This post stems from the comments on the previous one. It discusses real life situations involving teenagers and sex.
So, first things first: whether or not a teenager is allowed to read books with sexual scenes in them is up to the parent. Full stop. No judgement one way or another.
I’m going to talk about some personal experience here and my personal philosophy when it comes to sex education. I’m not holding myself out as an example, but simply sharing what it was like to bring two girls to adulthood. My children are now in their twenties.
Personal approach.
I always erred on the side of education.
I’ve explained sex when they were probably around 11 or 12, because puberty was coming. I thought I did a fair job. Then they started coming up and asking me all sorts of nonsense. Like can you get pregnant from anal sex? Does peeing after sex prevent you from being pregnant? When I dug deeper, I realized that they were talking to other kids, who were also coming up with nonsense, and trying to find information about random crazy crap they read on the internet.
I didn’t have internet growing up. It can be a great source of information, but it’s also an enormous heap of misinformation. It’s very difficult to be a parent in the digital age. I needed some outside authority other than me so they would have at least two points of reference I knew were solid.
I went with my parents’ approach. I bought a book written about sex and aimed specifically for teens. It went over anatomy, positions, safety, different types of intercourse, and so on. I left it in plain view. Sometimes it disappeared and surfaced in other areas of the house. As a parent, I had to come to the realization that some things they just have to research on their own, because it’s uncomfortable or they are embarrassed.
Dangers of not enough education
Case 1.
When my youngest daughter was about 14, I think, I opened the door to her dragging in a sobbing teenager. The girl cried and cried, and I couldn’t get anything out of her for about ten minutes other than it was a “sex thing.” I thought she was assaulted.
Finally she calmed down enough to say that she thought she had an STD. She was terrified to tell her parents, because she would have to admit she had sex, and the consequences would be catastrophic.
Let’s pause a little bit here and talk about teenage brain works. We are speaking about the hypothetical average teenager here. Your mileage may vary. When a teenager says, “If I don’t do this, I’ll die,” they often mean it, because to them it feels like they will literally die. To adults it seems absurd that you would think about killing yourself over a bad test grade, but to teenagers everything is super important. Take your emotions, dial them up as high as they can go, and remove the real life frame of reference.
So I have this kid hysterically weeping and saying she would kill herself, and my daughter going, “Mom, can we take her to the clinic or something?” And I am sitting there going, “How do I fix this? I can’t give consent for treatment for her. She is a minor, and I’m neither the parent nor a legal guardian.” So I checked, and it turned out that according to Texas law, a medical professional can treat her for certain STDs without notifying the parents.
When tea was distributed and sobbing stopped, I asked about the symptoms and realized immediately it probably wasn’t an STD. It sounded like a classic UTI. UTI treatment requires parental consent. I told her that she needed to tell her parents that she had a UTI, let them take her to the clinic, and discuss her situation with a doctor. If she was too scared, I would take her myself. I also encouraged her to talk to her mom.
She ended up settling on calling her aunt, who took her to health department. It was a UTI. The sex was never discussed with the parents.
Case 2.
I’m in the driveway with Gordon, watching our daughters and a couple of their friends who had stayed over for the sleep over, play basketball. Child one gets picked up. Child two, who was seventeen at the time, looks at me, takes a deep breath, and says very loud, “Why does it hurt when you have sex?”
Everything stops. Our kids make big eyes. Gordon turns around and walks into the house.
So I have 30 minutes before her parents arrive to pick her up. I ended up packing a lot of information into those 30 minutes. This girl was ignorant about basics. Really, just simple things every woman needs to know to have intercourse.
Half an hour later, her mother picked her up. We smiled, waved good-bye, and I stood there, a little shell-shocked, and looked at the car leave. The family was very religious, and when I asked the girl why she didn’t talk to her mother, she told me, “My parents don’t like my boyfriend.” For the record, I was with her parents. I didn’t like her boyfriend either.
She was having sex, she was having it unsafely, and she would continue to have sex for then next year and a half. Having a restrictive upbringing where books about sex or with sex or films with sexual content were not permitted didn’t prevent sexual intercourse. They just assured that she was unprepared and felt unable to discuss it with her parents.
Case 3
“… so I changed seats.”
Me: “Why?”
“Because X likes sitting on boys laps and lets them finger her in class and I didn’t want to spend the whole study period looking at that.”
Me: O_O
“She also keeps having sex with them in a school bathroom. It’s annoying. She has insecurity problems. Multiple people took a picture of it happening, because they did it at a group table, and someone posted one in the hallway. And she didn’t stop doing it, Mom. She keeps going.”
Not a thing you would normally expect a high school freshman to do. That right there was a tragedy in progress. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I would expect either history of abuse or some sort of issues.
Just now.
Me: “Do you remember X?”
“Oh yes. That was so messed up. She has a child now. She seems really unhappy. She posts continuously on Facebook looking for validation. I wish things were better for her.”
Books and films with sex
I self-censored as a child. If a book had too many adult themes, I would get bored and move on. Later I would pick it up again and be amazed at how good it was. I’ve observed the same process with my children. That doesn’t mean I completely let go of the reins. I tried my best to steer them toward the books I thought would be appropriate for their age, but if they picked up something else on their own, I let them read it.
At a young age my father handed me the World’s Classics. One of the volumes concentrated on Greek plays. Metamorphoses of Apuleius, specifically. Random sex with strangers, homosexuality, and bestiality. Thanks, Dad. I had to look up homosexuality in a dictionary. Because we didn’t have homosexuals in USSR, they were a “Western perversion.” Don’t get me started. Anyway, as an eleven year old, I wasn’t particularly disturbed by it. Sex was very academic at that point. If two men wanted to have sex, why not? I was fuzzy on particulars, but in principle eleven year old me was fine with it.
Bestiality was an entirely different thing and I could have happily waited several more years before knowing that sort of thing existed.
At a young age, my daughters read LOVELY BONES, which deals with rape, and LORD OF THE FLIES, and they found both a great deal more disturbing than sex scenes. When they were older, about 15 and 13, they bought 50 SHADES OF GREY with their own money. I had a serious talk with them when I saw the book and said Important Things like “this is not a healthy relationship” and “this is not the proper way to engage in BDSM” and “consenting adults.”
The next morning I woke up to loud giggling. They took turns doing their makeup before school and reading random pages from the book, because they found it utterly ridiculous. They went to see the first movie and almost got kicked out of the theater because they were laughing so hard. I worried for nothing. They absolutely refused to take it seriously.
I asked our 22 year old about it just now, and she laughed. I also asked her about reading sex scenes in books as a teen and she said that she read them like any other scene. She didn’t feel they were anything super special. She had friends who read what they termed “pure smut,” which was probably erotica, and got really into the scenes. It didn’t alter their behavior either way. It was a safe way to enjoy fiction and experience things through a book.
So in conclusion, whatever your parenting strategy is in regard to sexual content in fiction, I would encourage you to educate the kids. Hiding sex isn’t going to work.
We live in the age where kids look at porn on their phones. It will be happening, it might be already happening, and the best we can do as parents is to make sure that when it does happen it’s safe and it’s not a painful or traumatic experience for them.
I wanted to stress that wanting to have intercourse or not wanting to have intercourse shouldn’t carry a stigma. Some kids are asexual. Some kids are fascinated with it. Neither is better than the other. They are all just different ways to be. Teenagers often feel like freaks and outcasts already and a lot of them are uncomfortable with their sexuality. Stressing that there is only one “right” way to feel about sexual things could lead to tragic consequences.
If you do choose to allow them to read books with sexual content, I would suggest choosing books that reinforce consent and safe sex and stress that sex, ultimately, isn’t a prize you get for putting in the time or some forbidden thing, but an act of trust between two people. Adults have sex for many reasons, but teenagers often have sex because they are in love. That romance genre usually does right.
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Thank you for this post. I was raised in a very religious conservative family that didn’t talk about sex at all. Couple that with abstinence only sex education at school and I didn’t have a clue. I was so confused about sex that I didn’t realized until years later that I’d been raped when I was eighteen (I thought you had to be beaten up for it to count). It breaks my heart that other teens are still going through this.
I am so sorry.
My dad was in the Air Force. I am 57 years old ( for reference). In the 5th and 6 th grades we had sex education today it might be called health class. There were classes that girls attended and we learned about our periods. I have no idea what the boys learned. All parents were invited to attend any of the classes. My mom was the only one to attend. I learnt where babies came from. I also knew it could happen with one try. I most certainly did not learn positions and methodologies.
True story: in the early 2000’s, my neighbor’s ten year old daughter was telling us about girls going down on boys during recess. That is TEN YEARS OLD and this was happening fifteen years ago. More than likely the children today “have already been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.”
TIME, AND PAST TIME, TO EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN FOR THEIR OWN SAFETY.
Yes. Oh so much yes.
This shouldn’t have happened to you (or anyone),it sucks.
My girls are roughly the same age as yours, and my approach was similar. I agree that knowledge is power.
Our school district is heavily influenced by fundamentalist-types that insist on abstinence-only messages, so nothing worthwhile in that class. It baffles me. School is intended to help prepare children for adulthood. We expect that at some point in their lives, our children will have sex. Yet the only “information” the kids get in sex ed. is “don’t have sex until you’re married”. Ugh!
Kudos for sensible parenting and for being the one that is trusted to clean up other parents’ messes.
I was not comfortable in those situations. Like most parents, I worry a lot about if I am doing the right thing. Should I have been more strict, less strict, done this, done that… When it’s not my child on top of that, it was incredibly stressful for everyone involved, most of all the child.
I sympathize with it being uncomfortable and the fear of angering other parents. But the key is that you are clearly the parents that can be *trusted* – to not freak out, to give advice without judgement, to be a “safe place”. That’s golden right there. 🙂
+1000
I was raised in a family where sex was talked quite openly. Actually, very openly, sometimes too much when I was a teen.
But, I realized as a young adult that I had values about it, I knew what was out of question or downright agression, I also knew myself and, well, pleasure ?
In the meantime, some of my friends were so clueless that sex was just traumatic until late (very late).
So I’m using the same approach with my own kids.
Which is why my son (7) teacher asked me recently why my son knew a girl’s body so well…O-O. … euh…… why?
Breasts, this is why. Just talking about breasts.
It sounds so stupid to me that at school they would find that not normal. For god sakes, these are just breasts!
But I don’t care. Sex is part of life. Respect towards others, at some (very, like he will be 35-40 at least) later stage might also be about sex. So it is crucial (IMHO).
This is an excellent post. I certainly didn’t feel comfortable talking to my mother about sex when I was a teenager (back when LBJ was president) because she was one of the “sex is great when you are married, but awful if you’re not” people who were common back then. From what you say it sounds like they are still out there, which makes me sad.
Adults forget that this is a very hard mindset to turn off, which is why it’s so damaging to teach it to kids. If you internalize the message that sex is wrong and shameful for much of your young adult life, then even when you’re married and/or in a healthy and committed relationship, you continue to see sex as shameful because that attitude has been drilled into you for so long. It’s uncomfortable to talk about sex with kids, but I firmly believe it’s a parent’s job to prepare their kids for adulthood, and that includes teaching them about healthy relationships and safe sexual practices.
This is so true. I don’t have kids yet, but sex education for my future kids is something I’ve put a lot of consideration into for this exact reason. I was taught at an early age that sex was absolutely dirty and disgusting unless you were married. Later, I was sexually assaulted and felt so dirty that I never told my grandmother (She raised my brother and me by herself. Don’t get me wrong, she was a good woman and loved us deeply. She was raised that sex was filthy and thought she was doing right to teach us the same, especially me since I was a girl). The sex ed classes at school were actually pretty indepth, especially for the 90’s. They even used bananas to show us how condoms worked and actually addressed sexual assault but nothing ever got passed the association she created. I did eventually get help but I’ve never had a great relationship with sex. I’m 30 now and happily married. The biggest struggle we face is my issues with sex.
I have no intention of doing this to my own kids. To paraphrase a very good book, screwing up our kids up is inevitable… but I mean for mine to be comfortable with their bodies and sexuality.
I have a whole post about books on page 2 of comments, but I am so very glad I had Alanna and my older sister (who took me out when I was 16 and put me on the pill), because my mother’s “talk”, while for the most part as technically correct as could be in 1980-something, very literally included the information that sex is something men want, and not only do you need to wait until marriage, but even after that, it’s something wives did after having the children they want because “men have needs.” I am certain my father never used that line on her (he told me, in her presence, that boys/men had no needs that any woman should feel responsible for), but she got that idea from somewhere, and I’m guessing it was her mother.
But because I had books with good examples, even then I was not buying it that women only had sex to please men.
I talk about it. Openly and with the correct terms. It absolutely horrifies my teenage sons, but I don’t care. The political and social culture in Texas (as you note) makes it every difficult for teens to get accurate information.
Books, videos, and I also put bookmarks on their web browsers for good teen advice sites. They hate hearing from me but what else can I do.
I will say that I very much appreciate the focus on consent in all your books. Your alphas don’t proceed without it and you and Gordon make that very clear in the writing. That is a conversation as a parent of sons I’m having a lot. They could stand to read some books with romance plots too!
Yes! Ilona’s books always have very positive portrayals of relationships and sex, IMO, which is why I love them.
I love your idea about putting bookmarks in their web browsers. You sound like an awesome parent!
My religious fundamentalist parents allowed me to choose what books to read when I was 13, and what movies to watch when I was 17 – except if they were romance novels or movies. I still developed a few healthy ideas about consent and relationships – thank you Tamora Pierce and Judy Blume – but I also ended up having unsafe, painful sex well before I was married. This happened because of not having any real life reference or guidance on how to be in a relationship with a boy, not because of fictional sex.
