I don’t remember them teaching me about it, but I knew all about it. The conversation I DO remember was -
Mum - I found you prescription. I know you’re on the pill. I’m glad you’re being sensible.
This was then followed by a rant from me. The prescription had been torn into little pieces by me and placed at the bottom of my bin.
My mom tried to talk to me about “Seth” several times before I caught on that she meant “sex” (I didn’t know anyone named Seth).
She gave me a book about puberty when I was about 11 and gave me a promise ring (promise that I would stay pure) when I was 13. Around 16, she told me that if I kissed a guy until I turned on, I was going too far.
I did my own research on bc and was well prepared for my first time at 17, but I’ve had the same experience as the OP regarding other women. In the dorms, I found myself telling the other girls things like, “no, withdrawal is not an effective form of birth control, even if he loves you” :rolleyes:
With my own future kids, I’ll go phall0106’s route and require that they are on some sort of birth control until they are 18 and can legally make their own medical decisions.
Interestingly, the best sex info I got was at church. Yeah, that’s right. The Presbyterian church I attended as a teenager had a teens group that met once a week, and a “sleep away” camp in the summer. Human sexuality was a part of the program and they taught us about how the plumbing worked, responsible use of same, including birth control.
In the public school I attended they also “sex education” explaining the basics of how everything worked on both sides.
I remember once when I was quite young asking my mother if a lady who was not married could have a baby. I think what I was after was whether it was physically possible. She hesitated a minute and then said, “Yes, she can, but it’s not a good idea.” Why? “You need somebody to take care of the baby and somebody to earn money to live on. She couldn’t do both at the same time.” Very practical, and no moral condemnation.
Sadly, too few people get (or heed) this advice. I only have to stay at my community college past 5 PM to see examples left and right: single mothers trying to work, learn and take care of their kids at the same time.
They didn’t. I will.
Also, when I was around 13 or 14, my mother, in her wisdom, told me the story of my brother. She had him when she was 21, working full time and in college. She thought she could handle it. She told me how everything went wrong, how she felt it ruined her entire life.
You know what drove the point home? She told me she considered aborting me just because of how hard it was to raise her first child.
Nothing… I repeat, nothing, sets you straight about wise decisions knowing that you were almost aborted. I’m very pro-choice as a result. 
She talks to me about it now, funnily enough, long after I found out everything I needed to know on my own. Such is life.
Hah! Even now (I’m 23), my mom rails against birth control (that I can’t take anyway because I react horribly to even the smallest doses of hormones in them) and tells me that basically, I will get blood clots that will go to my brain or lungs or heart and DIE and before that I will gain weight and I will have every single worst case scenario BECAUSE BIRTH CONTROL IS WRONG AND A SIN.
Instead of, y’know, saying, “these are some side effects, some can be dangerous but talk to your doc about them and she’ll tell you if any of them should be a big concern.” Nope. It’s all scare tactics, all the time.
And to clarify the “I react horribly”: I suffer from depression and extra hormones exacerbates it badly. That’s why I won’t take hormonal birth control. I still think my mom’s “strategy” is idiotic. Yes, she was treating it as a sure thing I’d have a blood clot or breast cancer or ovarian cancer or any other horrible thing relating to birth control and/or female cancers.
No, they didn’t. I guess they just trusted me. Which turned out fine; I was on hormonal birth control before I ever had sex.
I don’t know. I think that if I felt my children were in a situation where they were not yet able to be responsible for birth control but could possibly be having sex, I would. On the other hand, I think that educating them about being responsible in general needs to be done much earlier, and that by the time they’re old enough to have sex, they should be responsible enough to deal with birth control themselves.
I got better information from my school than my parents. Not that they didn’t try. I remember about when I was 10, Mom showing me a sex-ed video. I don’t remember much of it, but I don’t think I was really paying attention, or maybe I was just a bit too young to completely get it. At any rate, what I did take from it didn’t make much sense until the next year when public health nurses started showing up in school every once in a while.
As for will I talk to my kids? I honestly don’t know, and won’t until such a time as I’m actually in that position. Knowing me, I’ll tell their father to deal with it 
My mom’s the way she is due to an abortion she had in the 60’s. (Yes. My mom’s a felon) I remember her telling me what staring that down was like-- a teenager, hoping no one found out, praying she didn’t hemorage or get an infection. She said there was no conviction or morality or God out there that was worth potentially abandoning her daughter to that fate. That’s where abstinence-only education gets you, 16 and willing to put your life in danger. (Mom’s also very, very pro choice, having quite literally seen the other side.)
