For all of you steppers out there that have 15 year old daughters or steps can you please give me some guidance?

My SD15 has once again been caught sexting from her cell phone. She basically told a guy that she wanted to come over and have sex with him and a bunch of other inappropriate texts back and forth with this guy. This was discovered by BM when she had taken SD15’s phone away when she was back talking a few days ago and decided to be a parent and go through her text messages. Of course she didn’t look through the messages while SD15 was on her time. Instead she calls my DH in a panic on Saturday morning. DH had BM send the texts to his phone so he could see them.

When DH confronts SD15 at first she denies, denies, denies that the texts were from her until she saw that DH had them on his phone also. He decided to read them out loud to her. So now he is dealing with sexting from his 15 year old and lying. He basically told her that she is never going to have a cell phone again (we will see how long this lasts) because obviously she isn’t mature enough to handle one and that she is not allowed to go to cheer camp at the end of August because of the lying and all around slutty behavior. This was discussed with BM before hand.

My question is this. I think that this is more of a self-esteem issue for SD15. I think for some reason she thinks that the only way to get a guy/boy to like her is if she talks like this. She tells me that all of friends act like this and that she is “totally still a virgin”. Obviously, we want to instill in SD15 that she is better than this and she should want to attract friends boys and girls alike that respect themselves more than this slut like behavior but how to you teach her this without coming across as preaching or actually get her to listen? SD15 is a pretty girl, great at cheerleading but has acne issues.

I am pretty much disengaged from this nonsense like most dealings with SD15 but I do want to help DH with this. He is at such a loss at what to do and if I let him he will bury his head in the sand and we will be dealing with much worse as she gets older.

What do we do now? She is back at her BM’s and I am sure she is grounded until she turns 30 but I think that this is a much deeper issue that what is seems like on the surface.