I’m not telling parents what to do, but I think it’s important to let your kids know they can talk to you, and be willing to listen and teach them. Shame and ignorance absolutely can lead to dangerous situations.
You said just about everything I ever wanted to say about sex ed ever!
1) I always found that making teenagers feel empowered to say “yes” makes them more likely to say “no” . . . at least until they’re older and doing so in a way that is safer. The one really promiscuous girl I knew in high school came from a conservative, catholic family that refused to let her take sex ed in school. Until I told her otherwise, she thought you got HIV from rough sex and that you couldn’t get STDs from oral sex. Guess who got oral gonorrhea? I definitely say the “in for a penny, in for a pound” mentality with other people too.
2) Thank you Anne McCaffrey! Yeah, some of her stuff was a bit odd, but I’m so glad I picked up Dragonflight at the age of 10. The “fade to black” nature of the sex scenes weren’t too graphic for a pre-teen to understand, but in reading the series from a young age, I learned that 1) sex could be enjoyable or unenjoyable, that a woman had the right to orgasms, you had to self-advocate, partner choice makes a difference, and consent can be tricky but should always be checked; 2) homosexuality is NBD and people who are homophobic are close-minded and wrong. I honestly didn’t know homophobia was a thing until I was 14. Sexual orientation just wasn’t brought up in my family or in my small private school, so the only reference I had were books where many of the heroes were gay men.
3) I have a handful of younger brothers, some of them much younger. Despite my parents both being doctors and relatively sex-positive, it became clear that the younger siblings preferred getting The Talk from older siblings. We covered biology at 11-12, when they started wondering about it, and emotions /consent at 14-15, when they started having real interest in actually having sex. Promised and obtained peer-reviewed sources for all my info and added my personal experiences. Ended up giving talks to groups of my youngest brothers’ friends. Proud to say, only one pregnancy scare and no STIs among my brothers and their friends.
All my brothers and their friends can now recite Kathryn’s Four Rules to Live By:
1) If you’re going to tap it, wrap it aka You don’t have to wait for marriage to have sex, just wait until marriage to have sex (any kind) without barrier protection, and still consider it then.
2) Seatbelts save lives and turn signals save cars.
3) People who don’t tip go to Hell.
4) If you time travel, don’t go in the water.
“Thank you Anne McCaffrey!”
…and then there’s Jean M. Auel.
I read jean M Auel and Anne McCaffrey at 12 or so. Jean was a lot more graphic than the pern books however Anne does have romances that are a little more explicit and definitely talk about rape and consent which was pretty forward for the time they were published.
2nd to McCaffrey and Auel at ages 12-13 or so (gets fuzzy).
I read Clan of the Cave Bear in the 2nd grade*, because my mom was reading it and it looked interesting. I was about to say I wasn’t sure when I picked up my first McCaffrey, but that’s not true – I picked up one of her short story collections that summer. It’s pretty likely that a lot of McCaffrey didn’t hit me that hard in terms of romantic fiction because I was just too young when I read a lot of her stuff… but it was also some time before I found much romantic fiction that was that personally resonant? A few, sure, but most were enjoyable, but clearly about people who weren’t much like me.
* Not that it discusses anything but rape.
I also read McCaffrey and Jean Auel in my early teens (and Mercedes Lackey etc mid teens) and I definitely think now they helped me gain a positive healthy attitude to sex ie. that I was meant to enjoy it and that I would only have sex when I wanted to. Plus, it would hurt without foreplay so yay foreplay! I didn’t have sex until I was in my early twenties, but knew girls having sex at a younger age who didn’t enjoy it and didn’t understand that they were meant to enjoy it too – they thought it was just for boys to enjoy and women to put up with etc. Sigh. My aunt lent me her books to start with and I’m very thankful to her for them. Funny afterstory – my mum ‘discovered’ Jean Auel a few years back and raved at them to my sister and I…and we were all, yeah we read her in our teens 🙂 I don’t think she realised at all what we were reading back then!
Love your rules!
Thank you for writing about this important topic, Ilona. Your books are a great example of always respecting consent and no meaning no, and even saying no for the other when they were in a too vulnerable state (Innkeeper).
Great rules, Kathryn. You did a big favour to your siblings and their friends.
Jean Auel’s books were my first explicit sex scene reads as a teen too. Them and Sergeanne Golon’s Angelica books, though they pretty much faded to black. I remember being totally shocked, not by sex but by both, Angelica and her count, cheating each others in a later book (both in the same book). But they were being French, I guess.
Kids are getting a very reasonable sex ed in schools in Finland starting in 4th grade (when they’re 10). First human biology, then in later years more about sex and relationships. My kids are only in 2nd grade but I have been speaking with them about being safe with adults and always saying no if they feel uncomfortable with anything and leaving the situation. And telling mom and dad about it. And also being careful about online content and speaking with strangers there and in the mobile games they play. I hope that they will feel safe and comfortable to speak with me if they have any questions. Right now boys and girls are ick.
My early sex ed in school was pretty embarrassing because my mom was the school nurse who gave us some lessons and all my classmates knew it 😛
? I love the 4 rules! Perfect!
I’m over 50 now so my sex education was early 80s. My parents would answer any question I asked and they gave me more than the basics. I was in small town Georgia in grade 9 (age 13) when there was sex education beyond body functions. Boys and girls together in one class silently reading a textbook with the physical education teacher at the front of the class. Raise your hand if you have questions. yeah right.
I told a lot of my friends about what I learned from my parents. Yes, you can get pregnant if you do it standing up. Going to the bathroom afterwards won’t “clean the sperm out” etc etc. About birth control and more.
It is easier for kids now with the internet and more books aimed at teenagers. None of the books I read in high school had explicit sex in them. I think James Bond movies were the naughtiest I saw.
This is a wonderful post. Thank you.
“Having a restrictive upbringing where books about sex or with sex or films with sexual content were not permitted didn’t prevent sexual intercourse.”
This is so much my experience. –
I went to college when I thirteen, in a program with a bunch of other thirteen and fourteen year olds. TBH, we were a pretty messed up group in many ways – not helped at all by the administration! – but for the most part, the students were above average for maturity for their age, if not mental health overall. There were exceptions. I was pretty well educated on matters pertaining to sexuality. Puberty had started at nine – runs in the family – and my younger sibling’s nanny* had pointed me towards “Changing Bodies, Changing Lives” and then I’d gone on to research the heck out of whatever else seemed unclear, or interesting. (And built myself a vibrator when I was ten. A delicate flower I am not.) The family situation was not good, including sexually, but it was information rich.
A bunch of the kids in my Early Entrance cohort and I started attending science fiction cons. One of this group was a devout evangelical girl. Somehow, her father decided that pulling me aside and telling me that he could trust me to keep her out of trouble was a great idea. It is true, I was very responsible. (Though also a virgin because a) boys my age weren’t that interesting and b) I was the kind of kid who had sworn an oath to Artemis when I was eleven, and hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to handle that. What can I say?) And I thought there was no way she should be having sex until she got her head on straight about things like birth control and safety. But how was I supposed to keep her out of trouble? Apparently not using birth control was more important than being chaste. Gah! So there she was with a slimeball ten years her senior, and I couldn’t pry her loose or get her to see sense. So stressful! ??? My sister, some years later, may have gotten a rather high information no subtlety at all version of sex education from me (mom abdicated), but at least by then I had some kind of formal training. And some authority.
I don’t have children of my own, and these days I’m usually dealing with my research students, who are all adults (though sometimes my office has turned into a health collective, I swear! What I love is how the students support each other, often without my intervention) and all the nerdlings and godkids and adopted nieces and nephews – and in those cases I’m close to the parents and often in the explicit role of non-parental close adult.
One last bit – an article I enjoyed when it was first published is freely available. Must We Fear Adolescent Sexuality?
* No, I never had a nanny. I’ve mentioned that my younger sibs had pretty much a completely different upbringing than I did?
A friend of mine was raised in a family that Didn’t Talk about some things. She stole her mother’s vibrator at a reasonably young age, and her mother couldn’t demand it back, because that would mean admitting she had it in the first place!
One of the things that I thing is a horrible shame with the stigmatization of female sexuality is that women are so discouraged from learning what they like. I mean, outside of fiction, how often does any lover know exactly what you like if you don’t tell them? And how can you tell them if you don’t know yourself? Meanwhile, there are all these people, especially women, having horrible sex. (No, really, studies have been done! Young women in particular have a lot of really awful sex. I’m glad I was such a terrifying young hellion.)
Hey, I really appreciate this post. I’m guessing it was my question in the comments of the last post that brought this up (asking the BDH if they had introduced Hidden Legacy and Innkeeper series to their tweens and teens, because I’m thinking of offering them to my 12 year old daughter). I was raised in the 70s and 80s, when we got sex ed in school in 6th grade but not…all the details. Like I knew it took a sperm and an egg to make a baby, and one came from one part of a man and one came from one part of a woman, but it wasn’t made clear how they actually got together and so I think I was in high school before I figured out you couldn’t get pregnant from kissing. My parents never ever discussed sex with me or my brothers. Needless to say, I’m trying to raise my kids with a lot more information. It’s not like we talk about it all the time, but I try to make it clear to them that I’m always willing to answer any and all questions they may have.
I have a lot more to say on the subject but what I most want to do is offer my thanks to the BDH for their collective advice and many, many great book recommendations in the threads. And most of all, thanks to the Authorlords for writing engaging, interesting, thought-provoking stories with strong female leads, that always involve consent when there are sex scenes. It’s no question to me that these are the kinds of books I want my daughter to read, it’s just a matter of when.
::waves:: Lucy, for some reason the spam filter is catching your comments. I am trying to fix it, but if your comment is delayed slightly, no worries, I will fish it out and restore it when I see it.
Thanks so much Ilona! I tried to comment three times last night and once this morning to thank everyone- I was beginning to be paranoid that I had offended someone and was being blocked. Weird that I suddenly got swept up in the spam filter between one comment and the next.
And thanks again for this post. Judging from the number and length of comments, this is a topic that means a lot to folks and I really appreciate the time and thoughtfulness you put into it.
I really liked that you focused on both the mechanical and emotional, social aspects. I had education on the mechanics of reproductive sex early on from my parents and biology class, but I wish I had that message about sex as an act of trust and pleasure between people. I am thankful to have been taught about periods, contraception and STDs, but wish I was told about orgasms and consent. Sex was very much implied to be a thing that men want that women can use against them, or maybe give as a gift in return for love, and as I wasn’t allowed to read romance novels or anything so frivolous and was a late bloomer in terms of my own desire it was a while before I knew anything to contradict that. Once I wanted and started having sex I was always convinced I was doing something wrong as my job was to please the man and perform and I didn’t know how. Looking back, I WAS quite bad at it for a long time, simply because I was so tense and artificial and badly communicating with partners who were in the same boat. Your daughters are very lucky!
I was teen mom, so I speak about sex openly with my two older kids, 12 girl and 16 boy. I’ve bought books and let them read it. And I always let them know that ask me questions not their friends and google. We also will stop mid tv show and discuss what’s happening, lately my daughter read the Twighlight series and she said she skipped the honeymoon because she felt like she was peeping in on a private moment. I don’t want them to be curious like I was because no one ever talked about it or gave us safe avenues other than abstinence.
My oldest seems to not be interested in girls or sex and we let him know that’s fine. He was been being hassled by the other boys on his track and soccer team last year for not having a girl or doing anything yet. I dont think hubs and I were prepared for it, so together with him we looked up asexuality or homosexuality and he thinks he’s not, but maybe he just hasn’t found someone he likes. Which again we reinforced is just fine too a long as he is happy. He told me the other day after reading Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson, he could date a girl like Mercy, one who is funny, capable and likes cars like he does. So maybe he is just a late bloomer where feelings are concerned.
My husband isn’t comfortable talking about sex with our daughter, but he makes an effort if something comes up randomly on tv or movies. These days I feel like we can’t avoid seeing sex everywhere, the only way to help them is to create a safe space for them to get information.
I really admire the way you approached discussing sexuality with your son. There’s so much pressure on boys especially to be overtly sexual, sometimes in a really aggressive and selfish way, and so many of them will perform up to that. I think it’s a real sign of maturity and security with you that your son can be honest about his current uncertainty and open to different possible identities.
I didnt realise the immense pressure boys had to live up too before these issues came up. I have 6 sister and 1 brother who is 8 years old than I am. My husband says what makes it harder for him is that he is classed as a jock at school and there comes a certain stereotype with that stigma. But we are taking it one day at time. We are here when he figures it out.
On the asexual spectrum is demisexual – badly explained that’s where sexual interest forms after the emotional relationship.
Personally, I think that past a point there are too many boxes and we just need to admit there is a spectrum of human sexuality and even that the same person can be in different places in that spectrum on different days of the week, much less parts of their lives.
But if it comforts your son, there is apparently a “box” where someone only wants sex if they like and respect the other person (I obviously have tremendous difficulty wrapping my head around why this box needs to exist). I don’t know the label, but I am certain it’s Google-able.
Thank you for this post! My kiddos are still little 7 and 5 but even though right now I don’t talk about sex with them I do talk with them about calling their privates the correct terms not a made up name and about touching. They need to know that they are in control of their bodies and no one should touch them or see them without their consent especially at this age nobody should be touching them. I let them watch animal documentaries so when they see animals having sex or birthing a baby if they ask a question I answer them truthfully and in a way that is appropriate for their age.
