Remember being a teenager? Remember the excruciating self-consciousness, the fear of not fitting in, the desire to run back to childhood at the same time as wanting to race towards that tantalising adult world which beckoned in all its terror and glory?
Remember the dreams, and the depressions? Remember the music which provided a backing track to the experience, which when you hear it today can still yank you back to those fleeting, awful, wonderful moments that we call adolescence?
They're not so different, the teenagers of today. The girl with gooseflesh adorning the soft pads of flesh on her carefully displayed hips still wouldn't put something warm on to save her life. The sensitive male still dons a protective covering of macho behaviour to ensure that he is not trampled by the herd. They look and sound older at a younger age than we did, but they are not so different. But we are different, and the world we have bequeathed them is different. And sometimes we let them down.
One of the ways in which we let them down is by being afraid to trust our instincts, and resorting instead to listening to so-called experts, especially when it comes to sexuality. We worry about raising the self-esteem of teenagers, but we display little esteem for our role as parents.
This generation of parents of teenagers is painfully aware that there was much that was lacking in our own sex education. So determined are we not to repeat those errors that we are very susceptible to advice which urges us not to impose our moralistic judgments on teenagers. Yet some of the so-called "value-free" approaches to sexuality, if followed to their logical conclusion, verge on negligence.
We adults may have inherited a lot of peculiar and unhealthy attitudes to sexuality, but at least they provided interesting constraints against which to kick. Any kind of sexual experimentation was conducted against a background in which the rules were still clearly understood, even as they were being flouted. Protections were built into that culture for those who did not want to be sexually active.
Now, according to experts, we should reduce the rules to "Don't get a sexually transmitted infection and don't get pregnant," because anything more is repressing natural instincts. There is no shelter for vulnerable young people in that minimalist set of standards, and adding, "Don't have sex until you are comfortable with it and ready for it" is just an abdication of responsibility dressed up as an ethic.
Parents need to trust their instincts. What parent really thinks that it is all right for a 15-year-old to be having sex, so long as a condom is used? Parents worry that taking a strong stance will just encourage young people to kick against parental restraint.
Of course, some young people will react that way, but for others it will be a welcome setting of boundaries, particularly if it happens in the context of a good parent-child relationship, and not just as a parental diktat. In a culture where any whiff of sexual repression is seen as a mortal sin, there is no shelter for either girls or boys who want more from sex than the modern equivalent of a handshake. Parents need to provide that shelter.
Part of being a parent is having some wisdom gained from occasionally painful experience. We remember the joys of adolescent love with the one we would love for ever, which then went on to last three weeks. With that knowledge are we really comfortable advising our teenagers that the right time to become sexually active is in the context of a loving relationship?
Much of the contemporary advice surrounding sexuality reduces it to an utterly banal level, devoid of any form of depth or meaning. How easy it is to advocate the use of condoms as if that solved everything. Easy, that is, until we remember what experience has taught us - that there is no condom for the human heart. We need to talk to our young people about the complexity and vulnerability of the human being. We particularly need to talk to boys, who feel pushed into a stereotypical "just out for the one thing" role which often leaves them bewildered and confused.
In spite of our failures, our teenagers still love us. They may not be able to tell us so to our faces, but parents rank higher than any other category of people in the recent Irish Times/TNS mrbi youth poll. Parents who are struggling to pass on their values often secretly hope that the school will do a better job than they can, but any honest teacher will tell you that even the best school can do little other than reinforce what is absorbed at home.
Parents do a better job than they give themselves credit for. Education in sexuality begins the first time we hold them in our arms and exclaim at the wonder of a new little girl or boy. It continues every time we relate to our husbands or wives or partners, long before our children ask any tricky questions.
The mechanics of sex may be briefly embarrassing to explain, but if they come as part of a natural sequence of questions, it is just a moment among many others, and not the most important element of education for sexuality.
Any opinion poll is just a snapshot, but the picture painted by this poll is closer to a caricature, if taken at face value. It tells us nothing about individuals, about their struggle to negotiate a culture which is more interested in training them to be obedient little consumers than in their happiness.
No newspaper is ever going to print a headline that screams that the majority of young people are kind, well balanced and fond of their parents. Yet it may be more accurate than the grim picture painted by the recent poll.
Perhaps we need to reverse our questions. Instead of wondering why things are as they are, perhaps we should ask why they are not worse? Perhaps we should ask why, in a sex-saturated culture, 75 per cent of 15- to 17-year-olds are not sexually active, and what the factors are that protect them.
We might be pleasantly surprised that some good old-fashioned sensible parenting features high on the list.