree with you, that there is this culture of women being, or young girls, teenage girls being the aggressors and initiating sex, and there’s this mindset that’s been pushed onto them that this is okay, this is acceptable. I mean, just listen to the music that they’re listening to. It’s just so hypersexual. What are some major things that you think are really influencing our culture? If it’s not coming from the home, where’s it coming from?
A lot of kids are left because their parents aren’t having the talk, and I am never going to have that conversation a little bit, but a lot of kids are left to figure things out on their own. A lot of it is music, television, and movies. A young lady in the class started talking about it, and this was years ago, but remember when 50 Shades of Gray came out? That movie came out and a young lady started saying, talking about the movie, and I said, “You’ve seen 50 Shades of Gray?!”. This was an eighth-grade girl, so this is 13 years old. She’s like, yeah. I said, but how did you get it? She said, my mom took me. I said, she said, my mom took me and my three friends. Here’s the thing: I’m not sure her friend’s parents knew that their mother was taking them to see an art movie.
She said they don’t check to see which theater you’re going to if you buy the ticket online. I was so shocked. I was like, how many of you in here have seen 50 Shades of Gray? And the number of hands that came up, I was like, yo, that’s soft porn. I’m like, I haven’t even seen it, but I’ve read enough about it to know that I don’t want to see it. So they’re watching R-rated movies, they’re listening to sexually explicit lyrics in the movies. They’re watching porn. It’s just they’re being bombarded from all angles. And so when kids, I think it was Dennis Rainey with Families First, had a quote that said this was to parents. He said, your kids will receive. I might get the number wrong, but it was a huge number, like a hundred thousand messages a year about sex. How many of them will come from you? And they’re learning about sex from very, very bad places that don’t have their interest at heart.
I talk about sex sales, and I talk to the kids about the impact of the media and about how they don’t care about you and couldn’t care less if you got an STD or if you became a teen parent. The person who cares about you is your parent. And you were talking earlier about the part of the brain that develops, the prefrontal cortex. It’s been very helpful for me to share that with the students. And this is the analogy that I give them. I tell them that the last part of their brain is the prefrontal cortex. And I said, y’all are making decisions based on impulse and emotions, which makes perfect sense to you. I said, but here’s the problem. You go and ask your friends for advice, and their brains aren’t any more developed than yours. I’m like, how crazy is that?
That’s exactly what I tell my daughter. Your friends know nothing, and their parents know nothing. So you need to make decisions based on who’s going to love you, who loves you, who’s there for you, and have sound, credible information,It’s a good thing that they’re very logical kids that I have. But it is something you constantly have to be the voice in your child’s life. Look, I am not the most liked parent because I don’t care what the other parents are doing. I don’t care. And my child knows that. She knows you’re my responsibility, and I want to influence your friends and other people, but ultimately, you’re my responsibility. I’ve learned through experience that as much as you want to influence parents and so forth, sometimes they’re just said in their own ways. So, music is something like being careful about what you hear and continuously seeing what you see because all of this is imprinting on your brain and mind.
And here’s the other thing, too, that I think maybe a year ago, we were having a conversation over the phone about a situation that you were sharing with me. What young people and even adults don’t understand is that there are certain things that when we see a stimulation in our brain, we get that dopamine hit. When a young person, so say a 10-year-old, because it’s not uncommon to hear 10 and 11-year-olds being sexually active, unfortunately. To me, that’s like, this is child abuse. This is not even disgusting to me. And so you have the moment, and even if it is through rape or molestation, what happens in these situations is that without them wanting to, their brain has already experienced sexual pleasure, and so they get a dopamine hit. And you’re talking about a developing brain that’s still growing, and they’ve already been initiated. The brain has already been stimulated in such a way that it’s looking for that next high.
It’s looking for that next high. And this is where the addiction patterns happen, whether it’s watching something you shouldn’t be watching, you become addicted. Hey, our phones have become something we want to keep looking at, doing, and using. And so it creates that same dopamine hit on our brain. This is why I truly believe that no young person that we should be very careful with what young people are watching, what they’re doing, and especially not being, because once you tap into this, it becomes hard for them to want to stop. Do you find that, I know you’ve had conversations with teens who have said, yes, I’ve been sexually active, but after hearing you, I want to stop.