My husband and I plan on teaching them truthfully when they get a little older like around 10 about sex and what it is and what is good about it and what can be very bad about it and how to protect ones self. We are religious but that doesn’t change things for us we believe God created sex and made us sexual so there is nothing to be ashamed of and we don’t hide it from our kids or wait till they are asleep the just think right now that it’s mommy daddy time but as they grow they will realize what we are truly doing and that it’s not something to be ashamed of. We will try to teach them to wait for marriage because what marriage represents and how personal sex is (something I didn’t really grasp until much later) but they will never be judged or condemned if they don’t. They will know they can always tell or ask us anything especially because neither one of us had that growing up. I told my mom the first time I had sex and she cried and just kept talking about how she was a bad mother (essentially making it all about her) and didn’t discuss anything with me about it so I just stopped asking or going to her about sex stuff. Had I had a parent that was open and honest and I knew that I could talk to about sex and not be made to feel bad I don’t think I would have done half the things that I did at such a young age.
Thank you for the post and us also getting your personal experience it helps us with young kiddos to see that it can be done correctly.
My house had a big library in my teenage years and no one care about what I read, even knowing that some books had adult themes, not only sex but drug use, homosexuality, incest, you name it (I grew up in a kind of hippie family). I read some unsavory themes as I grew older but, as many talked about it, in my early teens I usually just self-censored any sex scenes. To have access to information about drug abuse, rape and another themes in my late teens was also important, I think. That library and the capacity to pick up any book and just read anything I wanted give me not only precious knowledge about life but also save my life more than once, in more than one way.
I completely agree with this post. This stuff is important. Loved the sentiment that there is no one way to feel about sex and that ultimately, it is an act of trust between two people. One caveat, however, is the internet. It’s really not a good place to get your sex information. It is so overloaded with porn and hard core porn. The guys who think this is how you have sex are badly misinformed. Unfortunately, most of the girls they will have sex with don’t know any better either. Thus, parents will get questions (hopefully) like “Why does it hurt to have sex?” or “Should I just let him do whatever he wants?” Mostly, parents, keep the lines of communication open with your kids. If they learn to respect themselves through your parenting, you have succeeded.
The internet can be a great place for sex ed though, especially for kids who don’t have access to good books or adults who are willing and able to communicate well about the topic.
I wish very much internet access and the wonderful Scarleteen sex ed site had been around when I was a teen, or all those medical sites that could have explained how hymens work or irregular periods.
Yes, it’s awful if kids are getting their sexual expectations from unrealistic and misogynistic porn, but think of all those gay, lesbian, assexual, demisexual, non-binary or heterosexual with a twist kids who find they are not alone. There are so many kids out and comfortable with a tange of sexual identities ( even if not-practising ) and I’m sure it couldn’t have happened pre-internet.
I’ve a friend who’s used a great phrase with her teenage sons: learning about sex from internet/porn is like learning to drive by watching fast and furious movies. I’m using this – to grab some attention, in the hope that other messages (enthusiastic and ongoing consent, no pressure (don’t give it or give in to it), be safe physically and mentally, it’s ok to be curious and good to ask questions, our house is a safe space, if he /she /they are underage they can’t give consent but if you really love /care about / respect each other you’ll wait. Otherwise, condoms in the cupboard and you know they won’t protect you against some STIs right? and only 98% effective for pregnancy IF the user does everything right. Do you know how to make sure you both enjoy it? Yeah. I think I’m scaring the poor boy.
A lot of the above is not stuff my parents talked about with us. We had a great picture book available from when I was about 7 or 8 called “where do babies come from” that I look back on fondly as it had a little beer bellied man and marvellously thatched woman (by today’s standards) and went through the mechanics of it in ways that were understandable if very simplified. It resolved my curiosity and saved my parents having to talk about it (probably why they bought it)!
Totally relate to the early intro to homosexuality and bestiality. At the tender age of 11 I was reading (entirely without my parents knowledge or consent) Jackie Collins novels which are very sexually explicit. My parents had always been open about sex and where babies come from but I had not heard of oral sex or BDSM and I confess it came as a bit of a shock. Did people really do that?! Weird! I had heard of homosexuality but hadn’t considered the actual mechanics of it so that was also educational. Did I want to race out and try any of it? No. But later when I was more interested in sex I discovered I was much better educated about the mechanics, STDs and safe sex than most of my peers. Would I recommend Jackie Collins as sex-ed. No. But Ilona’s suggestion of a good teen sex book being available is an excellent one. Make it available early – the more education the better so that teens can make safe choices. Also be open to the idea of your daughter being on birth control. No birth control does not equal no sex just no safe sex. And yes I appreciate that men and condoms have a responsibility and a role to play too.
Sex ed in my home was… strange. I’m the oldest(23 now), so my Dad(parents are split) told me very little as he wasn’t sure how to approach these topics of sex-ed, sex mechanics, and what he considered appropriate. My mom tried to be open and honest in her explanations. “Tab A goes in slot B, or C. Whatever you’re into.” When I was in grade five and experimenting with relationships she told me that “…If he wants to hug you, fine. If he wants to kiss you, fine. If he wants to have sex with you, that’s not okay.”
In the end I did my own research and experimenting. Hordes of books(Laurell K Hamilton, Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness, the Edge series, Anne McCaffery, etc etc), internet, decent sex ed in class, talking with other students, etc. Books sometimes frustrated me because I wanted to know what happens after the fade to black. “How did the mechanics work? How does it feel?” Unfortunately it’s nearly impossible to explain the emotions to someone who hasn’t had sex, but in my endless pursuit I did find a few resources which helped me. In turn, I educated my sisters, and classmates.
One resource that I found, and continue to use, is the youtube channel Sexplanations. It’s a high quality show hosted by a clinical sexologist who explains all about sexuality. There are adults that talk openly and conscientously to each other about predetermined topics. The host is bubbly and cheerful, providing a colourful and memorable dislogue. I have told many people about it. It’s a resource that deserves to be shared. In addition, I wish that I had a sex referencing book left about the house. That is a wonderful idea.
My parents weren’t particularly religious, but the only sex conversation was “if you come home pregnant, don’t bother to come home” which was very unhelpful. I got “Dear Abby’s Guide To Necking and Petting” literally tossed in my bedroom door when I was about 17- then the door shut very fast. I was also told to return it after 3 days.
It wasn’t religion, it was embarrassment that blocked information in my house. The only reason I heard the word “period” before I got one was thanks to an offhand comment by a friend. No help at all in dealing with the consequences of a very irregular cycle (with hideously embarrassing consequences.) on a vacation I asked for tampons so I could swim, but the box instructions weren’t quite enough for a girl who did not understand her own body structure “down there” and that was a painful lesson.
The truely sad thing was growing up in the 70s I understood what rape was very young, but consensual, pleasurable sex very late. I think that is about as unhealthy as you can get. All my information on sex came from movies and books, and violent sex was much more common than relationship sex back then. Basically, all of society was fundamentalist purity culture in the bible belt at that time. Sex Ed in school came 2 years too late for menstruation information, and sex instruction was cartoons of silly swimming sperm racing for the egg- no context about how the sperm got there, no mention of consent. The sperm didnt swim to the egg until after marriage, but no mention of contraception. Needless to say, that sort of education leads to high rates of pregnancy and date rape (which was a very controversial topic at that time- can it really be rape if she isn’t beaten up and it wasn’t a stranger? And of course husbands always had “rights” even if their wife had separated or divorced them.)
Then AIDS showed up. Oh the judgement! It amazed me how many parents were willing to risk their kids lives by forbidding sex and never mentioning condoms. And I still want to know how many “good” wives got AIDs because their husbands brought it home to them. Men were just expected to wander, and condoms ruined the experience.
It’s hard to find a book today that doesn’t have some sex, but it’s even harder to find one that doesn’t offer healthy context for that sex. Kids need to see the context even if they skip over the steamy stuff. Consent and condoms go with sex like PB&J. Every time.
I am so amazed that we have authors like you who willing share such intimate thoughts with us. Thank you so much.
Also, make sure your kids know how lucky they are. My sex education from my parents consisted of this conversation:
“Do you know what sex is?”
“Um, yes.”
“Good.”
That was it. Everything else I learned as a teenager came from Nora Roberts, no lie. I am very open with my kids now about their bodies, and I fully plan on handling sex the same way.
My mom wasn’t particularly strict but I do think she was a product of her time and by the time I was hitting adolescence she was still learning to be comfortable with her own adjusting views. I got a few classics like ‘Seen one seen them all’ and she knew that if I wanted to do it I would (I was her 4th kid by that point), but she expressed the hope that I’d wait or at least be choosy since there would be a lot of emotion intertwined with sex for a teen (As you say, every bad thing was world ending). She didn’t have a lot of in depth information to share but she made a point to say that she’d rather know what I was up to or if I was troubled than for me to feel afraid to talk to her.
The internet was just starting out though so my friend and I found a lot of curious stories in the realms of fanfiction (Before even images there were always smutty fan stories!). Of course not a perfect source of information but we were pretty naive and curious. In my late teens a family friend loaned me a book regarding the ins and out of sex. It was aimed at adults but was written from a more instructional/educational perspective and I read that book on and off for years.
While I’m glad I was comfortable talking to my mom when I needed to, there’s definitely an element of self discovery necessary for teens and looking back I think a lot of kids moved at their own pace. The friends I know who came from more sheltered or restrictive backgrounds tended to have some bigger bumps along the way or ran on some misinformation for a long time. Women particularly who had issues with pain and sex and not knowing what was ok, what was bad, and what you should hurry to a doctor about.
YES, YES, YES, knowledge IS power, especially when it comes to sex. As the mother of a 19 year old and a 17 year old I want my kids to know exactly what they’re saying yes or no to. They also know that they can talk to me about any aspects of sex and I won’t judge. I have been very grateful to discover Laura Dodsworth’s Bare Reality series of books that show real bodies and talk to real people about real sexual experiences, good and bad. They are a wonderful antidote to getting all your sex education through porn.
From where I’m standing you guys win at parenting.
Since my mom is a teacher (music and biology) we had all those sex-ed books at home anyway and we could ask and talk to her about anything and everything…
And also: sex-ed is part of biology classes in Germany and therefore not optional (we even have tests/exams about it). Children here learn about it multiple times: 3rd grade, 5th grade, 7th grade and again about two times in senior classes… first it’s mostly just about the biological part but each year it is taught they also go deeper into other aspects of sex ed…
And, amazingly enough, the teen pregnancy rate in Germany is much lower than the rate in America.
Oh dear yes, the tests and exams… We had those too. I can (20-odd years on) probably still name the two major hormones involved in the process of ovulation in the female body X’D
Technically we did get some classes on relationships around age 15 or so, in addition to the biology classes on the technical side of things, but that did not cancel out the 17 years of not amazing examples I got at home, to the point my then-father’s unpleasant pov on sexuality still negatively impacts my current relationship.
So yes, like most parents I plan on doing it all differently and better with my offspring. I’ll let you know in twenty years or so if I succeeded.
Thank you. Triple, if not more for LGBTQ children. I kept the Joy of Hay Sex in my office just to be able to reassure, explain, and provide relatively sane answers to crazy teenage questions. We do harm to our children when we send the out without any information. As a pastor, I want to call it a sin to provide no education, yet be judgmental regarding the consequences. Again, thank you for your post.
I know this was probably a typo but now I soooo want to read the Joy of Hay Sex. 🙂
Hay is very scratchy. Bring a blanket. Books never tell you the logistical stuff.
I am sure I must have discussed sex with my kids. They are late 30’s I know my discussion with my mom was “do you have any questions?’ I didn’t know enough to have any questions, sadly. Oh well. I managed.
I do remember that my kids would wait until I was driving or something to bring up things that they wanted to know. And the one time, I think he was in grade 4 or 5, I was cleaning up a spill under the dining room table. It had those downward point you things on it. I remember this because i hit the back of my head w2hen he said, out of the blue, “ I know what a blow job is”. So we discussed that.
As a Middle School teacher, I can tell you that for many, talking about sex in 6th grade is normal for some, and grosses others out. By 7th grade, some of them are having sex. By 8th grade, far too many girls go into a stage where they feel they have to be perfect, and that means having a boyfriend – and they are easy targets for boys in 9th,10th, 11th.
Answering questions was strictly forbidden, as it offended some parents, and some boys would start with the weirdest things they could think of just to see how far they could push a teacher in class. But one teacher was fired for being too ‘friendly’ and ‘informative’, as if answering their questions and letting them hang out to ask them was going to lead to _her_ having sex with them. As teachers listening to our kids, we knew what she was doing (some kids double checked her info with others of us, thankfully privately so we could answer). But the school freaked when a parent complained.
So yes, they were getting weird information from each other. They are getting pressured. It is horrible – and isn’t much better for High School teachers, who also cry for some of their students and the ways we are not allowed to help.
I’m still highly amused when my wife and I discuss our childhoods and sex education. I grew up in a liberal leaning suburb of a major city, she grew up in a conservative leaning small town. We both had liberal leaning parents, though hers are a good decade or so older than mine.
Her (public) school district didn’t do any sex ed under high school (by which point, close to half the girls in her class were pregnant, some for the second time; did I mention this was a small town surrounded by cornfields with nothing much for teens to do?).
On the other hand, my (otherwise conservative) Catholic school began sex ed in 4th grade. Mind you, they didn’t do a great job of it, but at least they kind of tried.
*until high school
My Catholic high school also had excellent technical sex ed, with the caveat that absolutely everything was followed with “but not until you’re married.” Which made learning about STD’s fun, as even we could see some real illogic there.
One of the worst arguments I’ve ever had, in the sense that I ended up in tears on behalf of the poor girl, was with her parents who were taking a stand on FB that getting your daughter vaccinated against HPV would turn her into a slut. Cervical cancer. Which their daughter would never get because she wouldn’t have sex until she was married. Ok, right, but what if the man she marries is not a virgin? They had no answer to that, and when the mother ultimately said that if her daughter had sex before marriage she deserved cancer? That’s when I started crying. And, since they weren’t MY friends, blocked them. (Presumably she would also deserve cancer for marrying a non-virgin, when 75% of sexually active people in the Western world have or have had HPV. Which quite often doesn’t make visible warts. Which is also the most virulent strain AND the one that causes cancer).
