When puberty starts, your brain sends signals to certain parts of the body to start growing and changing. These signals are called hormones. Hormones also can cause emotional changes. During your teen years, hormones can cause you to have strong feelings, including sexual feelings. You may have these feelings for someone of the other sex or the same sex. Thinking about sex or just wanting to hear or read about sex is normal. It is normal to want to be held and touched by others. There are many ways to express sexuality. Sexual intercourse is one way.

Navigation menu

Send a question to the experts
Adolescence can be tough enough to get through without questions of sex, sexuality, and sexual identity. But adolescents are humans, too — no matter how alien they may seem to their parents at times. Sharing factual information with and giving good moral guidance to your teenager is a vitally important part of helping your teen understand herself or himself.
Starting the Discussion
Click to talk to a trained teen volunteer. Sex means different things to different people. Above all, it is a healthy and natural activity. It is something most people enjoy and find meaningful even if they create meaning in different ways.
The generational divide between baby-boomer parents and their teenage offspring is sharpening over sex. More than half of to year-olds are doing it, according to a groundbreaking study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers did not ask about the circumstances in which oral sex occurred, but the report does provide the first federal data that offer a peek into the sex lives of American teenagers. To adults, "oral sex is extremely intimate, and to some of these young people, apparently it isn't as much," says Sarah Brown, director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Among teens, oral sex is often viewed so casually that it needn't even occur within the confines of a relationship. Some teens say it can take place at parties, possibly with multiple partners. But they say the more likely scenario is oral sex within an existing relationship. Related story: "Technical virginity" becomes part of teens' equation. Still, some experts are increasingly worrying that a generation that approaches intimate behavior so casually might have difficulty forming healthy intimate relationships later on. Like once you've had sex, something more intimate is oral sex," says Carly Donnelly, 17, a high school senior from Cockeysville, Md.