Was having Thanksgiving with my religious extended family and we were playing Apples to Apples. Everyone takes turns being the ‘judge’, he draws a card with an adjective on it and everyone else gives him a face down card with a noun on it from their hand. The judge picks which noun most closely fits the adjective.
Some 5 year old legal relation of mine was the judge and drew ‘stinky’, I picked ‘blood’ just to get it out of my hand (thinking strategically here). He thought my pick was funny, until his mother reminded him of the blood of Joesph and went into a gruesome biblical description from his Sunday school lesson. I won that round, but damn… I’ll pass on playing that game again with kids conditioned to hate Halloween.
hahahahahah. Classic, kids say the darndest things.
when my son was 3 his Sunday school teacher was pregnant. He had asked me why her stomach was sticking out and I said a baby was growing in there. He points to my chest and says “Two babies?” I had to wait to stop laughing before I could explain to him that it doesn’t work like that, LOL.
You have to tell them the truth even if just to avoid having call their friend’s parents and have awkward conversations. We had brought his friend Ashley with us to the ranch where I kept my horse to go riding and have a “barn day”. The kids are in Kindergarten. At one point during the day I over hear my son telling Ashley that the “daddy horse sticks his penis up the mommy horse’s bottom to feed milk to the baby horse inside her tummy.” <sigh> Yes, there was a stallion at the ranch and a mare in heat and the owners were trying for breeding. I didn’t know my son had seen any of it going on.
He’d never asked the specifics of sex or even asked how babies got into women’s tummies or anything. In fact, the only thing he’d ever asked up until that point was how he got out of my tummy. When I tried to explain how it happens in general, he wanted to know how he himself had gotten out. So I had to explain that the doctor cut me open, lifted him out and closed me back up. He did not believe it.
oh, my twins were C-section babies too, so that is what I told them happened. They seemed ok with that. Kids can handle more than we give them credit for.
This is likely to come up fairly soon around our house, because we’ve got a three-year-old and I’m pregnant. My daughter knows where babies grow and how they get out, along with C-section variation, but she hasn’t asked how they get there. Yet.
When she does, I’m inclined to give her the simplified, age-appropriate truth. I don’t believe that this will make her try it out herself (or that *not *telling her the truth will prevent sexual experimentation). Is there anything I’m missing? Is there any other reason not to tell her the simplified basics?
I got the basics at three, when my mother was pregnant with my brother, and I said ‘Ick,’ and promptly forgot about the whole thing for years. It didn’t give me the faintest inclination to try it myself. It just meant that, when my friends came out with bollixy stories about babies dropping out of God’s pocket, I didn’t fall for them.
If this comes up, I’m planning to tell Widget that sex is something that’s for grownups, same as coffee, wine, high heels and saying ‘Dammit’ when you drop something on your toe. She’s already well aware that some things are only for grownups, and has no problem with it. (I know some kids would, though.)
Also, I think kids *need *to learn that some stuff just is inappropriate, logical reason or no. You don’t wear your swimsuit to school, even if it’s hot and that would make total sense, because it’s just plain inappropriate and there you go. You want to live in society, you have to work with the concept of inappropriateness.
My parents delegated the whole thing to a book called How Babies Are Made. That was in the old days before cable though. I suppose now you could just have the kids watch an hour or two of Cinemax. On the other hand, I see that the book is still available on Amazon.
Yeah, this is all I meant. Some people who have the biggest problem with explaining sex in plain, simple truths to kids have no problem displaying and demonstrating a bloody crucifixion and ramping up the violence by describing the scene in depth. Never visited a Christian church of any denomination which protected small children from the crucifixion.
My problem is that other people encourage their 5 year olds to dance, dress, and act sexy. So I can’t use the, it’s not appropriate for children to do that, because she sees her peers acting like that and even been encouraged by adults to act like that.
For example: http://www.tressugar.com/Pretty-Woman-Hooker-Toddlers-Tiaras-19008251
And this isn’t just Toddlers and Tiaras type parents. Regular parents send their daughters to preschool with mini skirts and belly shirts all the time, and I am supposed to tell my daughter she can’t? I dread adolescents
I know what you mean, I found that hard to explain to the kids I worked with. We talked a lot about respect (it was really a word that we tied into everything, so it was sort of natural) so I tied it into respect for yourself. We also really focussed on “the inside being important”, and that being sexy is the outside and we don’t think that matters very much. It’s still hard to explain.
As to the OP, I completely agree that children should receive accurate information. I think “cuddle in a special way” is fine while they are too young to really understand the mechanics. Pretty soon they’ll ask about the specifics of the “special way”. It just means the information comes on their terms, which I think makes it easier to absorb and properly understand.
