At one point or another, parents will have to give “the talk,” that uncomfortable but necessary conversation in which they explain the birds and the bees of sex.
Because sex is a complicated matter, parents resort to using imagery and metaphors to get the point across, but as one couple found out, that isn’t exactly the way to go.
In his Scary Mommy story, dad Ronnie K. Stephens recalls the moment his seven-year-old daughter took to the internet to find answers he and his partner failed to give.
They found out about it by accident, when his partner Mallerie was browsing their daughter AJ’s internet history on an iPad.
“AJ had apparently been watching pornography,” he says. “Naturally, we were horrified. Most of the videos were absolutely terrible, abusive representations of sex. She was only 7. Why was she looking at things like this?”
The realisation shocked them so much that it took a few days before they finally confronted their daughter about it.
As it turned out, their daughter simply wanted to know how reproduction worked, and when her parents didn’t satisfy her curiosity, she googled it herself and stumbled upon pornographic videos.
“We had failed where so many parents failed: obfuscating when our kids asked genuine questions,” he says. “But why did we do that?
“We talk about the birds and the bees, a woman’s flower, and planting seeds. We call it wrestling or lie and say that we’ve been taking a nap. Even the most common phrases completely remove sex from the equation.”
Sex is a difficult concept to explain, but the most important thing to remember is understanding the context of the child’s question.
Young children, especially seven-year-olds, aren’t interested about puberty and engaging in intercourse with their friends. When they ask questions about sex, they simply want to make sense of the concept in the technical sense.
“With younger kids, the key to a solid conversation is clarity,” Ronnie says. “That’s what they are after and, as we learned the hard way, they’re going to find the answers one way or another.”
Mallarie talked to her daughter for a long time, answering the child’s questions and taking special care not to make her feel as though she was wrong for trying to find answers on her own.
“Does AJ understand everything about sex now? Of course not. We didn’t focus on the first time or pressure from a date. We didn’t get into STDs.
“Those are details for a different conversation, one we’ll be better prepared for when she asks again, just as we’ll be better prepared when the other kids get curious about where they came from.”
Photo credit: Lars Ploughman
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