Pretty much the same for me(I’m 62) except that for us it was a week long class in seventh grade. One of the books had a very physiological description of sexual intercourse and I was shocked. I was the unfortunate girl(classes were gender segregated) who raised her hand to ask if this was how things actually happened. Everyone else in the class laughed really hard at me, and the teacher blushed and told be to talk to her after class. Of course I never did. I was mocked for weeks after that. But my real reason for asking had been that in my mind I’d pictured my parents “doing it” and went “Ewwwww!”
I think you need to know the answers to those questions in advance, and some of them may be things you haven’t really thought of. Like, do you approve of teenagers still in high school–specifically, your kids–having sex? At what age? Under what circumstances? I mean, just because you “aren’t uptight” doesn’t mean you’re okay with any or all sexual activity. And both parents need to be approximately on the same page. This is the kind of thing it’s possible to just never have talked about, only to discover one parent thinks sexual activity should absolutely be delayed until college and the other is okay with it at 16 or whatever.
I also think that kids won’t ask questions about consent, because it won’t occur to them, but that all kids need to have open-ended conversations about their right to control their own bodies and the importance of respecting others–not just not forcibly raping someone, but not pressuring, nagging, manipulating. And those conversations needs to happen before they are starting to be in those situations because at that point their brains are mostly mush.
In our own case, the situation is complicated by the fact that my son was conceived with a sperm donor (his father has a terrible genetic condition). I really, really don’t want him to ever formally “learn” this fact–like adoption, I want it to just be something he’s always vaguely known. I feel like secrecy looks like shame to kids. So right from the start, I always talked about how “some people have to go to the doctor for help” whenever we talked about where babies come from, and now, at five, he knows babies are made using pieces from the mama and papa, but that we had to get a piece from someone else so his legs wouldn’t be messed up like his papa’s. I think he currently thinks we used 3 pieces–the donor was an addition, rather than a substitution–but I’m okay with that. If he doesn’t finish out the biological implications by tweeny, I’ll probably point him in that direction so that it’s not a brutal shock when he’s a teenager.
I learned about sex from watching pet animals. We had guinea pigs and lots of piglets, and guinea pigs are pretty open about their sexuality. (Or lack thereof. We had one who never matured sexually and was treated by the others as if her were a piglet all his life.) Neighborhood dogs weren’t all fixed, and sometimes we’d see them doing it. Oh, and my mom left “Everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask” lying around the house, and I read that surreptitiously.
I wouldn’t recommend that particular book. It is dated in any number of ways, and even at the time, I read it and thought that it put an awful lot of burden on the woman. But there are tons of books on the market that can be sitting quietly on the bookshelf for your kids to find – way less embarrassing for both of you. My background is very tame compared to yours, but I have plenty of hang-ups, and it wasn’t an easy topic for me.
My husband and I agreed that I would be responsible for the sex education of our girl child, and he for the boy. But there were a lot of things we both did.
When the children were old enough to sit up on their own, and until they were about 3, we bathed them by sitting in the tub with them and making a little tublet for them between our legs. So both of them got to see what a naked adult body of each sex looks like.
We answered questions as they came up. I don’t recall actually explaining the mechanics of sex, but I’m sure I talked about sperm and eggs and babies growing in mommy’s womb. I made sure to tell my daughter about menstruation before it happened – my MIL never had that talk, and when she saw that she was bleeding she thought she was going to die. You have sons, so I guess that’s less critical, but I think it’s super important to give children a heads up about ways that their own bodies will change before it happens.
I had a sort of awkward conversation with my daughter about condoms and disease prevention when she was just entering puberty. I don’t recall how that started.
Shortly after puberty, I took her away to an amusement park for a long weekend, and brought a series of tapes about puberty, sex, and love I borrowed from a conservative Christian friend. There were designed for you to listen with your kid and then answer questions. They weren’t ideal, but they were surprisingly good. Obviously, when we did the Q&A portion I imparted my spin. I imagine there are better specific resources. For instance, I notice that the UU church sells resources to recreate its OWL series yourself:
But having something structured and a time and a place to talk about it with fun, emotionally easy activities during the day worked pretty well.