I grew up on a ranch and my mom is a nurse, so I had the differing levels of the sex talk growing up. My mom was very clinical about it, so until I was a teen, I did not understand why people bothered. The biggest thing I was appreciative about is that I was comfortable to ask my mom any question, and she would answer it. I can’t remember how many times my friends would have a question, I would ask my mom, she would answer straight up, and I would relay the answer. As a 41 year old who has never had sex, I can say that the most important thing is knowledge. How can you make an informed decision if you don’t have all the facts? Having the weird misinformation still floating around freaks me out. It is each individuals choice on what they do with their bodies, but knowing what is going on is key.
My mother likes to tell the story of how when I was about 5 I woke her from a nap to ask if men and women had to (crude hand gesture of finger going through ?) to have a baby. She thought oh dear lord I’m not ready for this but summoned her will power sat up said yes then prepared to answer any other questions. I said ok and walked out. Then in 4th grade they decided to teach us basic sex anatomy, but separated the girls and boys. We were given pictures to color of a penis and testes, I colored the penis orange and balls green. I took it home to show my mom how well I did staying in the lines. She asked about the color choice and I said I liked it.
Thank you, Ilona Andrews. I am the one the family sends people to who have “questions.” So i feel for you as i know what you mean. There i am serving tea at family gathering of over 300 people at family church and here comes someone to ask about being bisexual or gay or whatever because aunt or uncle said teen needed to come talk with me. I probably should say I am oldest grandchild, a former vet tech and female. Like the above commenter I also read Anne McCaffrey at an early age. Dad encouraged us all to read books as he said that he knew nothing about raising girls just boys. Mother was raised as a fundamentalist which she did her best to raise us children (6) as. It took major negotiations with her to be able to watch Charlie’s angels on tv as part of our allowed 10 hours. But like you said, it was not the sex that drew us because we self edited. We also watched Dr Who and spent hours trying to explain science.
Thank you for the chuckle. I think you did fine. I tell the kids number one rule is consent of both parties. Number 2 is keeping it zipped and wrapped until after you get your degree and married as physical protection protects both parties. I also remind them birth control is not 100% effective if only one person is using. That usually makes them think as I am not saying No sex unlike patental units but Safe sex. Makes a difference.
One of my nieces has Aspergers syndrome and finds social interactions very difficult. What her mother did was buy sex ed book for teens and leave laying out just as you did. That worked for both of them. Her male parental unit reminds of the country song about dad cleaning gun when beau calls for girl.
I think one of the very first books I ever read that touched on sexuality was by Judy Bloom. Then someone handed me Flowers In the Attic and I was like, “What?!” So yeah i totally get it. Ans thank you for such a wonderfully worded post. My daughter and I have gone through a very similar conversation a few years ago, but it was more about what she was watching instead of reading. Thank you.
Oy. Teenagers.
I’ve always been upfront about sex. My thought is that if it’s taboo, it’s something to rebel over. My best friend got pregnant at 17 because she didn’t think you could get pregnant the first time. She didn’t know better because her parents were super religious and wouldn’t talk about sex. So, they really pushed her to marry him, and that really worked out well (not).
My kid has asked me all kinds of stuff. And I told her that if she wasn’t comfortable discussing stuff with me, that her auntie was super cool and would advise her without telling me (with my permission). So far, so good. I’m not too worried about her.
Although, we did have to talk down her friend who thought she could get pregnant from a toilet seat when they were 12.
With all the sobbing from that event, I thought she’d been prayed upon too.
This is a great post! I wholeheartedly agree with education as the default for rearing kids. And consent is a critical concept to impart. I was shooting for respectful and cooperative kids not frightened and biddable. Trying to teach good decision making skills and the inalienable right to own her own skin. I wish I had your ability to communicate!
Laughed and lived the part where Gordon turned around and went into the house! My own does that whenever the topic is too volatile, so funny when it’s not me!
I’ll join everyone in thanking you for this post. My mother was extremely strict about everything related to sex and dating when I was in high school – to the point where she would rent movies , record them onto a new VCR tape, and edit out the sex scenes. She also heavily monitored the books I got. And just as you hinted with The Lovely Bones, all the sex scenes I got were then rape scenes in so-called literary books that flew under her radar. As a result, I feel pretty strongly that hiding books or trying to erase sex from a teenager’s life is going to have a strongly negative effect. You can’t erase it, but since she made sex so shameful that I would never be comfortable talking with her… well, luckily nothing bad happened to me.
I agree 100%. I never made sex a taboo topic with my niece and nephews or our 3 kids either. We discussed sex, talked about homosexuality and they know what their body parts are actually called and how they work. We live in the Bible Belt and so many kids are left so ignorant it is infuriating. We were at my daughter’s Girl Scout meeting when she was 7 and she was telling everyone how her brother got his penis caught in his zipper and we had to take him to the doctor ( not fun but no scar and we all lived) and all the moms were HORRIFIED that she said the word penis. How could I let her say such a word and talk about it. It’s a body part ladies….that is what it’s called. *rolls eyes* She stated the facts and it should have been no big deal. Abstinence and ignorance should be classed as child abuse in my opinion. Too many kids get hurt by not knowing what to do and what is healthy about sex.
The horrified reaction does so much more harm that the knowledge. FFS.
It’s great that you discuss homosexuality with your kids. 12 years of Catholic school where it just wasn’t ever mentioned meant I didn’t know it existed until I went to college. Of my 93-woman* graduating class, I know that 3 are gay, and I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to be so incredibly invisibled.
_____
*all-girls high school. It did make the sex ed easier.
Thanks for the post. From the age of about 11 or 12 I had full access to all the Judith krantz and Barbara Taylor Bradford books in my mum’s collection. They were definitely an eye opener! I found them fascinating and they taught me (rightly so) that mutual pleasure is what make sex amazing. We didn’t talk too much about sex growing up and I am now making a point to talk about sex and bodies in an age appropriate way to my 7 and 4 year old. Mostly they ask a question about where babies come from or how they are made and then forget the answer as soon as I have said it. Blog posts like this are great conversation starters!
I don’t have kids of my own, but my mom was very no-nonsense/always made it clear no sexual questions were too weird or awkward to ask, and let me read romance starting in my…early teens? And I definitely felt like, growing up it meant I had a much less skewed idea of what sex meant/the risks/etc than some of my friends, especially the ones with families who treated it like something taboo.
My sex education consisted of my mother signing me up for a film that my elementary school showed about maturing. I think there was a pamphlet too.. I came away being a bit confused, but didn’t ask my parents any questions. I’m in my 60s and we were much more innocent then.
I learned from the best. My Mom had a degree in education and child psychology. In spite of growing up in the fifties, I was very well informed and freely shared that information with my friends who, though curious and questioning, had parents who were less forthcoming with the answers.
Our family had a very open and loving relationship so it never occurred to us to be embarrassed about our curiosity. My mother believed that if you were old enough to ask the question, you were old enough for the answer.
I thought I knew everything. Imagine my shock when, at the age of 19, while reading the book, Leopold and Loeb: The Crime Of The Century, I ran across something that bothered me. Of course I went to my Mom and asked her to explain what that was. She calmly explained about homosexuality which I had never imagined or even considered as a possibility. It just goes to show, you’re never too old to learn.
I taught religious studies in a Catholic high school and embedded in the program is information on STDs, consent, positive and harmful relationships (no I didn’t teach that being on the LGBTQ spectrum is wrong or sinful but rather about the signs of an abusive relationship.) When students asked questions my colleagues and I answered honestly. I’ve never had a parent upset about me answering their child’s questions. But to this day I am amazed at the wrong information that is out there. For example, if you’re both naked above the waist you’ll get pregnant, birth control is a woman’s problem and responsibility, and oral sex doesn’t count because it is safe!
Despite being a medical doctor my mother was rather repressed with regard to discussing sex with us children. But she did buy us an age appropriate book that provided quite good explanations. Growing up in a German speaking environment we also had a magazine geared towards teenagers (BRAVO) that had a sex education column (Dr. Sommer), where a team of sex education experts answered questions and provided advice. I was also lucky to have a very enlightened biology teacher in highschool and when we studied human reproduction she also discussed with us the different methods of contraception, STDs (AIDs was a big thing back then) and showed us the proper use of a condom…
My parents were raised with virtually no sex ed; my aunt tells the story of how she thought she was dying when she first menstruated because her mom had not prepared her. So my parents were determined to be open and educate us kids – early and often. I remember when my Mom had the first sex talk with me, and told me that if I determined I was mature enough to have sex, I should also be mature enough to 1) be safe and protect against STDs and 2) be mature enough to take measures for birth control. At the time, I was horrified and disgusted but she reminded me every year or so. And when I started to have more specific questions and didn’t want to ask my mom, she took me to the library and I got some helpful books. No judgement from my parents. I am grateful for the way they handled things. All my friends used to come to me with questions, thinking I was experienced (I wasn’t…just well read), but I did my best to point them to useful books and dispel misinformation. I did the same for my daughter – provide info and resources.
My mom always answered any questions we had about sex. The depth of the answer depended on the age of the kid asking.
We had sex ed in 6th grade (1970), and my reaction was, “This is a weird class to have at school, why don’t the other kids just ask their moms the way we do at home?” I was stunned to find out that most of the other kids were not encouraged to ask at home.
It makes a huge difference in kids’ lives when their parents are willing to answer any questions they may have, even if the parents are uncomfortable or feeling out of their depth. So I applaud and encourage parents who may have to sit for a minute and have a drink of water first, but steady their nerves and then answer factually and calmly.
You mentioned that you self-censored. I did too. I remember in Year 10 (so about 14 or 15 years old, around 1966) reading a fascinating book recounted by a lady in a nursing home, remembering her life, no doubt a bit of dementia there though I did not know the word or concept. I gave it to my sister to read (three and a half years older than I was) and next thing I knew, she was acting horrified at the content! The only thing I could think of that she might have complained about was the woman remembering her breasts being like oranges. Perhaps there was more that I glossed over and didn’t notice as it was meaningless to me. I was bewildered that she could not see past that to the depth and meaning in the book. I was also made to feel shame at having read it and passed it on to her.
I was raised in a what I now know to be information friendly and sex positive family. My grandparents were sexually active and loving, my father suffered through having a voracious reader daughter with lots of questions.
I have raised my two monsters, a boy and girl, to understand that their sexual needs and desires are not a joke, weapon or tool. My son and daughter both have healthy amounts of self respect and my ridiculous sex drives.
Their friends come to them for clarification, because they come to me. Most of their parents have no clue what their kids go through or worry about. I find it sad, but I’m grateful that my kids can help.
I am from Germany and I am *so* relieved to hear “real” Americans talk about sex in a thoughtful and sexpositive way.
Our european way of thinking about Sex ed in the US is often formed by teen comedies where the father threatens the daughter’s boyfriend with his shotgun or by reports about there being no Sex ed in schools whatsoever.
I read J. M.Auel at nine and skipped all over the boring sex scenes. Read it again at 13/14 – not so much?
Had very clear expectations about consent and slightly overdeveloped ideas about sexual prowess in men…
I grew up on a farm, cows, pigs, horses, all had sex and babies. My mom was a rare individual who wanted to be open about talking about such things, found age appropriate ways of discussing human sexuality as well. I read everything growing up. Not a big deal in my house. Guess I was lucky
I have been stressing over this very subject with my two girls, a 14 year old who has a boyfriend that is 17, and an 18 year old that hasn’t shown any interest in sex or boys.
I was wondering if you’d be comfortable sharing the book you left out for your girls to find?
Oops, I replied wrong. ?
I left out The Teenage body book. It discusses boys and girls. I don’t know if it’s still available.
Also, I can’t recommend Scarleteen.com enough. They have many articles about consent (especially Yes Means Yes, which has been passed around quite a bit) that might be useful for your 14-yo and reams of stuff on the QUILTBAG spectrum for your 18-yo (obviously both subjects are good for both young women, and also the articles for late bloomers that might be appropriate).
I am the Mom of twin boys that are about to turn 14. We have open and frank discussions about sex but so far they see absolutely no reason why anyone would ever want to do it, one even went as far as concluding adoption would preclude the need to ever have it. When I try to introduce the idea that it can be pleasurable they completely shut down the conversation.
I’m hoping that books are a way to introduce a different perspective. One of them is a voracious reader and is moving from kids science fiction/fantasy to adult books. I’d like to steer them to books that include healthy relationships, sex that is good for the woman, and consequences of assault or of not using protection. I realize these themes might not all be in the same book. Any suggestions?
Easy by Tamara Webber. Heavy on consent and what does, in fact, count as rape.
As far as sec good for the woman and healthy relationships, I can’t recommend the Psy/Changeling series by Nalini Singh enough. A very thorough knowledge of anatomy and a wide range of likes & dislikes.
Ilona & Gordon, I hope you’re not offended that I’m not recommending you, but I am making the assumption that everyone here has read your books.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan series is quite a good choice for depictions of healthy relationships, cool sci-fi stuff and the impact of unhealthy relationships.
Tanya Huff’s Torin Kerr space marine series focuses a lot more on the impact of war but features healthy adult relationships and draws a clear line between assault and sex.
Seanan Mcguire/Mira Grant books are are good for relationships etc (SM for urban fantasy and MG for more science horror).
I am shocked everytime when I read about how little sexuality and sexual education is discussed in American schools. I do not live in the USA and in my home country we have mandatory sex ed. You are taught about your body about safe sex, even how to use a condom (at least in my school). And I think this is so important.
Espacially because there are so.many false rumourse about sex and many teens just don’t want to ask their parents.
