When Our Children Ask About Sex - That very expression "the birds and the bees" should be your first clue. Is talking to your kids about sex going to involve strange forays into ornithology and entomology, into the leggy interspecies copulation between titmouse and luna moth? No. It's not. But it likely will involve a peculiar mix of sexual facts and immaculate euphemisms -- the truth diluted with metaphors that confuse as much as they clarify. (Birdy, our 5-year-old: "So, wait -- the daddy's seed plants on the mommy's egg?" I picture a hard-boiled egg covered in sprouts, as if human life starts as edible Chia Pet.)
I'm thinking of this mix of fact and fantasy now, as my 8-year-old son Ben and I read the informative, whimsical Amazing You! Getting Smart About Your Private Parts, by psychiatrist Gail Saltz. In a note at the end, Saltz cautions parents against reproductive flights of fancy: "Do not make up stories involving storks or other magical events." It's wise counsel, but curious, given that just a few pages earlier Saltz tells this anatomical whopper: "The baby will come out of the mother's vagina, which is very, very stretchy. It stretches wide enough for the baby to come out and then goes back to the way it was before." Sure it does!
Of course, you wouldn't really want to tell your child the whole truth here. (Let's just do our Kegels and keep our mouths shut, okay?) Still, Ben pronounces Amazing You! "very helpful." It's one of a stack of books we've checked out of the library to address his growing interest in bodies and sex. Or if not sex, exactly, then nakedness. "But," he's saying shyly now, "the book actually leaves out that other part. The part I'm most interested in."
Holy coitus interruptus, Batman.
I'd wondered if intercourse would be missed. Like many books of its kind, especially those written for the younger set, Amazing You! loads children into a kind of informational station wagon and drives them along various anatomical roadways, chatting sensibly and comfortably about penis and vagina, ovaries and testicles.
And then, zoing! It catapults them across the canyon of sex, and the kids suddenly find themselves on the other side, chatting about uterus and baby without ever having gotten a good look at the view. "When a man and a woman love each other and decide that they want to have a baby, a man's sperm joins with a woman's egg. From the egg and sperm, a baby will grow."
It's like the filmstrip we saw in sixth-grade science: a couple sitting on a park bench, a dotted line (lust? germs?) traveling down his arm and up hers. And then -- voila! -- a baby.
Earlier, Ben and I were reading How Was I Born?, a book of those brilliant Lennart Nilsson photographs taken in utero, which offers two parallel stories: the child's narrative about expecting a new baby brother, and the science narrative about embryology. When the kids were little, we followed only the child's version, but now Ben was reading over my shoulder. "Hey, can you tell us that other part?" he'd asked then as well.
I started to, only suddenly, on the very same page with the nice, comforting story ("My mom is called Sally. She's happy and sometimes wears glasses."), I choked on this little reproductive chicken bone: "This means that the father puts his penis inside the mother's vagina and many sperm come out through his penis." This same father we've known for years? The beloved Daddy-called-Pete with the nice-smelling sweater? When I got to the end of the page, I turned to Ben and said, "Wow. That's probably new information for you. Do you have any questions about it?" His eyeballs were practically rolling around in their sockets, but he shook his head and said, "No." And then clarified, "I mean, I've got, like, a million questions about it? But none that I even know how to ask."
And isn't that sex, in a nutshell? A million questions that you don't know how to ask.
It must seem so random to a little boy: Now we're talking about your penis and what it can do. Now you're in trouble for talking about it at recess. Now we're talking about babies. Now birds and bees.
When I sift through the facts gleaned from my own childhood, it's the mental equivalent of rows and rows of tidy files (multiplication tables, cursive, how to build an igloo) and then a big trash bag of sexual odds and ends: that 1975 Sears catalog in which, incredibly, a model's penis seemed to peek out below his boxer shorts; our uncle's bosomy first wife who skinny-dipped at dawn while my brother and I pressed our faces to the lake-house window; Judy Blume's Forever ... (which ruined the name "Ralph" for me -- forever). And for all of my unsqueamish compulsion to talk frankly with my kids, I bet it's the same old trash bag for them, just different contents: the camels we saw humping noisily at the zoo, the menstrual flotsam and jetsam that shows up monthly ("so the string just hangs out your butt?"), Birdy "hatching" her doll babies by jumping until they fell out the bottom of her shirt (dream on, sweet girl).
Don't you wish there were some sort of handy talking-about-sex script you could follow?
All tested, good to go. I even tried to get Ross Thompson, an expert on child development at the University of California, Davis, and a Wondertime advisor, to tell me exactly what to say and when. Um, yeah, no: "This is not a one-size-fits-all conversation," he said. "It's always about the context of the inquiry, the nature of your particular child and of your relationship to them. Listen to what they ask about and listen to the follow-up questions. Sex is an emotional topic: You're worried about telling them too much or too little, so the best way to approach it is by listening."
Okay, we'd done that at least. I felt that my husband Michael and I had provided the crucial, basic information to the kids: Babies grow when a male seed, called sperm, enters the woman's body and joins with one of her eggs. Birdy was satisfied with this, and Ben now had the rest: The man puts his penis inside the woman's body. It was only when Ben overheard me talking to Michael about a friend ("Considering they weren't trying to get pregnant, she sounds pretty excited!"), that I realized how much we'd left out. "How could you get pregnant if you weren't trying to?" he asked, genuinely baffled. "That makes no sense."
