So my daughter just turned five. Recently, she asked me what do boy privates look like. She’s seen my 3 month old nephew get a diaper change so I reminded her of that and said that’s what they look like. No, that’s not what she wanted to know. She asked how they looked when boys get bigger. I asked if she meant when they were big kids, but she said ‘no, grown up boys’. Well…I was NOT ready for that. So I kind of skirted around it and said ‘mostly the same…just bigger…’ I thought that was that, but today she asked again, out of nowhere. I kinda changed the subject but I don’t want to continue doing this.
I know that it’s normal for children to get curious about the opposite sex, and I want to try and encourage her to come to me with questions. But at this point, I’m not sure what I should do. Should I show her pictures? I’m a bit worried about what other questions she might have. And I’m also concerned about being able to find something child friendly for her if I do decide to show her. Has anyone else run into this with their own kid? Or have any suggestions for appropriate images to show her? I was hoping I didn’t have to deal with this so soon.
There’s no one right answer; too much depends on your values, your family’s values, etc.
But…FWIW, my mother snuck the issue past me by exposing me (haw haw) and my sisters to art books. Great paintings of European culture. Madonnas and children. The Sistine Chapel ceiling.
We also saw our parents nude… And we lived on a ranch, and so we learned “the bulls and the cows” pretty plainly.
My opinion? Show her pictures, but soft-pedal the experience. Better now than via internet porn…
I recommend medical books with pictures. That’s what my parents showed me to shut me up. It worked. I’m 50 and childless and they are really regretting their methods now.
This series of books - It’s Not the Stork! (aimed at 4-8 year olds), It’s So Amazing! (aimed at 7-10 year olds) and It’s Perfectly Normal! (aimed at 10+ year olds) - are fantastic to read with your kids. They use cartoons, but frankly drawn ones, to illustrate the different body parts, how babies are made, and so on.
I’m a trained OWL (Our Whole Lives - a comprehensive sex ed course) teacher at my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and these are the books we suggest to parents (and the books I have for my own kids).
When my daughter was 5 she realized her drawings of people weren’t very good. So she had her Mom call me to bring home a book about bodies. I worked in a school library at the time, so I grabbed a book on Human Anatomy & Physiology from the Books on Sale table and brought it home for her. Two days later she came running to her Mom, saying: “Mommy, did you know boys and girls are different besides boobies?”
Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I really want to be open with her and not act like sexual things are ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ by avoiding talking about them. But, damn, it’s hard to do! I guess it’s my own upbringing that’s influencing me. I think I’ll look into those books C3. I glanced at the stork one and it made me a bit uncomfortable but I need to just get over that for her sake.
I got a book that had drawings of boys and girls starting as babies, then as kids, then teens, then adults. It worked well enough for her to understand the difference. My girls, 7 and 4, also see me naked sometimes, I’ve never made a big deal out of it, though we have gone over who can and can not see their private parts.
I’ve found if you’re pretty straight forward the kids get over it pretty quick.
My mom showed me medical pictures too, like the drawings, then we graduated to pictures of the real thing. If you want to really freak her out show her what a grown up woman’s parts look like. She will be appropriately traumatized
Fortunately I have not had to deal with this with my two. They are boy/girl twins and have always seen each other naked. There was never really any curiosity.
Heh, you got it easy AngelSoft, my son wanted to know how do Dads factor into the baby making process. (He was a little older than five.)
Personally, I just went for the “Rip the band aid off quickly” method. I just told him in very clinical terms what happens. I also explained to him these kinds of conversations are private and NOT something he should be talking about outside his mother or me.
My older brother gave his first grade class a graphic, yet mostly* correct explanation of where babies come from. Mom did not enjoy that parent teacher conference at all, and Grandma never let either of them live it down.
*Our grandfather bred dachshunds, and my brother extrapolated from what he saw.
I had Gray’s Anatomy. The book, not the show. Both of my parents were artists, and told me NOTHING about sex. But they had their anatomy book that answered all my questions . . . well, except one. At some point we had sex ed in school, and a special teacher came in and told us all about puberty and the egg and the sperm. I was the kid who raised his hand and asked “How does the sperm actually get to the egg?” I have no recollection about the answer I got, but I suspect the teacher left out some of the details.
