My family invented “Don’t ask, don’t tell” long before the US military did.
My parents told me everything they knew. Nothing.
(I’m damn surprised they knew enough to have kids.)
Same. My parents didn’t talk about it (I was given general puberty pamphlets by my pediatrician and various teachers), and I rather preferred it that way.
Female, child of a highly-educated 70’s proto-hippie with liberal ideas on childraising.
I picked “Other”. My mom didn’t really directly discuss sex with me at all, but she did give me all the sort of “enlightened and empowering education for girls” books like Our Bodies, Ourselves. (Which I mostly ignored in favor of reading the grown-up versions (the Kinsey and Hite Reports, Joy of Sex, etc), various liberated-70’s fantasy novels that had lots of stuff I didn’t completely figure out until much later, smutty books found under mom’s bed, etc.)
I’m pretty sure she knew that I was doing something, and knew that I knew that she knew, but she never actually said anything except to make the occasional death-inducingly-embarrassing joke or comment. Although she probably would have talked about it if I had asked. (Not that I would have.)
When I was away at college and my parents were packing the house to move, my mom told me she found my 4 or 5 falling-apart Playboy stash. I said oh? and she said it was disgusting. Pretty strong words, coming from her. That’s pretty much the only conversation we had about it.
Lucky it wasn’t Hustler that she found then.
Because she was disgusted by porn, or because the pages were sticking together?
I clicked " other" because it was never even mentioned to me.
Wouldn’t that fall under “They preferred not to discuss”?
My mother was halfway between “we don’t discuss that” and “if you must do it, don’t do it when other people are around.”
It was never mentioned. I thought it was sinful but I’m not really sure WHY I thought it was sinful.
I like that my daughter and I can make cracks and jokes about everything. I just asked her what I taught her about masturbation and without missing a beat she said, “That it kills kittens!”
Every boy knows his peepee is only for weewee.
Not a thing, other than “don’t come out of your room with an erection.”
we just got new carpet.
That would have been a hell of a thing to ask her.
I assumed the former.
Dad told me about sex and puberty but not at all about masturbation.
When Mum caught me in the act, or thought I had been “at it” as she put it, she went nuts. I really don’t know why, she was the supposedly liberal one :rolleyes:
Looking back, I think I feel worse for Dad, when caught I was dragged from bed and stood before him. I remember him asking Mum, in a way I never remembered him asking anyone else for anything else, almost pleading, to let me go back to bed.
Neither parent ever came within miles of discussing it.
My parents were mighty progressive and I’m sure they would have been in the “it’s nothing to be ashamed of” category if I had ever brought it up. But I didn’t and neither did they. In fact we never had any sex discussion at all. But they did sign all my permission slips for sex ed at school :D.
We never, ever, talked about anything related to sex and puberty. Nope.
Nothing whatsoever. I suspect, like most kids, I heard about masturbation from other kids before actually doing it myself. I went to a Montessori school where grades 4, 5 and 6 were all together in one class. Consequently we had younger kids mingling with older ones on a daily basis and it meant that we as young kids (nine or ten) were hearing the conversations of the 12 year olds, which is quite an age gap. The older kids talked about masturbation often, and we knew what it was at like 9 or 10 but (at least speaking for myself) didn’t have the urges to do it until later. Until that point (age 11, for me) it was just a joke, something to laugh and giggle about but not actually do. Then it became serious business.