Thanks for the great post. I agree, education is the way to go.
In 7th grade one of my teachers confiscated my book. It was a Dean Koontz book (can’t remeber which one, I read several that year). She asked where I got it and acused me of lying when I said my dad gave it to me. She pulled me from lunch to sit there while she called my dad. He was so confused as to why she was calling him about this. Her response was to whisper “but it has S-E-X in it!” Like I couldn’t spell it ?.
She was horrified that my dad was ok with me reading about sex but I know for sure several kids in my class were already having sex… at 11. I treated it like your girls, just another scene in the book. I love your idea of the reference book just left out. Even though my parents were very open and willing to talk there was a lot I didn’t know because I didn’t know to ask or how to find the right information.
The abstinence until marriage thing is probably the sole reason I am a 31 year old virgin. My parents told me so many horror stories about what would happen, that even though I am an adult and on my own, I still have no interest.
I’m so sorry that your decisions were formed by horror stories rather than by an informed choice. In my case it was teasing by older sisters when I was going through the cling-to-mother stage, followed by me wanting to give up all touch but still being forced to kiss my father every night. I was in my twenties before I felt comfortable hugging anyone again.
Thank you so much for that wonderful post. As my job is the consequences of sex (ob/gyn), I can tell you that in many ways adults are just as miseducated as teenagers.
I find it astounding what I run into on a day to day basis and withholding information, or worse teaching that this is something not to be discussed only leads to tragedy. I’ve taken care of pregnant 10 year olds (one pregnant by an 11 yo) so trust me when I say it’s more complicated than everyone possibly believes.
I encourage us all to think about sex with a healthy and open attitude (not necessarily what you do, just to think openly) so that we don’t find ourselves in the weeds. The other end of the spectrum is 40/50/60 yo women who finally realize they are lesbians after being married 10/20/30 years.
These are our bodies, how they work and what do with them should be our conscious decisions and not programming. In order to get there we have to embrace knowledge and not be ashamed of what are biologic processes.
Great discussion, and your kids were so very fortunate. I won’t even go into what my early ‘70s sex education was, or was most definitely not, but my husband and I decided early on that when our daughter and son asked, we answered in age-appropriate ways.
The only funny thing was that when my daughter was in 6th grade and it was time for “that” class in school, she asked me to sign the “opt-out” form because she found it too embarrassing. I said sure, that I would go into the school, get the materials the nurse and counselor had, bring them home and she, her dad and I would watch the video, go over things, and answer her questions. She decided she wasn’t THAT embarrassed to do it with her friends.
I”m a pediatrician with two grown daughters, and I want to thank you for writing this post. Its a calm, honest, balanced essay of your experience. Its not a lecture and you’ve made it so clear that people are different and unique. I wish more parents could read this and just think about the situations. Mostly, it shows love and respect for kids. Thanks.
+1. Well said.
I grew up gay in a small town in the south. I didn’t know I was gay until I was doing community theater as a teenager and a local doctor started hitting on me. (I was so massively clueless. I had no idea why he was always willing to give me a ride home or always wanted me to come over to his house to go swimming or practice our lines.) When I tried to talk to my parents my dad beat the ever-living crap out of me. He continued to do so every time I “acted gay”. I ended up dropping out of college and joining the USMC to prove to him I was a man. (Again, stupid in retrospect.) No one in my house ever talked about sex or alternative lifestyles.
Your daughters are blessed to have parents that care enough to educate and give them room to make their own choices. I have a grandchild on the way and hope I did a good job with my son and he will be open and educate my grandchildren.
Many hugs.
I’m sorry you had these terrible experiences when growing up. I hope you’re doing good now and wish you all the best!!
I just don’t think it’s stupid to want validation from a parent. It’s defined as normal. You want a parent to love you unconditionally but so many experience conditions on the love. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t have had to join the USMC to earn said validation. You clearly didn’t know that your feelings we ok and valid. And even though you feel your feels not everyone has a safe environment to express them. You did what you had to do to get through and you survived and are making a life for yourself in your terms now. Good job.
Good for you for making your way through that minefield. I hope you have a wonderful life now.
Thank you for your take on this topic! It can be very uncomfortable for both the kids and the parents. This seems like a safe, educational route to take.
I’m old, so most of this is lost forever from my memory banks,,,
I have a vague memory of telling my kids when they were very little that masturbating was a private activity, not done in the living room when friends were visiting, other than that, I’ve just forgotten specifics.
When they were young adults it amazed me how many of their friends were clueless about the basics, and how many young people came from abusive families
I have to admit that from my personal point of view, as much as I enjoyed one on one sex, I’ve never found reading about it to be a contributing factor to the quality of a book.
Catholic school Literature teacher here… soooo many parents kevetch about books. The Giver? Oh boy. They use words that belittle the role of motherhood… lady, that’s the POINT! Chocolate Wars? MASTURBATION! The list goes on and on.
The reality is the middle school students I teach are in the middle of that “look on the internet and get freaked out” stage. There is no sex ed class. There is VERY little mentioned in religion class other than “Don’t do it! SIN!”
So, as the “cool” teacher (I put up with their crazy crap rather than just slap an infraction on them) they started asking questions. Started easy, with like pimples, then it exploded into questions on sex and what it means to touch others etc. I get that cold little stunned moment where the world sort of narrows down and I think “This is how I get fired.” But I had to answer, so I put it in terms of “This is my belief” or “This is what I would tell my daughter” kind of answer. No one came burning down my door but I wandered over to the church offices and sat down with the pastor and went “WHY ARE WE NOT ADDRESSING THESE ISSUES.” He agreed but stated that all Catholic education has the main premise that parents are the first educators and we, the church and school, cannot introduce things that parents feel are inappropriate.
I said some choice words after that. He offered me some booze. We agreed parents are scared. He’d see if he could talk with them. I like this pastor. He doesn’t seem like his head is stuck up his ass.
Now I field questions in the middle of my Literature classes. I try to find stories that demonstrate healthy relationships. I affectionately call dating “The Mutual Admiration Society” and the students snicker at it.
I’d rather they ask then hurt themselves.
I love this pastor.
So, I’m always really amazed about how the parent child relationship is viewed in the US, especially when it comes to sex. It’s like the parents have the right to treat their child like property: “You are MINE and I can decide EVERYTHING about your life until you’re 18! Hahahaha!” Out of my German perspective that ist just wrong. Horrible actually when it comes to important information like safe sex.
Here parents will usually treat sex as a normal thing of life and answer their child’s questions from an early age whenever they pop up. But even when parents don’t feel comfortable to talk about this topic, the school definitely will.
We have sex education the first time in primary school in 3rd or 4th class (9 or 10 years old) and it’s really like: “This is a thing adults do. It’s fun if you do it right. It doesn’t concern you now, but we think you should know about it.” Depending on the state and district you live in topics like homosexually might also be discussed already at that age. However, they will DEFINITELY be discussed the second time we have sex education, usually in 7th grade. There might be an opt-out option for the one hour where any question by the students might be asked and will be answered by the teacher. But there is definitely no opt-out option for the rest of the class. So everyone will definitely learn how sex works, what the risks are and the details of reproduction, i.e. the female cycle and the process of fertilization until birth.
I think focusing on information is the right way to go when it comes to sex and children/teens. Books might help give that information. Personally I can’t remember reading books with sex scenes in them until I was 14/15 or so. I wouldn’t mind however, if my children picked stuff up earlier. My parents never screened what I read but they always encouraged me to talk about it. So that helped a lot. I think you can go either way on that, I really like Ilona’s idea of steering teens towards romance novels if there’s an interest in reading “sexy stories” as they focus on love as the reason for sex.
Thank you for this thoughtful post on a subject that affects every teenager. Your children are very lucky.
We used a combination of information and humor with our son. The condoms were in the closet and available, and we would restock as needed. Teased him about adding and removing condoms to mess with our head 🙂
My mom was of the “she wore white for her wedding and had earned it” but both of my parents were also biology majors in school. So their philosophy was to truthfully answer whatever questions I had. Evidently, I was an inquisitive child, cause I had the full story about where babies came from by the end of first grade. One of the favored family stories is my little friend Monica, whose mother told her the stork brought her, told me the stork brought her and I proceeded to give her a biology lesson that led to her mom calling my mom that night, furious about her daughter learning the truth. My mom was all, “say that again to yourself. Slowly.”
I’m going with the same approach with my daughter. She knows the real names of all her parts and the basics about things.
Very well said. Thank you.
Great and thoughtful post! I want to share it with my niece. ♡
Thank you for taking the tube to post this. As a mother to a 4 year old, I’m already prepping and it’s invaluable to hear real-life examples. You rock. Your books rock. This made my Sunday. Thank you for giving us, your audience, so much of your time.
This is a really terrific post and it gave me some food-for-thought, so thank you. I noticed a lot of people sharing their parenting experiences, but I thought that I’d share my own personal experience since that seems relevant to the conversation.
Context: I’m 21 now, but have been a serious romance reader since I was 11.
I grew up in a kinda weird situation because my parents weren’t opposed to discussing sex if I asked (they’re certainly pro-birth control and believe in safe sex), but they also subscribed to the “ask your older sister by 4 years” if you have any questions. I think, culturally speaking, it was awkward and uncommon to talk about it (my mom had an arranged marriage and didn’t really know about sex until her mom talked to her about it the night before). I’m certainly not endorsing this method, but it is what it is. I don’t think I’ve ever had a discussion about sex with them, mostly because a) they trusted my sister’s capabilities, and b) they trusted my school (to be fair, we had pretty great sex ed in my state).
While this would normally be a terrible way for a child to learn about sex, I was lucky because my sister was a level-headed, intelligent person who told me everything I needed to know (often before I asked). My parents got lucky that the older one knew how to use google without panicking or using it for more nefarious purposes (porn). Our parents were kinda useless to talk to about sensitive/embarrassing topics, so we confided everything with each other. So I strangely grew up with the correct information from a young age.
Re: the reading sex from a young age… Okay, I’ll confess. My first semi-explicit sex scene was THE FAIRY GODMOTHER by Mercedes Lackey when I was ten. I loved her Valdemar books, so it was natural that I’d pick up this series, too. My first official romance was some Harlequin Presents that I stole from my sister (I think Lynne Graham). I fell in love with romance & romantic plotlines – not because I was titillated by the sex or had any desire to have sex at that age, but because I was entranced by the emotional intensity of these books. I swear, romance is the best genre to make you *feel emotion* because the emotional conflict takes you on a wild ride. I also liked that the books generally ended in a happily ever after, which was a relief because I was tired of protagonists dying by the end. I will also admit to thinking that the purple prose in Old Skool historicals was amusing.
Anyway, I became obsessed with the genre. With the help of my sister (who was also a romance reader), I started reading authors like Judith McNaught, Lisa Kleypas, Julie Garwood, Nalini Singh, etc. In case you don’t know: some of these authors don’t have the best representation of consensual sex. I remember being *awed* by WHITNEY, MY LOVE, but that book is *extremely controversial* for many reasons (hero whips heroine, rapey first sex scene, etc). Look: I’m not saying that was necessarily the best book for a 11 year old to read. But I loved it for all its ridiculousness *and* somehow didn’t come out of that book thinking it was okay to whip people or rape people because you thought they cheated on you. It’s possible to enjoy a book (and its sex scenes!) without actually endorsing the content in the book. I didn’t skim over the sex scenes, but I wasn’t aroused either. It simply just was. I remember when I accidentally read an *extremely* explicit erotic romance and was kinda shocked – I just stopped reading it because BDSM didn’t interest me when I was 14. I self-censored. I must have read around a hundred romances per year in those first years, and didn’t come out of that experience with a warped view of sex, consent, or what was anatomically possible (cough Passion by Lisa Valdez cough). Of course, I was also lucky enough to have a sister/school to teach me about sex ed, but still. If kids are supposedly emotionally mature enough to read LORD OF THE FLIES in 8th grade (that’s when I read it), then a sex scene is not going to f’ them up for life.
A more detailed example: I also started reading PNR/UF at a young age. I first read Magic Strikes a couple of months after it came out in 2009. If you recall, that’s the book with the hot tub scene. It’s a little explicit – they don’t actually do it but they get close. Incidentally, that scene is also pretty great for consent because Curran stops when Kate tells him no. There’s this whole thing where he won’t do anything unless she explicitly agrees.
I remember reading it, and being disappointed that they didn’t do it – not because I was especially titillated by it, but because I wanted Kate and Curran to get together *so badly* and sex would mean that a relationship was a possibility. Was I emotionally mature enough to read that scene at 11? Well, let’s see. That’s the same book where Kate murders a bunch of monsters, there’s a gladiator tournament where most contestants die, and poor Derek gets his face smashed. I’m not necessarily arguing that if a child is mature enough to consume explicit violence, then they are automatically mature enough to consume explicit sex. All kids are different. But you should trust them to explore boundaries so that they can see what they like and don’t like. Flat-out restricting content is extremely unwise, in my opinion. Kids will find a way around those restrictions and consume that content, anyway.
Have a little trust in your kids. They’re smart enough to know what is fiction, and what’s not okay in real life. And if you let them read adult content, you can have frank discussions and help them draw those boundaries. And don’t worry about them reading content that they’re not ready for. Like Ilona said: kids self-censor. I certainly did.
We live on the west coast and our schools have a rather expanded Sex-Ed policy, and I’m glad for it! My BFF lives in Texas and I was shocked at what their kids (private) school policy was on the subject. Still very misogynistic, what her son learned and what her daughter was taught was day and night. (Not to mention what her son is allowed to do and the daughter forbidden to do)
I feel that every drop of education you can impart on your children in this arena is invaluable, and hopefully they’ll spread the correct knowledge to their friends. But don’t forget to answer their questions on “should I do X” this is important too, along with the facts. Mental needs to accompany physical.