Do you find that they struggle with stopping? I have tons of students who tell me they’re stopping. And I’ve run into students years later who said that. I didn’t even know at the time, but who said when I heard you speak at high school, I haven’t had sex since? And I mean males and females, and people think, I think that one of my biggest frustrations with just people, in general, is that everybody thinks that everybody’s doing it, and they tell me that they’re going to do it anyway. So you might as well teach ’em how to make the best of a bad choice. They’re incapable of making the best choice, and I have just not found that true. I think that when you give kids the information in a way that they can accept, they are willing to change. I remember this is a kind of funny story, but a guy came to my door to sell a subscription to the local paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Because I live in the county where I’ve spoken for 20 years, I often run into kids out in the community who will say, you look familiar. So this guy comes to the door and he’s like, are you famous or something? You look really familiar. And I said, what high school did you go to? And he’s like, oh my God, you’re that sex lady. I’m like, not my claim to fame. I don’t want to. That’s not the title that I’m looking for. And so he starts trying to get, he’s a sophomore in college, and he says, do you remember me from North Co High School? And they always want me to remember I was sitting in the back row with my friend, and I’m like, I talked to thousands of kids a year. So he says he’s trying to get me to remember him. He’s like, I got to text Brandon and tell Brandon, guess what? I’m at the sex lady’s house.
And he’s like, Brandon, don’t believe me. Can we have a selfie? And I can just imagine where that would show up. But he told me, he’s like, I haven’t had sex since I heard you speak. And this is a guy who is a sophomore in college who heard me speak in high school. And so if you present it in the right way, I give them tips about this is what you need to do. If you are sexually active, your boundaries are going to have to be set back a lot further than somebody who’s never had sex because your hormones are going to go from zero to 100 a lot quicker because you’ve been there. So you’ve got to guard your eye gates, your ear gates.
You can’t expect to go to the same place, listen to the same music, be on the same couch, and that the same thing is not going to happen this time that happened the last time. And so sometimes they’ll reach out to me after the class is over when they were too embarrassed to ask the question before and say, Hey, Ms. Jackie, what do I need to do? I’ve been having sex and I don’t want to have sex. How do I tell my boyfriend? Or how do I tell my girlfriend that I want to stop? Yeah. And I’ve been doing this for 20-something years. I’ll tell you a young lady that I just spoke to yesterday. I started mentoring after graduating high school; she heard me speak in the eighth grade, and she is getting ready to turn 35 years old now. And she told me not too long ago that 80% of her values came from what I taught her.
Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah. What are some common regrets you hear from teen boys and girls that they share with you? They regret doing these things.
Oh, the number one is, and I didn’t mention this about the shocking thing, but I forgot about it. But sending that naked picture. It could end up so many places.
That’s the other thing: sending the picture, they regret that, and they regret having sex. Some of them will even say they regret even dating because they’re like, my GPA would be higher if I didn’t get caught in all the drama of a relationship. I remember being in a class with a 10th-grade girl, so she’s 15, and she’s like, Miss Jackie, I’m done with relationships. I’ve cried my last tear, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, girl, you’re 15. How are you so jaded at 15? And it’s because she started dating too soon. And so that’s why I use her story. Much of my teaching is sharing things from previous classes because they can relate to them.
Absolutely. They’re real situations.
They’ve been through a lot of them. And so when I’m in eighth grade, I share this story of this 15-year-old girl, and I say, y’all guess what? The reason she’s so jaded at 15 is because she started dating too young. If she hadn’t dated, she wouldn’t have gotten her heartbroken. She wouldn’t have had those tears. She wouldn’t have cried. So, I try to get the eighth graders to understand and learn from all the regrets that the high school students have told me. And one of the things that they in there, because in my middle schools where I’m just talking to girls, we separate by gender in the eighth grade, and there’s a male that talks to the boys, and I talk to the girls and I share a lot of the letters that I’ve received from the high school students. I read those to the girls or let them read them on the screen. And so they are able to say, you know what? This isn’t just an adult telling me not to do it. This 16-year-old girl just said, if I could go back, I would’ve never had sex. And so that’s so powerful for them to say, what I thought I was going to get out of it is not what I really got out of it.
