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Expert Q&A

	By John C. Friel, Ph.D. Psychologists

We just found out that our 16-year-old daughter had sex with a 20-year-old boy. I don't know if I'm more upset that the boy is 20 or that he is black. It has been overheard that he commented "Yes, I f**ked that girl" My husband and I thought that we had a nice family unit and a nice Christian home... We all have dinner together and family pizza night every Friday night we all go to church togther... Now... well we don't know what to do. Why do I want to see this boy DEAD? What do we do now? How do you mend a broken heart... a broken soul... and a beautiful broken daughter?

Because of the complexity of this problem, I would first strongly -- and from the bottom of my heart -- urge you to enter family therapy with a good family therapist in your community. You allude to a number of quite serious "problems within the problem" in your question.

If there are what we call "extremes" in families, such as too much permissiveness or too much rigidity, children and teens will often unconsciously react to that by trying to move to the opposite position to create balance, which is why we frequently see kids from overly rigid families rebelling and acting out quite severely in adolescence.

A family I am currently seeing said that their child was a straight-A student, captain of an athletic team, etc., until his junior year in college, and then he started drinking, getting D's and F's, etc. When asked if they felt that it was OK for teens to take "healthy" risks, like white water rafting, versus unhealthy ones, like doing drugs, the parents said that they didn't want their kids to take ANY risks. Therein lies the problem.

I wonder why you are concerned about this young man being black? Are you prejudiced? If so, it is no surprise that your daughter had sex with a black man. That is a very common outcome of growing up in a bigoted family.

As loving Christians, do you really want this young man dead? And if you harbor that much rage, I wonder how you and your daughter will ever get through this together. Life is filled with problems. Healthy families are the ones that are able to do good repair work along the way. Crises are normal. It's how we handle them that says what level of health we have.

In addition, in most states this is a case of statutory rape, which means it will have legal ramifications as well. But from a psychological standpoint, I feel it is crucial for the above issues to be explored with a very competent therapist.

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