🙂
I have always believed that knowledge is power, so my kids got all the info they could handle, plus some.
I still feel that the most important things that I could impart to them came from various things I have read over the years.
The first comes from author Lori Foster in her Buckhorn Brothers series. This is paraphrased:
Fantasy is anything that gets you excited and gets you off. Reality is what you and your partner discuss and agree on.
The second comes from a friend of mine who crudely says, “Don’t f*** anyone crazier than yourself.”
The third is from my life experience. You have to at least like the person if you are going to get intimate with them. The act of sex is one of the most personal things you will ever do with another person, so trust and liking are key.
Other than lots of discussions on all forms of relationships, sex, and odd bodily functions; I maintain that there is only one rule in my house – NO STUPIDITY!
Everything falls under this edict, even sex.
– having unsafe sex is stupid, so don’t do it.
– pissing off Mom is stupid, so don’t do it.
– underage drinking is stupid, so don’t do it.
Well, you see how that goes.
I’ve always loved the way Ilona writes about relationships. The sex is not an afterthought, it’s actually a build up in the couple’s dynamics. And always with lots of communication.
The approach you took is the one I plan to take with my son. I’ve already inadvertently given some questions and answers. My cousin invited me over (I’m a registered nurse) and we talked about periods and things in her car on a trip out for dinner with her pre-teen daughter in the back who was trying very hard for most of the car ride to look like she wasn’t interested. She eventually asked a few questions which I gave answers for. I think more knowledge is better. And safer. My husband who went to a catholic school fully admits he had some skewed information until he was in university and even my public school didn’t really talk about consent. As for stuff that happens my grandfather and I have talked about education and even he admits he knows of kids who had sex at the age of 11 when he was a child. So it’s not like this is a new problem. More education is better. I like your approach and I love your books for actually mentioning that condoms should be considered. It hardly ever comes up in books that I’ve noticed anyway.
Catholic schools are also very different. My Catholic high school had excellent technical heterosexual* sex ed, although always with the caveat “but not until you’re married”. I dated a guy in my first couple of months in college who had gone to Catholic school who, after a date where we fell asleep watching a movie in my bed, fully clothed and cuddling under a blanket, was absolutely convinced I might be pregnant. I was NOT a virgin, and tried to convince him there was no chance of us having sex and not knowing it, but he was not only convinced it was a possibility, but that he “might have had a wet dream” and somehow his semen would… exit his underwear and jeans and sneak in through my jeans and underwear and up my vagina? I dunno. I didn’t understand it even then. I asked about his school’s biology class.
Anyway. We both went to Catholic school, is my point. It’s all local decision-making, at the very least at the diocese level, and often all the way down to the individual school.
I don’t know what Cathplic schools are like these days, with changes in leadership, but when JPII appointed really conservative Bishops they clamped down on sex ed. My wife went to Catholic school through grade 12&her school (this would be through June 81) had comprehensive sex ed,a yr or 2 after she graduated they were forced to toe the line and teach abstinence only,describe lgbt people as abnormal,etc.
With Catholic schools it depends a lot on the diocese. I grew up in one of the more liberal ones around, and we had, as Siobhan said, excellent and accurate information about heterosexual relations, including methods of birth control and their relative effectiveness, and why we weren’t supposed to need them. Meanwhile the next diocese over was notoriously conservative, and their sex ed was limited to nonexistent. Homosexual behavior was described as disordered, but homosexuality was OK as long as you left out the sexuality part. Our 40 year reunion was interesting. 😀
Wasn’t meaning to criticize catholic schools in general. Just highlighting differences. That’s crazy about the guy you dated. My husbands information wasn’t quite that bad. Just a little vague and didn’t cover much beyond condoms exist.
Autism means dealing with sex differently. I have always been accessible and i answer all questions. Kid2 I can only hope to explain assault to before I can no longer care for him.
Saying that, I have had male and female teenage sitters over the years. I have listened and never judged and the stuff I got asked…. and i always gave an answer. My girls were readers. As one that read early and adult books as a teen – I worked at the library – I made a point of finding good adult relationship stories for them. They were not sex free since they were reading those already. Their mother’s never asked yet knew the books I shared were mine.
I really appreciate hearing from someone with older girls having this approach. My family didn’t talk about sex and when it was it was done in a way to purposely embarrass me. I started this open approach with my daughter. We have had talks and I gave her a journal if she couldn’t talk about it that she could write a letter to me in the journal asking her questions and I or her dad would reply. She is young yet so we will see how that stands but so far it seems to be working for us.
First of all, thanks for a very well thought out presentation. This approach, while on a different topic than your books with Gordon, show the respect for people as people that appears in your books. I’m from a generation where sex wasn’t taught and I had so much misinformation that lasted well into adulthood.
Thanks again. You guys are marvelous.
I used the book left laying around after my talk. It did so much better job than I. I learned so much from it myself. I assume that my daughter in law talked to my granddaughter but since she lives with me I may need another book.?
I’m the mother of a five-year-old and a three-year-old, and I really appreciate this post. Thank you for sharing your experience.
Your daughters, and their friends, are very fortunate to have had you. My mom taught us all about reproduction from an early age. And nothing whatsoever about sex. Oh, well.
I feel very strongly about this because at 44-yo, I still read a lot of YA. And man, has it changed. When I was a kid, Alanna turned 16 and (using magical pregnancy protection, but still pregnancy protection) has sex. Then, later, she breaks up with guy #1 and has sex with someone DIFFERENT. There were no sex scenes. There were *decision* scenes. Kerowyn has sex with a boy and ALSO breaks up with him, and while the sex scene is not in the least descriptive, it does mention pain and why & that she doesn’t achieve orgasm.
When I read YA today, I usually want to run out and shove Alanna or more recently, Beka Cooper, into the hands of all the teenage girls I can find. Because this is what I see:
1) no sex and no question of sex
OR
2) sex with the one who is your lifelong love (*shudder* and if I could ban the word “soulmate,” I would)
AND
3) in the case of #2, zero pregnancy protection and zero correct anatomy — zero foreplay, soulmate just inserts penis into soulmatee and the earth moves. SOMETIMES it hurts for a minute.
I know it’s because of the second backlash. But what these books are teaching our girls young — and I was reading “YA” at a VERY young age, 10 or 11, and I see lots of children that age reading it, is appalling. From a “true love” point of view and from an anatomy point of view. There’s an epidemic in the US — I was reading an article on this the other day — of women who consider themselves frigid because they can’t achieve orgasm from ONLY penetrative sex (90% percent of women (and I can find that statistic, too) require clitoral stimulation to orgasm). And these ideas are absorbed so very young.
Personally, I found some of my mom’s “raunchy” books and read them about that age and was riveted. And then once I started having sex (16), I got bored. Pretty much ever since, I have skimmed through sex scenes the way I do through battle scenes — in the latter, I look for who died, and in the former for any “” marks. I WILL generally read the first sex scene by a new author, just to see if zie has a grasp of anatomy (Nalini Singh is hands down the best with this), but after that? Meh.
So while I agree somewhat* with Ilona’s statement that it’s up to the parents what they let their kids read, as long as it’s monitored and they are available to answer questions, I so desperately wish there was more out there to offer. And I agree wholeheartedly about the self-censoring (for example, I first read Dragonflight around 8, didn’t understand the not-very-descriptive-at-all-sex scenes or the rape comment, and so just shrugged and moved on). Lots of authors read this blog. Someone write something for our girls, PLEASE. If I could, I’d do it myself.
If anyone wants a really fabulous internet resource for teenagers, I can’t recommend Scarleteen enough. Not just for technical accuracy, but because it has a vast array of articles around consent as well as many for QUILTBAG teens.
____
*somewhat simply because there are far, FAR too many teens like the one Ilona described. Who know nothing about sex but are having it anyway.
Hi there. What is the name of the YA books that you refered to? (The Alana and Beka Cooper ones)
I used to get so frustrated when reading YA and a lot of romance books that I eventually just gave up on the genre. Would love to read some YA thats actually good 🙂
She’s referring to Tamora Pierce’s series. They are wonderful.
Yes, Tamora Pierce. Song of the Lioness (the Alanna tetralogy, beginning with Alanna: The First Adventure) was her first, and as much as I’ve lauded it here, she really does get much much better in her next few. I love every one of her Tortall books, but I’m iffy on her Circle series, I just never got into it, so I don’t know how much they deal with sex.
At least in Tortall, her heroines always always have a decision moment about sex. And while the sex scene is fade to black, the decision scene is fabulous — including being influenced by one’s own desires! Amazing that a teenage girl might just be horny!
Anyway, also great are Kristin Cashore’s Graceling series, although book 3 — I was 40 when I read it, and it was emotionally devastating. I didn’t list it here because it sorta falls into the category of one love-one partner, but the heroine in Graceling is anti-marriage and anti-having children (if I recall correctly, I might be wrong about the kids thing, but I don’t think so), and deals with how people accuse her of being less feminine or make her feel not like a complete woman for her choices. Really very good.
Misinformation is rampant. Unfortunately parents who do not educate their children about sex in particular are leaving them to get the information from other sources. Those sources may not have the same care for your children that you do, and the information can range from ludicrous to highly dangerous. Children are curious by nature and puberty adds a whole lot of chemically driven emotions and urges. Sex is a natural part of our biological nature and it matters not whether you believe that is was given to couples by a creator or developed as an evolutionary tactic to create family units to ensure the continuance of the species. I am a biologist by training so sex is more straightforward for me than many people. That being said I was also handed the classics as a young child and given zero actual information from my parents. The things we thought we “knew” in high school… My decision when I was young parent with toddlers that I have stuck to for the most part was reproduction at 8, a “what’s happening to my body” discussion at 10-11, and a complete rundown of human sexuality at 12. This has shifted back and forth slightly age wise as different children will be curious at different ages but for all that I have birthed, fostered, adopted or sheltered through the years it has been effective. When I started there were no resources for parents, but now with my grandchildren there are a number of excellent books that can help. Even children that are too embarrassed to do more than endure my lectures while staring at the ground will pick up the books and read for themselves. They will get the information, it is up to us to make sure they get the right information.
Bless you for all your care for children.
My parents decided that they would rather we know and looked after ourselves than lived in ignorance. We would get asked questions by our friends and then go home and ask our parents ‘hypothetically’ what would we do if such and such happened. Asexual by nature I couldn’t even figure out half the time why they would want to do some of this shite but that is what my parents were for.
Not sure if my parents are even aware that they helped talk through a couple of my friends from pretty dark times and hard decisions. We had Every woman as our source of truth if we needed hard facts but pretty much everything else came from my parentals.
It was always amazing to me how little my friends knew. Really freaked me out a few times. And condoms. Teaching a person a couple years older than me how to put on a condom was kind of weird.
Sex education must begin long before puberty. We look at education about sex as seperate form building a functioning healthy adult. But real sex education starts the with teaching self-respect. It’s about teaching your children boundaries. It’s about teaching them to not give themselves away cheaply. It’s about teaching them that no means no. It’s about teaching them that their bodies are a gift and valuable, but no more valuable than their hearts and soul. I remember my six your old daughter watching Sleeping Beauty and commenting that Prince Charming was an idiot. When I asked her why, she said he was stupid because he had fallen in love with Aurora for her looks. He didn’t know if she was smart or nice. I knew I was going down the right path with her. Love is not a feeling. It is the decision to treat another as if you value them, and that includes loving yourself. If they don’t have the understanding of live, sex will be a path for manipulation, control, and abuse for them.
Yes!!
Great approach!
I was a single mom. My boys are now 29 and 27, but I remember when they were 10 and 8. I had carefully explained the parts and actions (they asked lots of questions), but I guess I wasn’t clear on the mechanics. In the middle of a lunch-time restaurant, my 10-year-old stated loudly and indignantly “I don’t understand, how does the sperm get to the egg?!?!?” I thought the poor man at the next table was going to need the Heimlich. I could see men all over the restaurant laughing. We were in a mall, so we went right to the bookstore after lunch, and I bought them several explicit but age-appropriate books. (The sperm were riding a roller coaster…. ) They read the books together, lying next to each other in the middle of the living room. We had good sex ed in school, but my boys always had questions.
My mother figured all I needed to learn I learned in sex ed. She never had “the talk” with any of the 6 of us. I think I read the Happy Hooker when I was 13. I’m 16 years older than my youngest sister. The 2 youngest sisters never knew me as a “kid” , I’ve always been an adult and a mother to them. So one day I dropped by my moms and my 2 youngest sisters are there with their girl friend who is the child of a single dad (all age 8-10). I hear giggling and my sisters telling their friend “just ask her!”. I say “what?” their friend says “what is a blowjob?”. I said “that’s a question you should ask your daddy, honey.”. She said “I did, but I didn’t understand the words he used.”. I had her call her dad and asked him if he wanted me to give it a shot… He said “YES PLEASE!”. And so I became the neighborhood sex Ed teacher. My sisters, then my daughter, now my sons bring their friends to me with questions and I answer them as honestly as I can.
One of my favorites was a 12 year old male friend of my sisters. “I get eggs and sperm and orgasims and ejaculation and all that. I just don’t get where you’re supposed to put your penis!”. “women have 3 holes, Johnny.”. “OH!” (he never got the chance to find out for himself… He died in a car accident at 15).
I have a 15 year old and an 18 year old sons. We took them to a science fiction convention recently. I made sure to have the “birth control and consent is everyone’s responsibility” discussion before we left. They both pointed out they have girlfriends…un huh. I’ve heard that before. Condoms. Consent. Just in case. Not applicable… This time… But it’ll stick.