So, as we wrap up this episode here, what are some endings, if there was a teenager in front of you who hasn’t had sex or maybe has had, what are some takeaways that you would want them to know? Two or three takeaways that you would want them to know?
One, and this goes for girls and boys, is not to give up one relationship too soon. And maybe the next person you date would be the one that would wait. Unfortunately, when I ask the students, how many of you think that all guys want sex or everybody wants sex? And they’ll say, yeah, all of them do. And I say, the problem is if you think they all do, you won’t feel like you have a choice because you say, if I’m ever going to be in a relationship, I’m going to have to do it. And I said, maybe the next person you dated would’ve been the one that would’ve waited. The second thing that a lot of students tell me that really helped them is say, if they don’t think you’re worth the weight, why would you think they’re worth the date?
That’s a good one. That’s really good.
And the third one is whenever a teenager will say, I had sex because I wanted to show them how much I love them. My question to them is, what are you going to do to show yourself how much you love yourself? Because when you love you, you protect you. When you love you, you respect you. When you love yourself, you don’t make decisions that could ruin your health and jeopardize your chances of reaching your dreams and goals. So forget about trying to show anybody else how you feel about them until you show yourself how you feel about yourself.
That’s really good.
So those are things that I hear over and over from students saying. This is what made it click for me when you said that. I’ll tell you this last story: 24, I’m in a dressing room at Marshall’s, and a young lady comes up to me, and she’s like, oh my god, Ms. Jackie, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. And she said, you taught me at Marietta High School when I was in high school, and I’m 24 years old, and I’m still a virgin. She said I’m going to tell you what my measuring stick was every time I dated somebody through college. It was that quote: if they don’t think you’re worth the wait, why would you think they’re worth the date? She said whenever I told somebody because her goal she said was to wait till she got married to have sex.
She said every time I told a guy that was my goal, if they tried to pressure me or broke up with me, I was like, well, okay. That was just my measuring stick. I avoided another one that only wanted me for my body. So I got her information because I told her that I do interviews a lot. I might want to interview one day. I got her information. Two years later, during the pandemic, I was doing my masterclass for Teen Girls, which I attended for eight sessions. We went through a chapter of my book every week. Well, Monday and Thursday night, for an hour and a half online, I had students from girls from the UK all over, from Phoenix, Arizona, and a couple of girls from there. I brought a teen mom, a teen dad, and different people I interviewed, and they said, do you have a girl that may have made good decisions that we can hear from? So I called this young lady, and so this is two years later, and I said, Hey, I want to know if I could interview you for this masterclass I’m doing. And she said, well, my situation has changed a little bit, so I’m thinking she’s going to say I’m not a virgin anymore. And she’s like, no, I’m still a virgin, but I’m getting married in two weeks.
And so she’s 26 years old and getting ready to get married. During our interview, she tells me that her fiance has a child. And I said that’s who I want to interview because I want to understand why he was willing to wait on you. But he didn’t wait on the woman, the girl that he got pregnant. And so I interviewed him, and I said, Brandon, what was it that made you wait on Jasmine, but you didn’t wait before? He said because that’s how bad I wanted her. And that’s what she told me it was going to take to get her. He said, if she had told me I had to go to church with her every Thursday night, I would’ve done it. And I shared that story with the girls in the class, and I said, “Guess what? He thought she was worth the wait. And I said, but the other girl that he has a child by didn’t demand that he wait for sex. He didn’t, and she didn’t get the ring, but the one who got the ring was the one who demanded that he wait.
As women, we have a lot more power and should use it wisely, which will benefit both ourselves and our partners. And so, wow, thank you for sharing that story. That’s amazing. What a great conversation. We can really even expand further on this. What I’m going to be doing is I’m going to be sharing all your links, social media, website, how people can access you to purchase your books, and so forth on our, I’ll be putting on the description of this video so people can have access to the information. They really should be getting that content from you. And then, to our audience, stay tuned for the next episode. We will continue to have this conversation, but we will switch it up and address what parents should be doing when they’re having this conversation with their child. Thank you so much for joining us on this amazing conversation with Jackie. And until next time, everyone, be blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message, and reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.