THE SEX QUESTION - My 16 year old daughter confided in me that she was in love with a classmate

How to react when a teenager spontaneously evokes, with his parents, his loves and his heartaches?

How to respond when it concerns a person of the same sex?

In "Sans Rendez-vous", on Europe 1, the psychoanalyst and sexologist Catherine Blanc responds to a mother in this situation: her 16-year-old daughter recently told her that she was in love with one of her comrades from classroom.

This pushes this mother, who welcomes the news, to wonder out of curiosity about the permanence of sexual orientation over time.

The question of the listener

"My 16 year old daughter confessed to me that she was in love with a girl in her class. Obviously I have no problem. But out of curiosity, can she change her attraction in the future? "

Catherine Blanc's response

“First of all, she's not talking about sexuality, but about being in love. It doesn't always mean that it's mixed with sexual urge. It's often an interpretation that some parents can have. moments of adolescence when there are real feelings of love for her girlfriends or for her boyfriends. In any case, the girls between them are very much in love with their girlfriends. That does not mean at all that there is sexuality. Now, since this mom focused it on that subject, maybe she obviously knows more than her question asks. "

Is a sexual orientation set in stone?

"There are couples from elsewhere who are made, who have children and who, all of a sudden, have an impetus that goes completely elsewhere. Couples who separate. And then men who become homosexual, women who become homosexual. All that exists too. Things are moving. They are so simply because they were already there. In reality, it is not that we change our minds like our shirt, but they are there, repressed. And then, at a given moment, they position themselves. It is true in a sense of heterosexuality which turns to homosexuality as it is true of a protective homosexuality which finds a framework of heterosexuality where applicable. "

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Do you have to talk about it with your daughter?

"If she does talk about it, we can tell her 'How do you feel? Are you okay with that? Is that a problem at school? If you tell me, is that? is it just to see that you are welcomed by me or is it to find some support that you don't have within school or this girl? is this girl responding to your love “You might be in love, but maybe she isn't back.” It's the same subject if it's someone of the opposite sex anyway. love is not meant to be the source of pain. Yet, of course, there are all the setbacks that come with it, if there is one. "

Isn't it too intrusive to ask all of these questions?

"What's more intrusive is saying 'So you have a boyfriend, a girlfriend?'

This is what is rather intrusive, where the child is very modest. We can already see the young girls hide their hips, hide their breasts with their hair and their shoulders, etc. We tell them 'you're a pretty girl. bit of a girl, do you have a lover? '

There, we are not in this scenario, because it is she who comes to speak about it. I think that we can have this discussion, very quietly, without having specific questions, but questions which open the possibility of 'an exchange, in order to let the child go where he wants to go. "

Despite everything, there can be rejection and somewhat violent attitudes ...

"Of course. Fear does not cancel out the danger. To be afraid for the child is rather to endorse the possibility of a fear, so it is to check that everything is fine, to take it lightly and try to hear if, precisely, this represents a concern in one way or another for the child. We can say to him 'you know, in life, you also have to have the peace of your choices and therefore acquire the power of one's choices. 'Once we have the power, there will always be people who are resistant to our views on the world and our views on love. To the extent that we have the power, we walk quietly on his way. "