I’m still upset at the prudish insistance of strictly separating the sexes, and little girls not seeing daddy naked etc. How on earth would they know what you are talking about when you do explain it? To each his own I suppose, but I just don’t see the big deal.
Well, I guess I lucked out having both a boy and girl of the same age, so there were no illusions about genitals and what they looked like. I am not going to make my husband uncomfortable nor insist he allow his kids to see him naked. My husband grew up in a home of 4 boys and 3 girls, so i am sure he glimpsed nudity at some point.
Ummm former Baptist here and no, there were no gory page after page descriptions in any of the churches I attended. He carried the cross, had a crown of thorns, spear in the side, ridiculed, talked with the thief, said “my God why hath thou forsaken me” and then died. That was pretty much the way it was described, no gore added. The point was what he gave, not to make it a contest to out-gore Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When we were very young, it was merely “died on the cross” not much leading up to it was described that I recall.
It was clear that it was a painful way to go, but it wasn’t described in gory point by bloody point detail.
I see no value in describing any murder to a kid younger than 12, but I’m crazy like that. Seriously? Crown of thorns, spear, hung by nails from a cross and that’s not gory? Sheesh
My mother was a nurse, and apparently hid any of her nursing magazines which she didn’t want us to see.
Like most of the rest of humanity, I learned the basics in either kindergarten or first grade from my older brother who learned it from someone else.
Japanese families bath together until the kids are much older. Often the fathers bath with the girls until they are eight or nine, and there is less concern about kids referring to penises in public.
(disclaimer, not arguing here, or being snarky, just answering what seemed to be an honestly curious question from upthread).
I don’t remember it being described beyond “died on the cross” when I was little, and I still vividly remember a SciFi horror movie I saw part of (but wasn’t supposed to) when I was right around that age, so I would have remembered :D. The other details didn’t really get brought out until later, probably 10 to 12 years old.
And the description of the steps leading up to his death was pretty much as I described them, blood and gore free. Just matter of fact. "Jesus carried the cross up to Calvary…he was given a crown of thorns (I forgot the part about the King joke put on the cross above him). It’s not as if the preacher or Sunday school teacher described the wounds and steps in bloody detail. What was described more fully was the emotional state of the Jesus, disciples, the thief, etc. The pain of the actual events as tied into the purpose of the crucifixion.
What’s funny (and actually related to the OP), is that I don’t remember ever being curious about, or asking about babies and where they came from. I had an aunt who was almost always pregnant also. I also don’t remember my kids being the least bit curious or asking about it.
I definitely remember my aunt (and other aunts) being pregnant, and I remember how fun babies are when you’re 4, 5, 6 years old, but I don’t remember being interested in, or curious about the process.
I think I was just a very self-absorbed kid and it didn’t interest me. Plus I was a reader at a pretty young age, and always had my nose buried in a book. I’m sure not ALL kids are curious or ask, right?
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with telling the kid how babies are made (i.e., intercourse) and how they come out, but I do think it’s best to limit the answer to the level of detail in which they seem interested. For example, if your kid is kind of curious, but not really, going into a 10-minute monologue about the mechanics of sex isn’t going to be useful, especially to a 3-year old who might not get what you’re saying.
If the kid asks questions when you give a general overview (i.e., daddy put the baby in mommy’s uterus/tummy/whatever), sure, answer. But I don’t think all that many kids are truly asking for that much detail until later.
I asked my parents the Question when I was four or five, and I got an answer pretty much like in the OP. Explaining about how the part of mommy’s tummy where the baby grows is called a uterus, how the penis goes in the vagina, and how that action is called sex. It was all very clinical and straightforward. So clinical, in fact, that when I heard the phrase “making love” for the first time when I was thirteen, I had to ask a friend what it meant. :o
Sure, there are no guarantees your spawn won’t embarrass you or piss off family and neighbors. But you do your best to teach them that some topics are not to be talked about in certain settings, and some words might upset some people, and some topics are to remain private within your family, and some actions are only for people of a certain age, and each family gets to make their own rules, and a million other lessons.
Hell, parents are just making it up as they go along. All you can do is the best you can think of, repeat yourself a million times, and try to set a good example.
Probably a ways from the OP, but at this point with all of my kids over 21, I get great personal satisfaction out of my belief that however I messed up as a parent, at least it wasn’t the result of not doing what I thought was best at that time. If your parenting choices are the result of reflection and good intention, and not made solely for convenience, I think you have a pretty good chance of looking back down the road and not beating yourself up too badly.
I can’t get behind “special kind of cuddle.” The kid may understand the concept of two different words for the same thng, that that doesn’t mean an understanding of “special kinds of cuddles” as being (I hope) different in kind from the sort of cuddling with which the child is familiar.