Couple years ago my daughters friends in their 30s and I had a conversation about marriage and sex toys…. As they are newly married and I’m long married…
My point… It never ends… Just be as honest as you can and leave the lines of communication open.
Sex education in my house started young with an explanation of “good touch/bad touch” and was expanded upon as I grew older. When it came time for sex Ed at school, Mom said I should go because they “might have figured out new things since I was your age.”
To put things in perspective, Mom and Dad married when she was 15 and I was born 5 days before her 16th birthday. In high school she admitted that while I wasn’t planned I wasn’t exactly a mistake. Dad had a full scholarship to a private college and they didn’t want to be separated, so they stopped using protection. “If it happened, it happened.” They knew the only way they could stay together was to get married and at her age that would only happen with parental consent. They wouldn’t give it unless there was a very compelling reason.
She was raised in a very strict and religious house, he wasn’t. A lot of her parenting decisions, sex ed included, were based on “I wish someone had told me this at your age.” Looking back, I think she did a fairly good job. Put me off the idea entirely until I was grown and out of the house.
You are every secondary librarian’s dream parent. Kids need access to good quality, factual information that they can trust. And they need good quality stories that model all types of relationship. We really can trust them to make the right choices for themselves.
My parents didn’t out right talked about sex, but if we ( my siblings and I) had questions, my mom would calmly answer. My dad would turn beat red and usually walk out of the room. My sister, when she was young, read a news article about abortion (this was back in the 60s). She didn’t know the word, so she asked. My mom said “what’s the word and spell it for me.” My sister said “a-b-o-r-t-i-o-n”. All my mom said was “the word is abortion.” My sister said “oh” and went on her merry way. No hysterics, no lecture, just calm.
Me, on the other hand, kept asking “why?” to the point my mom said that it was a discussion for another time. I remember the first time I saw a Playboy magazine. I laughed. The Playgirl magazine was a little more interesting, but I still laughed. In high school I took anatomy and physiology and learned all about the reproductive system. This was interesting since I lived in a small rural town. I also found “The Joy of Sex” under my parents’ bed. My eyes got really round , and I couldn’t stop laughing.
I read adult romance books when I was 10-11 years. I also read James Clavell’s books that young too. The joys of having older siblings and a mom who loved to read
Most of what I’d like to say has already been shared by others. Thanks for this well thought out and rational approach to this topic. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I was determined that my own kids would never be afraid to tell me anything. This resulted in two really excellent parenting moments that I would like to share.
1) I also used the approach that if they were old enough to ask the question they were old enough to hear an age-appropriate answer. We developed a policy where I could talk to them OR I would vet the internet to find them good information that they could read on their own time. When kid2 was a teen, he was downstairs with some friends. I was headed down with snacks when I heard a friend exclaim “You asked your Mom WHAT???” And she TOLD you??” Soon I was fielding their questions as well. I also always encouraged them to talk to their own parents, but sometimes they couldn’t and I think good information is important.
2) Sitting around the dinner table with my husband (who works far away and often can’t share meals with us, but is still an amazing Dad), an older family friend (in her late 50s) and the boys, 17 & 19:
Kid1: Are we out of condoms?
Kid2: No, I hid them because X keeps coming over and cleaning us out. His mom gets mad when he asks her for them.
Kid 1: Where are they?
Kid 2: I’ll show you.
And up from the table they both jump, back in three minutes, and resume regular conversation. Our friend was utterly gobsmacked. I never encouraged them to have sex, and we talked a LOT about consent (I may have issues there…) and healthy relationships and what sex is and isn’t. By the time they and their partners decided on sex, they had good information and access to protection. FYI, they bought their own.
My parents took the ask and we will answer policy which isn’t necessary a bad thing but as I got older I was more embarrassed to ask as it get as though I should know already – not sure where I got that idea from ? Luckily I had a great older cousin who realised from a few pointed questions that I needed extra information! As for reading I started reading romance at 12 and I’m pretty sure I just self censored too. I can remember reading Devils Bride by Stephanie Laurens for the first time and being bored by the sex talk so skipping pages but re-reading a few years later made me read it in a whole new way. I found that with a lot of books I read between 12-15 that were for adults when re-reading them again when I had better understand if felt like reading a whole new book
Great post. Your anecdotes about your family life continue to make me feel a bit better about the world – it’s good to know islands of sanity and kindness to fellow creatures exist.
I have 2 teenagers, a boy almost 18, and a 16 year old girl. I had them both by 18 with another teenager. When they started school, they began asking questions like why I’m so much younger than the other moms and why they don’t have a bio dad. They had my husband, but they knew it wasn’t the same. My dad was a bad person, but my mother never once bad mouthed him. Through serious addiction, abuse of every kind, and divorce, she taught us to respect him because he was half of us. I remember when I was a teen, I called him a crackhead and my mother slapped me in the mouth. I tried to do the same for my kids. As much as I ranted and griped, I did my best to do it away from the kids. I’m sure we argued around them on occasion, but we tried. I explained that we were too young, unmarried, and unprepared to care for them properly alone, like their peers. They had their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and stepparents to help raise them and love them. As they got older, we would explain what we felt was appropriate for their individual maturity level. Currently, my son is questioning everything from gender to what fetishes are out there and says he is asexual. He is autistic and a very vulnerable child, and we have caught him talking to older, senior citizen older, men online. I think that because he is very needy for attention of any kind, that may be the reason he is unsure. It doesn’t matter; I’ve tried to explain that their sex lives, or lack of, is their business and no one else’s. Because he is vulnerable, though, we opted to be very direct with him. We felt it was best if he knew fiction from fact to help prevent him from being manipulated into things he wasn’t ready for. With our daughter, it is a bit different. She is a quiet and private person in every aspect. She doesn’t feel comfortable discussing things too much. She says she wishes to wait; I’ve told her that is ok, but please don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. That’s our way of handling it, but we won’t know if we have gotten it right until they’ve grown up. Good luck to everyone out there. Raising teenagers is probably the most difficult part of parenthood. I feel as though I’ve become almost insecure as an adult; teens are rough on one’s ego.
Excellent anecdotes and right on the money. I’m 61 and when I was growing up, my mother was amazingly open to any questions about sex. She told me she swore that if she ever had daughters, she would never allow them to be as ignorant about sex or body parts as she had been, born in 1920. She told me that after she was married, she asked her mother if there was any way she could not get pregnant. My grandmother said, “Smoke in the woodhouse and spit out the window,” which my mother didn’t understand and my grandmother wouldn’t explain. Years later, she finally got it, after she had several married friends. Any questions my mom didn’t answer, my second oldest sister did. It’s always better to know. I’m just as open with my 3 kids and I know that whatever my 24 year old son and 18 and 15 year old daughters choose to do with their bodies, they will make choices in absolute awareness of the facts.
When I was growing up, my brain always seemed to be a bit flighty. Uh, well, it still is, but hopefully not so much. I never seem to take things seriously or really pay attention so it’s surprising I’ve gotten this far.
On that note, in the 4th or 5th grade (dad was in the air force and this was like 50some years ago), the entire grade went into the cafeteria for a sex ed class. All I remembered was the sperm travelled to find the egg and fertilized it. Ok, where did the sperm come from? And how does a girl keep the sperm from fertilizing the egg? (remember, flighty/non serious brain). A few days later, while getting ready for bed, my parents came in with an LP from Art Linklater on something about where babies come from. “You see, the male horse has this long tube..” . I told them I already knew all this stuff because they had a class on it at school. Uh, they weren’t too happy to know we had this class and they didn’t know about it. Hmm, Maybe that’s why I never learned where the tube went, they probably shut off the record player. I also don’t remember the rest of the conversation. Anyway, it took a long time before I found out where the sperm came from.
Thankyou Ilona, for writing such a poignant piece.
My own experiences and observations have been similar to your own.
I appreciated reading about you and your daughters experience with digital media.
So, I’m always really amazed about how the parent child relationship is viewed in the US, especially when it comes to sex. It’s like the parents have the right to treat their child like property: “You are MINE and I can decide EVERYTHING about your life until you’re 18! Hahahaha!” Out of my German perspective that ist just wrong. Horrible actually when it comes to important information like safe sex.
Here parents will usually treat sex as a normal thing of life and answer their child’s questions from an early age whenever they pop up. But even when parents don’t feel comfortable to talk about this topic, the school definitely will.
We have sex education the first time in primary school in 3rd or 4th class (9 or 10 years old) and it’s really like: “This is a thing adults do. It’s fun if you do it right. It doesn’t concern you now, but we think you should know about it.” Depending on the state and district you live in topics like homosexually might also be discussed already at that age. However, they will DEFINITELY be discussed the second time we have sex education, usually in 7th grade. There might be an opt-out option for the one hour where any question by the students might be asked and will be answered by the teacher. But there is definitely no opt-out option for the rest of the class. So everyone will definitely learn how sex works, what the risks are and the details of reproduction, i.e. the female cycle and the process of fertilization until birth.
I think focusing on information is the right way to go when it comes to sex and children/teens. Books might help give that information. Personally I can’t remember reading books with sex scenes in them until I was 14/15 or so. I wouldn’t mind however, if my children picked stuff up earlier. My parents never screened what I read but they always encouraged me to talk about it. So that helped a lot. I think you can go either way on that, I really like Ilona’s idea of steering teens towards romance novels if there’s an interest in reading “sexy stories” as they focus on love as the reason for sex.
My mom explained to me what sex was at a very young age but she went the very scientific route. I was too young to really understand eggs, sperm, and fertilization and for awhile I thought women had real eggs inside them hahaha. I eventually figured it out but I think I probably learned from friends at school. I do remember one time I saw the word “blow job” as graffiti on my mom’s college campus, we were there for her reunion. I was in 5th or 6th grade and had never heard the term before so I walked right up to her in front of her friends and asked her real loudly “What’s a blow job?” Haha we still talk about that! She wasn’t very forthcoming at that time and just explained it as a “sexual act a woman does to a man.” That really didn’t leave me a lot to go with but again school taught me real fast what it meant.
And then there was the time my sister shared all the info she learned about sex from our mom at summer camp one year, she was really young, maybe around 5 or 6. During Parent Visiting Day, a mother walked up to my mom and asked her “Did.you.know.your.daughter.talks.about.SEX.all.the.time?” My poor sister thought she had done something so bad so of course she cried. My mom apologized and said she should have been more clear this wasn’t info my sister should have been sharing with others but at the same time was firm in the fact that if we asked her a question about sex, she would answer it. Also in first grade my sister’s teacher had her class draw the life cycle of a fertilized egg and learned about pregnancy… it was an international school in the States and it was very progressive that way lol. Sex was something open we could discuss with our mom (dad was too squeamish for such discussions).
As for books, my mom didn’t really censor what books I could read and not read. (She only got upset when she found out I read The Color Purple in 6th grade… a book that I didn’t understand much to be honest because I was really too young to grasp the heavy themes in that book at the age of 12). Most YA fiction only went as far as kissing, I don’t really think I started reading real sex scenes until maybe I was 15 or 16 and that was through fanfiction on the Internet, not real books haha. And while I didn’t realize it at the time most of those sex scenes were probably really, really bad but it did teach me a lot about sex in a lot of ways, as ridiculous and badly written as they may have been.
I’m lucky my mom was open about it, one of the many blessings I grew up with her as a mom.
Your mom sounds pretty cool!
I don’t understand the reasoning behind her answer regarding your sister and camp, however (“My mom apologized and said she should have been more clear this wasn’t info my sister should have been sharing with others”). Could you maybe explain?
My mom apologized to the mother who came up to her, explaining to her that yes, she had shared with my sister where babies came from. But she had neglected to tell my sister that this wasn’t information you should be running around camp openly sharing with others as it is a sensitive topic. Especially at that young age when details quickly get twisted and things get out of control. Again it wasn’t my sister’s fault, she was young and she was just sharing with her friend what our mom had told her. She didn’t do anything wrong really. But parents get very uppity about that kind of thing and this mother probably wasn’t thrilled that a six year old had beat her in the birds and the bees talk with her daughter haha. I think the other mom probably judged our mom for telling my sister the truth but… this was just stemming from her own insecurity that she hadn’t had The Talk with her own daughter yet. She made it sound like my little sister was a sex crazed addict running around telling everyone when I think she maybe told one or two people…
But note to parents: you can’t blame anyone if your kid hears about sex from someone else first. That’s totally on you! Especially in this day of social media and the Internet.
I don’t know why my comment disappeared…☹️
I was just wondering if you would be comfortable mentioning the bool you chose to leave out for your girls to read? I worry greatly over my 14, almost 15 year old daughter and his subject but find it hard to talk about. I can never seem to find the right words…
Hi Marissa,
I don’t know which book the ALs used, but “It’s So Amazing” by Robie Harris is the book I bought my much younger daughter. It is matter of fact, fairly detailed, and clear and accurate. It is part of a series and there is a book for older kids/teens called “It’s Perfectly Normal.” We don’t have that one yet (my daughter specified that she wants it when she turns 10) but I looked at the preview and it appears to continue the very honest, straightforward and clear approach of the earlier books. Hope this helps!
Thank you so much, Liz. I will look into it!
Safe sex is always the key two words when the subject gets discussed. Not discussing or ignoring sex just means your child is going to the “street”to learn. I can remember a girl saying shaking a Coke bottle and inserting into vagina to fizz prevented pregnancy. Weird practices existed long before the internet, but they spread faster now-just like STDs. Unfortunately the 65 and older group have higher STD rates than any other group. They stupidly believe pregnancy isn’t a problem and they’re safe. Education needs to be life long. ?
I love reading comments from the BDH. This is a really excellent group of people. So many of you are taking care of so many kids. I have an 8 year old daughter. We have already had several conversations about menstruation, sex, pregnancy, the difference between infatuation and love… and we have bought age appropriate books for her which she has read and asked questions about. I have a great group of friends with kids close in age, and we have all agreed to be people that any of our kids can come to with questions.
