Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex by Amy T. Schalet Page A

relatively homog- enous school-based peer groups. Schools are, however, only one place to meet boyfriends. That at nineteen, Vincent lives in a town, rather than hav- ing moved to a city, as university students often do, suggests that his class trajectory may not make him a suitable sleepover partner.
    But if concerns about gender and class drive Ria’s resistance to the sleep- over, they will not, she says, outweigh her desire to eventually move be- yond a state of conflict:

    It is also our life’s process, and every time we too shift a little. . . . At a certain point you can no longer hold it back. We feel we have been able to prolong [our resistance] a bit, [thinking] it could be that the relationship breaks up. . . . But okay, if the [courtship] stays strong, then [as a parent] you also get more accustomed to the boy, become more familiar with him. . . . I won’t say, [the conflict over the sleepover] is going to stay like this. I hope not. No [having this conflict stay] wouldn’t be good. . . . You know, you need to move with your time.

Moving with Your Time
    Accepting the sleepover is, for Dutch parents, a sign that one has moved with the times: with the historical time—since the prevailing norms re- garding adolescent sexuality have changed dramatically in the course of a generation—and with personal time—since a child that was once little is now on the way to becoming an adult. To navigate these changes, and the tensions they produce, Dutch parents draw on distinct cultural tools— cultural frames, forms of reasoning, and everyday practices that help them to smooth out most of the wrinkles of discomfort and disarray. The cultural frames, as we have seen, are normal and nonsecretive sexuality, relationship- based sexuality, and self-regulated sexuality. Together, these cultural frames
    create an understanding of adolescence and of parenting in which permit- ting the sleepover, under the right conditions, makes cognitive, emotional, and moral sense to the Dutch parents.
    As a cultural process, normalization contains a cultural logic: its con- ceptual components reinforce one another to make the sleepover seem reasonable and right. However, this does not mean that parents do not struggle—with one another, with their children, and with themselves: Jo- lien Boskamp exhorted her husband Mark not to make their daughter “do penance” for the limitations imposed on them when they were young. Natalie Boskamp and Fleur van Kampen use the frame of normal sexuality to turn the tables and win over reluctant fathers and mothers by arguing that their sexuality should not provoke such an “overblown” emotional response. Finally, confronted with potentially uncomfortable elements of children’s sexuality—whether in providing run-of-the-mill sex education or in responding to sexual violation—Ada Kaptein and Marga Fenning both had to struggle to make their actions and reactions match the mandates of normalization.
    Indeed, the controlling and constituting components of normalization apply as much to adults as they do to youth themselves. 21 Permitting the sleepover under the right conditions is part of a strategy for exercising con- trol through connection: with teenage sexuality open to discussion, parents can maintain oversight and are thus able to encourage youth to engage in “good ways of relating” and to “know their responsibilities.” 22 By allowing sleepovers at home, the Dutch parents provide young people both the op- portunity and the incentive to experience sexuality as part of life that can be discussed, rationally planned, and experienced in harmony with, rather than in opposition to, the social fabric of the household. But providing such opportunities requires substantial emotional work on the part of par- ents. Indeed the sleepover exacts from parents the same qualities they hope to induce in their children—self-restraint, interpersonal attunement, and the capacity to keep reservations and