I'm thinking of this mix of fact and fantasy now, as my 8-year-old son Ben and I read the informative, whimsical Amazing You! Getting Smart About Your Private Parts, by psychiatrist Gail Saltz. In a note at the end, Saltz cautions parents against reproductive flights of fancy: "Do not make up stories involving storks or other magical events." It's wise counsel, but curious, given that just a few pages earlier Saltz tells this anatomical whopper: "The baby will come out of the mother's vagina, which is very, very stretchy. It stretches wide enough for the baby to come out and then goes back to the way it was before." Sure it does!
Of course, you wouldn't really want to tell your child the whole truth here. (Let's just do our Kegels and keep our mouths shut, okay?) Still, Ben pronounces Amazing You! "very helpful." It's one of a stack of books we've checked out of the library to address his growing interest in bodies and sex. Or if not sex, exactly, then nakedness. "But," he's saying shyly now, "the book actually leaves out that other part. The part I'm most interested in."
Holy coitus interruptus, Batman.
I'd wondered if intercourse would be missed. Like many books of its kind, especially those written for the younger set, Amazing You! loads children into a kind of informational station wagon and drives them along various anatomical roadways, chatting sensibly and comfortably about penis and vagina, ovaries and testicles.
And then, zoing! It catapults them across the canyon of sex, and the kids suddenly find themselves on the other side, chatting about uterus and baby without ever having gotten a good look at the view. "When a man and a woman love each other and decide that they want to have a baby, a man's sperm joins with a woman's egg. From the egg and sperm, a baby will grow."
It's like the filmstrip we saw in sixth-grade science: a couple sitting on a park bench, a dotted line (lust? germs?) traveling down his arm and up hers. And then -- voila! -- a baby.
Earlier, Ben and I were reading How Was I Born?, a book of those brilliant Lennart Nilsson photographs taken in utero, which offers two parallel stories: the child's narrative about expecting a new baby brother, and the science narrative about embryology. When the kids were little, we followed only the child's version, but now Ben was reading over my shoulder. "Hey, can you tell us that other part?" he'd asked then as well.
I started to, only suddenly, on the very same page with the nice, comforting story ("My mom is called Sally. She's happy and sometimes wears glasses."), I choked on this little reproductive chicken bone: "This means that the father puts his penis inside the mother's vagina and many sperm come out through his penis." This same father we've known for years? The beloved Daddy-called-Pete with the nice-smelling sweater? When I got to the end of the page, I turned to Ben and said, "Wow. That's probably new information for you. Do you have any questions about it?" His eyeballs were practically rolling around in their sockets, but he shook his head and said, "No." And then clarified, "I mean, I've got, like, a million questions about it? But none that I even know how to ask."
And isn't that sex, in a nutshell? A million questions that you don't know how to ask.
It must seem so random to a little boy: Now we're talking about your penis and what it can do. Now you're in trouble for talking about it at recess. Now we're talking about babies. Now birds and bees.
When I sift through the facts gleaned from my own childhood, it's the mental equivalent of rows and rows of tidy files (multiplication tables, cursive, how to build an igloo) and then a big trash bag of sexual odds and ends: that 1975 Sears catalog in which, incredibly, a model's penis seemed to peek out below his boxer shorts; our uncle's bosomy first wife who skinny-dipped at dawn while my brother and I pressed our faces to the lake-house window; Judy Blume's Forever ... (which ruined the name "Ralph" for me -- forever). And for all of my unsqueamish compulsion to talk frankly with my kids, I bet it's the same old trash bag for them, just different contents: the camels we saw humping noisily at the zoo, the menstrual flotsam and jetsam that shows up monthly ("so the string just hangs out your butt?"), Birdy "hatching" her doll babies by jumping until they fell out the bottom of her shirt (dream on, sweet girl).
Don't you wish there were some sort of handy talking-about-sex script you could follow?
All tested, good to go. I even tried to get Ross Thompson, an expert on child development at the University of California, Davis, and a Wondertime advisor, to tell me exactly what to say and when. Um, yeah, no: "This is not a one-size-fits-all conversation," he said. "It's always about the context of the inquiry, the nature of your particular child and of your relationship to them. Listen to what they ask about and listen to the follow-up questions. Sex is an emotional topic: You're worried about telling them too much or too little, so the best way to approach it is by listening."
Okay, we'd done that at least. I felt that my husband Michael and I had provided the crucial, basic information to the kids: Babies grow when a male seed, called sperm, enters the woman's body and joins with one of her eggs. Birdy was satisfied with this, and Ben now had the rest: The man puts his penis inside the woman's body. It was only when Ben overheard me talking to Michael about a friend ("Considering they weren't trying to get pregnant, she sounds pretty excited!"), that I realized how much we'd left out. "How could you get pregnant if you weren't trying to?" he asked, genuinely baffled. "That makes no sense."
When Our Children Ask About Sex
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