It’s amazing how we change over the just a generation or two. Most of the dopers who responded didn’t get much of a talk from their parents, but they did/will with thier children. I think that’s great. Though we are a self-selecting bunch of smart people, so maybe that doesn’t say much about society in general.
I made sure my son never needs birth control information.
I got him a mensa membership.
**1. Did you parents talk to you about birth controll/pregnancy specifically? **
A bit, but not as much as they probably should have. Most of it was just anecdotal information of information that was kind of given to me in passing, sort of as an afterthought. I learned what I knew from a relatively informative series of health classes, and my own common sense.
2. Did/do/will you talk to your children about this in detail? Tell them specifically that they can come to you if pregnant? Or do you just hope?
I will set them down and tell them everything. EVERYTHING.
Let me tell you the story of my high school. I live in a town of about 9,000 people. My graduating class, the class of 2004, had a big problem. A big problem, that nobody seemed to see but me and one of my best friends. We flipped through the yearbook, and counted the number of girls in our graduating class. 64. Then we went through and wrote down the names of all the girls who were either pregnant at the time, or who had already had a baby. There were 22. 22 out of 64 girls in my graduating class have a child. I think three were married. A couple of them had more than one kid. One girl already has three kids, and she’s my age. I’m 19. It’s like an epidemic here, and I’m not even kidding. Our graduating class was the worst. The two grades below aren’t much better. When my brother was in 8th grade, he told me that girls in his class were getting pregnant. Some of these girls don’t give a rip about their children. I’ve talked them specifically - I’ve heard them say that they hated their children, wished they’d never had them, wished they could get rid of them. I can only think of one girl that gave her child up for adoption - the rest kept them.
Talk to your kids about birth control. I don’t care if it’s against your religion. I don’t care if you don’t believe in it. IF 1/3 OF THE GIRLS IN MY GRADUATING CLASS HAVE KIDS, SOMETHING IS WRONG!
My parents don’t talk about sex. Ever.
I don’t think my siblings got sex ed – they went to a private school. I should ask my sister sometime.
:eek: :eek: :eek: I just thought we needed a few more of these on this post.
My dad told me more about sex than I really wanted to know. Even tangentially, I didn’t want to know about stuff mom might have been doing with dad, thankyouverymuch. Both of them, separately, told me about condoms. I didn’t get a demonstration with visual aids about how to use them, but I was told that if I didn’t want to be a father early on or pick up a disease that I should use them. Dad added the bit about not trusting the girl about birth control.
Additionally, the early years when I could have been having sex were the years when the whole AIDS thing was reaching its peak of public awareness. Everyone had figured out that it wasn’t just a “fag disease” and that heterosexuals were getting it too. Combine that with late bloomer syndrome and other issues and I didn’t do anything about my raging hardons except develop my hand-eye coordination for a long, long time.
My parents were fairly open with me about sex, and I think they talked to my sisters about it as well, though I don’t know for sure. Surprising for a fairly fundamentalist family. I plan to be even more open with my kids, whenever I have them. They’ll definitely know about pretty much everything way before they’ll need it. The only problems I’m likely to have are my kids “corrupting” the neighbor kids with that information.
My mother didn’t. If it hadn’t been for the fact that my period came and needed to be taken care of with supplies, I don’t think she would have even discussed that. And it (sex) wasn’t discussed in school other than in the most cut and dried biological manner in classes. Kids at school were a whole 'nother story of course, but I’m forever grateful that I was a “reading fool” (as some relatives deemed me) and researched things on my own so I actually had accurate info.
I’m not going to have kids, so that’s not an issue.
My mother didn’t really ever talk to me about sex, but one of the best things she ever did for me was to tell me that if I ever needed birth control to tell her, and that she would help me and not be mad. A year or so later I did just that.
It was very uncomfortable, because it was basically telling her that the then 16 year old me was sexually active, and it was especially frightening when she told me she would help, but that she would have to tell my father. She clearly wasn’t happy, but she did help, and Dad never said a word to me about it, even though I know he knew.
I’m absolutely convinced that if she hadn’t given me the permission to ask her I would have ended up pregnant before I was 18.
I have a 3 year old daughter now, and I plan to be open with her about all aspects of sex and birth control. I don’t think it is something that women of any age should be ashamed to talk about with their parents. I mean, come on, we’re people, we have sex, I don’t get why it has to be some big secret.
I don’t remember any specific conversations on birth control, but I’m quite sure that if I’d gone to my mom and said I wanted to get on the pill, she’d have arranged it for me. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we had talked about it, but I don’t remember. I was far too terrified of getting pregnant or something to go without it if I had been having sex as a teenager.