That was what my parents used for me and my brothers too. Same time frame. That must have been a best-seller.
No mention. I wasn’t the type to really need it explained. It’s not like a boy is going to fail to discover it, and I was hardly the type to worry it might be “wrong”. My parents weren’t really into parenting, exactly. Buying stuff was no problem but awkward talks or getting to know their kids wasn’t really a priority.
Nothing.
I had to get to grips with the subject by myself.
Considerably harder than you might think.
But I’m sure that before too long you were holding your own.
I was tucking in my undershirt one day when I was about six, and my dad turned red and yelled at me to, “STOP THAT!!!”
For years I wondered what was so wrong about tucking in undershirts.
How did we kids learn about sex and masturbation before the Internet? In the sixties and seventies, groovy parents owned many books like the Joy of Sex, the Sensuous Woman/Man/Couple and the Happy Hooker. I was an earnest and dedicated student.
In the 80s, you had your old man’s stack of nudies. Mostly Penthouse, the old perv.
My parents did not teach me about masturbation. Neither did anyone else.
I’d been doing it for about 8 years before I was more certain than not that, yes, the thing I did was indeed what that word meant; and that (therefore) yes, it was true, other people did do this, I wasn’t uniquely perverted.
I think I was 17 or 18 before the topic ever came up in any shape way fashion or form with my parents. Me & my 2 yrs-younger sister and parents were at the dinner table and the subject of teen pregnancy came up and I said something about people being able to do “things” in lieu of the specific activities that caused pregnancy, which yielded a rather loud “THIS TOPIC IS AT AN END. THERE WILL BE NO MORE DISCUSSION ON THE SUBJECT” from my Dad.
Nothing, nada, zilch about sex in any way shape or form. Grew up in the 1960s.
And I’m OK with that. I wasn’t particularly close to either of my parents, and was quite happy to be gone and on my own as soon as I could-- which was age 17, and never looked back. I keep in touch, of course, and visit occasionally but they are, frankly, an insignificant part of my life.
I don’t think masturbation existed in the South back in the mid-eighties. It just hadn’t been invented yet, apparently.
Wow, I had forgotten all about that! I, too, remember hearing the word and not know what it meant. Looking it up, I got… self abuse. Yep, sounded bad. Or, rather, I had a pretty good idea what it was, but wanted to confirm and that definition actually did confirm, but told me it was bad. Didn’t stop me, though! 
We must have been exceptionally sexually liberated in the 80’s, then. Hell, a lot of our popular songs were about masturbation (Darling Nikki, She-Bop, Turning Japanese, Blister in the Sun**)!
We knew what we were doing, we knew everybody else did it, we joked about it, our teen fiction (& nonfiction) mentioned it.
I wonder what happened between the 70’s & the 80’s?
*Yes, I know the performers of those songs claim they’re not about masturbation. They are about masturbation, mmmkay?
I think my dad told me it would lead to blindness or hairy palms (or something along those lines). Later I came to the realization that if either of those were true then EVERYBODY would be blind and/or would have hairy palms.
My parents never mentioned it, or anything about sex. I actually could have used some guidance but I am forever grateful they didn’t try. Eventually I figured it out.
I don’t think my parents were particularly comfortable discussing it, but I don’t think I gave them much choice, being a rather precocious and, um, enthusiastic devotee of this art form. They had to tell me something, or else I’d have been doing it in the street. The information I got leaned more to the “This is normal and most people do it, but in private, mmmkay? In private!”.
ETA: this was in India, in the 1980s and early 90s
Dad never said word one.
Mom, on the other hand, left pamphlets all over the place. She made it clear it was normal and natural, but I can’t say she thought it should have been kept private–she asked me directly at one point if I did it [yeeks] … (Mom has always had a little trouble with boundaries)
So, none of the above, quite.
Dad taught me the proper grip, Mom taught me about changing/alternating pressure.
Nah. Nothing was ever mentioned that I recall.
When I was 8-9 years old, my older sister and I got some grown up books (“What Every Woman Should Know About Her Body,” “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask,” stuff like that) and learned about masturbation (and venereal diseases!).
My mom deserved a great deal of credit for keeping a straight face when I walked up to her in the kitchen one day and asked, 'Are we allowed to masturbate?"
She said that we were, and listened patiently to my complaints that I didn’t really know what my private parts looked like, and it wasn’t fair, because I didn’t have a little mirror like my sister had. In a totally unrelated turn of events, she got me a little comb and mirror set a couple of months later.
I grew up in a very strict Mormon household where my mother would hide any of her nursing magazines that happen to have anything to so with the private parts of the body, or sex or whatever.
There is no way they would have had a chat about masturbation.
The Mormon church was passing out The Young Men Only, a booklet containing a talk by the uberconservative church leader Boyd Packer, which compares the male reproductive system to a “little factory” and teaches that masturbation, use of pornography, and homosexual activities are immoral and forbidden by God.
In the meantime, my father was sexually molesting my sisters and my older brother raped me, our younger brother and a number of other boys.
The only talk about sex was when my father told be explicitly what he had done to my sisters, and blamed them for his actions, all of which he did without saying they were wrong.
We were one fucked up family, and yes, it can lead to lots of problems down the road.
And that’s the long and the short of it.
Oh yes it did! Er, or so I was told. :o
masterbation is unhealthy unless your with the rite compeny ;)