The Sex Talk

[ceragonstarfire]

Re: The Sex Talk

In my family Mom was a nurse and so matter of fact about things, it actually probably scarred me for life lol. I knew what a period was at age 8. So i got the sex talk at around age eleven. Dad had nothing to do with it, it would have been less akward talking about masturbation with him than mom. I guess i turned out alright.

[Arianrhod]

Re: The Sex Talk

[quote author=Shahaku link=topic=686.msg20670#msg20670 date=1291779706]
For those of you who say you won't tell your kiddo's until they're older or you never want to have the talk with them, I'm gonna share a tidbit about myself. If my mother had deemed to have some sort of talk with me when I was 4 or 5, I wouldn't have been sexually assaulted by a neighbor when I was 6. I let him do things to me, because I didn't know it was wrong and it has really fucked up my life. If she had just set me down and said "People have private parts and you shouldn't let others touch those private parts" I could have prevented a lot of devestation in my mental and emotional realm.
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Thank you for sharing your experience.

This is one of the reasons that we discuss sex, personal boundaries and safety in age appropriate terms with our children. My 3 yo DD knows that boys have penises and that girls have vaginas and that we only touch our own. I recently discovered how vital this is when a parent was removed from my DD's daycare for exhibiting grooming behaviour. I need to know that she understands good and bad touching. As she gets older we will explain things in more sophisticated terms.

She also knows how babies are made (in egg and seed terms - we have chooks at home which helps), and how they are born as we were expecting she would be at her sister's birth. She fell asleep just before the grand arrival. She likes to tell perfect strangers that babies come out of vaginas. I think birth talks are a natural extension of sex talks.

[ThatKrazy]

Re: The Sex Talk

My view on this topic is entirely armchair thinking and distant memories from getting the sex talk rather than the real-world experience of having children and having or getting ready to have the sex talk.

In my family Mom was a nurse and so matter of fact about things, it actually probably scarred me for life lol. I knew what a period was at age 8. So i got the sex talk at around age eleven. Dad had nothing to do with it, it would have been less akward talking about masturbation with him than mom. I guess i turned out alright.

My mom is a biologist and I got my first sex talk at age 7, so I know exactly what you mean. My mom had not planned on having the conversation that early, but always answered questions truthfully when I had them. She used biological terms and explained to me the general process of it. I knew how babies were made by age 7 and I knew about STDs by age 11. The best conversations we had on the issue were when I was very young learning about general anatomy, and later learning about all the STDs and dangers of sex. The worst were the moral conversations with her which we never got more than one or two sentences into until I was in college. She has very strict personal morals on the subject, which thankfully she did not drill into me as a child. She knows I disagree with her, that I do not believe in waiting until marriage for sex, but she also has told me that I am wrong and that it is a very bad idea. All the same, I think her frankness with the physical aspects of sex led to me having a more healthy sex life. I waited until I was 20 and fully capable of using adequate protection.

In my developmental psychology class a couple of weeks ago, we were asked to discuss how we would approach "the talk" with our own children - how long we would wait and what aspects we would be sure to cover. There are some things I would try to do the same as my mother, and there are things that I would like to do better. I hope to raise inquisitive children who would come to me with questions early on. With very young children, they are most curious about the physical mystery of how a man and a woman produce a child. I would explain the differences in anatomy in a very basic way, using the real terms for things, etc. Later on, I would, the same as my mom, talk about the risks of sex, but I would also be sure to mention the emotional risks as well of having sex too early, especially with a partner who is still emotionally immature. My first partner, even at age 20, was probably still too emotionally immature for sex. That was something I had not been prepared for and could never have talked to my mom about.