So...what are your stories about "The Talk"? And what are your own plans with your children? Is their an age that you thing it *should* be brought up? Or do you think it should wait until *they* bring it up? Are their subjects that you think are taboo? How would/did you broach topics like homosexuality, masturbation, birth control? How do you handle nudity in your home? And (because I totally overhead this at the grocery store today), how do you handle taking your teen age daughter wanting a vibrator--or son wanting the equivelent...or either wanting porn (personally, I thought it was pretty impressive to see that sort of honest and comfortable relationship between a parent and kid at that age)?
This is sort of an ongoing discussion in our household--about how we plan to handle teaching about the body in general, when its appropriate to talk about sex and what sort of detail to go into, etc. I grew up in a household where my mother was a nurse and had a quite a few books about anatomy and where babies come from (I notably remember this one)...so I don't remember ever really *not* knowing in a scholarly sense what sex was, what human bodies looked like, etc...while my hubby was raised by his mom since his dad died as a child in a super-Catholic (and repressed) family.
We are still hammering out the details (as I suspect we will be for the next 15 or so years), but we've found the book Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid They'd Ask): The Secrets to Surviving Your Child's Sexual Development from Birth to the Teens by Justin Richardson and Mark Schuster to be pretty damn helpful in anticipating some of the issues/questions that we can expect (while we have yet to have and real curiosity from being "interrupted", we have had children intrude a bit in other ways...notably the discovery that we need to hide the grown-up toys better).
This is sort of an ongoing discussion in our household--about how we plan to handle teaching about the body in general, when its appropriate to talk about sex and what sort of detail to go into, etc. I grew up in a household where my mother was a nurse and had a quite a few books about anatomy and where babies come from (I notably remember this one)...so I don't remember ever really *not* knowing in a scholarly sense what sex was, what human bodies looked like, etc...while my hubby was raised by his mom since his dad died as a child in a super-Catholic (and repressed) family.
We are still hammering out the details (as I suspect we will be for the next 15 or so years), but we've found the book Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid They'd Ask): The Secrets to Surviving Your Child's Sexual Development from Birth to the Teens by Justin Richardson and Mark Schuster to be pretty damn helpful in anticipating some of the issues/questions that we can expect (while we have yet to have and real curiosity from being "interrupted", we have had children intrude a bit in other ways...notably the discovery that we need to hide the grown-up toys better).
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