I didn’t talk much about sex with my son (husband’s job) but at some point I learned that they’d never talked about porn, and I thought it was important for my internet-savvy child to have some guidance on that. There’s a lot of porn out there, and while I think it’s normal and healthy for a teenage boy to enjoy some of it, I also think that some of it is pretty sick and some is misleading about how sexualty works. So I initiated a short and awkward talk on the subject.
Anyhow, my kids are now young adults. My daughter has a lot of emotional issues, which I attribute mostly to bad genes (there’s a lot of depression and anxiety disorders in my family) and some to bad parenting on our part, but I don’t think any of them are related to sex or her sex ed. My son appears to be in a healthy relationship with a young woman. He is also comfortable about not conforming to gender stereotypes. So I feel we did an adequate job on the sex-ed front.
With each if my kids, I made sure they knew I loved them and would talk straight to them at all times. They each started asking questions around age 8 - I would give the easy facts, then stop and check in that the next stuff was grown up stuff and give them the option to proceed. They would self-regulate saying No I don’t wanna hear about that…until they did.
In our case, we live in a jurisdiction where it’s a fairly serious crime to have sex with someone under 18. I told my kids, “If you love someone, wait until you are 18 so you don’t put them at legal risk.” I suppose that implicitly means I gave them the green light after 18, although I suppose I didn’t come out and say that explicitly.
When my son was in his first post-18 serious relationship, we did have a couple of instances where we could approve or disapprove of it. My husband and I talked about it, and agreed that we were okay with him having sex, and we signaled that in several ways, including letting them share a bedroom in situations where we could have prevented that. (Inviting her spend the night when she’d stayed late for a New Year’s party, and making it clear that it was up to them which bed she used, for example.)
LOL, at my 30th college reunion, I was the only mother of a son who wasn’t worried about her son being accused of consent violations. I was quite certain both that he wouldn’t violate consent, and also that he wouldn’t have sex with someone he didn’t know well enough to know that she wouldn’t make shit up about him. But that education came more from the older friends he had than directly from us. But also, his college did a decent intro-to-consent training for entering students, and I talked with him about it. He was critical about it in all the right ways, and had obviously already developed a good framework of consent for his own use.
The Firebug will be 10 this summer, and I’m surprised he hasn’t asked the interesting questions. (I really expected them years ago.) I’m kinda wondering at what age I should step in and initiate a conversation about how babies get made if he keeps on not giving me a natural opportunity to take the conversation there.
My mom went the “leave a book lying around” route with me. She might have just chosen that way because she knew it’d work (I read everything I could get my eyes on as a kid), or she might have been uncomfortable giving The Talk to a boy (I still saw Dad occasionally, but I’m certain she didn’t trust him with The Talk). Oddly enough, I don’t think I realized, as a kid, that I found that book because she specifically placed it for me to find. I just took it for granted that there were lots and lots of books lying around the house.
On the other end, I don’t yet have any kids of my own, but I have been in positions where I’ve been asked questions (for instance, substitute teaching for a middle-school health class). My approach is just to answer all questions simply, honestly, and directly. If the kid wants follow-up, they’ll ask.
That’s what we would call a “teachable moment”, and your teacher gave about the worst response possible, because I guarantee you that a lot of your classmates didn’t know the answer either. Especially not the ones who were laughing the loudest.
Hey, I didn’t realize that until I was in my 30s and had kids of my own!
Dad never hid his Playboy’s … always quick to tell his whoring stories … I pretty much knew what went where and why in graphic detail by the time I was eight …
I remember the shocked look on the ticket taker’s face when my dad took me to see MASH* … “Sir, did you know there’s graphic nudity in this movie?” … my dad laughed, “nothing the boy doesn’t need to learn in a hurry” … he smiled so proudly at me right then …
Graphic NUDITY? Oh my god! they might learn what a body looks like.
When our kids were somewhere in the 8-15 range, we accidentally stumbled onto a nude beach. It wasn’t at all sexy – mostly wrinkled old people sunbathing, with a few enjoying the water. The kids looked all embarrassed, and my husband turned to them and said, “you should look, this is educational.”
It’s perfectly simple. If you’re not getting your hair cut, you don’t have to move your brother’s clothes down to the lower peg. You simply collect his note before lunch, after you’ve done your scripture prep, when you’ve written your letter home, before rest, move your own clothes onto the lower peg, greet the visitors, and report to Mr. Viney that you’ve had your chit signed.