What book is the one you bought for your kids to educate on sex?
Well written post and interesting comments,lot of them are familiar. My parents for people of their generation were pretty liberal (they would be 96 and 92 if alive now), they didn’t actively teach us but they also didn’t hide from sex if it came up, answered questions, and had very positive views of sexual and gender identity at a time when few talked about it. My dad would go off on people saying how of their generation they didn’t do what kids were doing today, they waited for marriage, etc and he laughed at them and said the only difference was people lied about it in the past, were hypocrites.
The sad irony is in some ways we have gone crazy, we have the internet and phones exposing kids younger and younger to sex,sexual images, and the governnent thanks to pressure from religious conservatives have removed sex ed&replacesd it with just say no (i would prefer they teach kids about the power of sex, the responsibility around it,tell them to make sure they are ready for it, but also teach them the facts). Conservatives seem to believe kids have sex if you talk to them about it&if you don’t they won’t know what it is,which is leaving kids often w less info than we had in my day at a time when the pressure is high.
Our approach with our son was to talk about it in age appropriate ways,share books with him, and as he got older talked about responsibility, the dangers of sex, without preaching or dumping a ton of stuff on him or facts and figures,we neither trivialized it or made it into this big scary thing and he knew he could talk to us if he needed to. One thing for parents with kids hitting the age of being active and beyond,know that as much as you try to teach them, as smart as they are,they still may end up doing stupid things, having sex for the wrong reasons, or having unprotected sex/getting an STD,and it isn’t your fault,the hormones and peer pressure and just plain irrationality can override the best of teaching, this being from personal experience:)
The biggest irony to me is that those that push the most the idea that sex should be taught and controlled by parents are often those least equipped to do it,whereas those who push for sex ed and sex health training know a lot,but realize that the parent/child emotional relationship can make it fraught &better someone trained as a teacher or counselor might be easier(though I hope they have better teachers now,in high school in late 70’s my school used gym teachers, not great teachers,was as bad as the anti drug ed we had in some ways,tables of dry facts and pictures)
Best PSA in a long time, thank you.
This is such a great post! I feel so passionately about the importance of information around sex and sexuality, and the very real dangers of misinformation, silence and shaming around sex for kids – particularly those already at risk of abuse due to other environmental factors.
I would also say, from my own experience of reading some very explicit content very early (10 to 11), reading about sex and sexual pleasure (usually written from a women’s perspective) was really empowering. It meant I approached my early sexual experiences from the perspective of expecting them to be pleasurable, and exploring what i liked, not just pleasing someone else, or expecting the fun to be just for the guy. Someone made a comment earlier in the thread about directing your kid to content that emphasises consensual and female-led sex, and I think a conversation about stuff that’s fun to read about or watch but not fun to do in real life can be valuable. Rape or rough sex fantasies for example can be very confusing for young girls.
Yes! I totally need to have that conversation about the difference between what is fun to read about and what is fun in real life with my kid. Thanks!
Excellent article thank you for writing it I hope it has a wide circulation .
Thank you so much for this! I love the idea of leaving a book out and having it dissapear randomly. I need to start making lists of of how I want to handle this; my son is 2 and I’m pregnant with my daughter now so I still have some time before the first of The Talks have to happen ?
Getting advise from people with the same mindset is golden. Our community as a whole across the country tends to be very conservative (sunny South Africa), the information I had growing up just left me wondering and confused.
The biggest thing I took from my own childhood is that kids will get curious, and if that curiosity boils over they will experiment.
Thanks again for the interesting discussion.
Fantastic post.
This was my parents approach (“as long as it’s between two consenting adults…”) and my mum was a biochemist so we’re also have a lot of stories of friends of mine and my sisters coming to us for help and guidance. I used to look at my mum talk to them and feel so lucky.
I lost my virginity at 18, my younger sister at 25. Knowledge never pushed us to sex.
Agreed, a great post. Thanks IA!
I totally concur! Great post.
I first came across sex in books at 17 when I started hoarding romance novels like Judith McNaught or Catherine Coulter… where marital rape was often Ok and the wife (often 17 to his 34…ewww) would forgive all because he “loved her”.
If I hadn’t snooped and found my older brother’s illustrated copy of the “Joy of Sex” I would have probably been permanently stuck in this chauvinistic pattern, especially living in Mexico. Phew!
So nicely done and similar to the openness about sex education my mother had.
It made a huge difference in how I approached that side of life because it didn’t need to be furtive or considered wrong. Be safe, be educated. Better to have your kids know their stuff than have them caught unawares and end up traumatised or in trouble and not feel they can ask for help or information.
Your kids won out in that department.
Thanks for a great post.
I wish my mom had discussed things as openly as you did. I ended ip having so pretty rotten things happen as a young teen. Luckily, I overcame them, had a great son when I was 18,and resolved to be upfront and open with my children. It’s paid off. My adult children even still come to me with health related questions.
I’d suggest the graphic novels “Sunstone”. Fantastic “slice of life” comic about falling in love and long-term relationships when your main hobby happens to be… well… sex! And no, just because the characters WANT sex more than average doesn’t mean they aren’t adult about it. Or… that they don’t have all the usual problems being adult about relationships. 😛
Its the only story I’ve seen when everyday stuff interferes with sexy time like… being on your period. Or “not being good at sex yet”. Or…ruining your partner’s mood because you have the giggles.
Would read it with them because BSDM (the real version) is a theme.
Thank you for this post, and I am loving this thread. But I need specifics please!! Finding books that model consent, female pleasure, and realistic and healthy relationships has been much on my mind lately. My daughters are 10 and 7, and the 10 year old is an avid and advanced reader. She’s venturing into books not written for kids, or even teens, and diving right in to stuff her dad and I read. She just started the Shadow and Bone trilogy, for example. Still mostly fantasy and scifi (she’s not interested in the romance genre at the moment). I’ve been talking about sex with her for years, and while her reading books with sexual content per se doesn’t concern me, I am worried about the negative ways that sex and love are often portrayed – such as that it is romantic for the guy to not accept a “no”, or that violent possessiveness and anger are signs of love. Also worried about unrealistic portrayals of sex – the stories in which two people who have never had sex before magically have mindblowingly fantastic sex the first time, or the “he knew her body better than she did herself” trope, etc. She both reads very fast and has way more free time for reading than I do, so I have no hope of prescreening things for her. Can we please have a thread where the BDH recommends books with sex and relationships that hopefully won’t actively harm a girl’s developing sense of themselves as an empowered sexual being?
I think most of the Ilona Andrews books are just what you need- if she likes SciFi Innkeeper will serve her well and they only get together in Book 3, so it feels natural. And as Ilona explained lots of consent going on there: Curran hears a No and Stops (Hottub Scene)
I read The Black Magician Trilogy (Trudi Caravan) when I was about 10 years old – mostly fantasy; romance and sex only enter in the third book and in a mild way but the book includes consequences such as an unplanned pregnancy.
I read City of the Beast (Fantasy) ages ago and I think there is slight romance in the last book of the trilogy but I am not so sure – it does have good main characters though (boy & girl) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Beasts
If she’s a strong reader, has she looked into Mercedes Lackey? I remember the conversations about sex were healthy, the relationships balanced, and it wasn’t too explicit. There are homosexual and heterosexual heroes – I still read them when I want that nostalgia comfort.
I would agree with Mercedes Lackey, but only for her earlier books. Her later books over the last decade have really turned me off her writings. Sad, because I absolutely loved her Valdemar series (my first foray into sci fi and fantasy was Oathblood).
Though you might want to stand by when she reads “Arrows of the Queen” (I think) where the main character is imprisoned, tortured, and raped. It’s not done in any kind of way that a person who doesn’t quite understand that would notice it among all the other torture, but still.
I haven’t read Shadow and Bone but the follow up duology (six of crows and crooked kingdom) has some very adult themes but handles relationships well.
Someone has already recced Tamora Pierce, and Kristin Cashore. I would add Diane Duane’s young wizard series (the characters start very young but age up with the books and the relationships are handled very matter of factly). Maggie Stiefvater’s books ( very teenage centric.
I still haven’t finished them but Richard Robert’s “Please don’t tell my parents I’m sa supervillain” series is fun and models healthy relationships.
Margaret Mahy wrote some amazing books that hold up reasonably well.
+1 Diane Duane
+1 Tamora Pierce
You might look at Andrea K Höst’s Touchstone series – portal fantasy, written as a journal by a girl in her late teens. Open & sensible/realistic about crushes, first times, people behaving badly because of jealousy, significance of sex with someone loved, crucial nature of consent. That description makes it sound very didactic and loaded and it’s not at all.
Try Sarina Bowen’s romances. I’ve not read them all, but the hockey-themed ones were good, and I’m not normally a fan of romance novels. They are very explicit, but I found the sex in them secondary to the relationships.
Also I recommend For Goodness Sex by Al Vernacchio, it’s the book I bought for my kids, and they both enjoyed it.
I recommend Anne Bishop’s The Others Series. Not so much about sex per se but about developing intimacy in a relationship. Plus rousing good reads.
+1
I would really not recommend this for a child. As an adult, I am deeply troubled by the gender dynamics portrayed in these books. Additionally, the sexual exploitation of the Cassandra Sangue is very disturbing. perhaps more so for how subtly it is conveyed.
Tamora Pierce’s Alana series had the first book I remember reading where sex was mentioned. It’s not in your face, and healthy, but got me thinking. She is also the first author who had a character who grew into herself and realized that she was a lesbian. Having been raised in a very strict Catholic household, this was a big deal for me.
I loved all of her books but the third (and last) in the Beka Cooper series (the first two books rocked and definitely ran all over the issues of sex and intimacy, in good ways), titled Mastiff. Other than that book — which betrayed the author-reader contract by turning a character bad with absolutely nothing in the two first books to suggest they might do such a thing — I’ve loved everything else.
Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski
This book changed the way I think about desire, and I think all humans should read it.
It’s funny, and smart, and well written, and will blow your mind if your sex ed was as mediocre as mine was.
It is written for adults, and might be too advanced for a ten year old. So you might want to read it first. But that might be a good thing, as then you would be prepared for questions that come up.
A couple teasers: desire has an accelerator and a brake (like a car). Normally, if people are having problems with ‘not being in the mood’, it’s because their brake is on too hard. So to fix that, they/we should reduce stressors. But that’s not what our culture says. Instead people try to rev the accelerator, which is like pumping both pedals in the car – not effective. And learning about responsive desire is such a game changer.
[Ilona Andrews, let me know if you want a copy if this, and I will totally get you one. Sometimes I fantasize about having the next convention of the Romance Writers of America (if they have conventions), be all about this book. There could be panels, and seminars, and then people would have the information they need to write books that are sexy and accurate, like yours.]
2.
Another book I’ve really like is Drawn to Sex: the basics by Erica Moen and Matthew Nolan. The are a wife and husband pair who produce Oh Joy Sex Toy, a comic that includes sex toy reviews, smut, and sex ed (here is a (NSFW) link to all their sex ed comics: https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/category/comic/education-comic/). I bought the book on Kickstarter, but it is now available from Amazon, etc.
It is graphic (haha), but also funny, and inclusive of bodies (shape, colour, ability, pairings), which is a really nice change from what is normally out there.
Check out their website (it’s free, and there are no ads anymore, as it is funded by OMG Yes and the Magic Wand). (OMG Yes also great, but probably too old for her)
They also have great links to Planned Parenthood and Scarlet Teen.
3.
The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler
This does deal with rape, so you should vet beforehand.
You could also consider going to a production of it on Valentine’s day (check out on YouTube to see if you’re interested). A lot of post-secondary schools put them on, and you should be able to find out what age range it will be suitable for. The producers can choose which bits to put on.
4.
Learning Good Consent edited by Cindy Crabb
Good, though it has been awhile since I read it, so I have no more comments for you.
5.
Queer, a graphic history, by Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele
Also excellent. Again, may be too advanced for a ten year old, but is not explicit.
This book is more so that she has the skills to question the picture of normal that she might be getting from other sources, because we don’t all see ourselves in that picture, which can be scary.
6.
Not a resource, but a recommendation on where to find more:
Your local independent sex store.
I use Come As You Are in Toronto, but they have them all over.
They generally have a section on sex ed (I know that CAYA has books on sex ed geared to kids and teens), and will be well curated. And the staff is very helpful and not creepy.
Good luck!
I am finally coming back to this thread after a few days slammed at work, and am so excited for so many great and thoughtful suggestions. Thank you all! I want to take more time with everyone’s comments, but just wanted to say I’m always a bit nervous posting (anywhere, not just here) and I really appreciate everyone who took the time to make recommendations. Thank you.
What worked for me was letting her read those things and then TALKING about them. Edward and Bella’s relationship isn’t romantic – it’s a girl trying desperately to change herself for a boy. We watched rom-coms and then talked about how confusing it must be for boys to have women love movies where the hero grabs the girl he fights with and then kisses her and she melts, but in real life we tell them to be respectful and obtain affirmative consent. I read what she read, watched what she watched, and then asked her what she thought. That’s what worked for us.
Also, “The Care and Keeping of You” by American Girl library is an amazing book for girls 8 and up. Buy it and leave a copy in every girls bedroom.
I completly agree. Sex isnt wrong in itself and the parents should talk with their children about it like they would about others things in life, like the flow, the future… I am sure your daughters are grateful for that.
I am 25 yo and even now, if there is a sex scene in a movie my family is watching, my father doesnt feel confortable with me being there. Growing up, it was a tabu topic for me because although my parents tried to talk about it, I felt their discomfort. It took some time with my first boyfriend to learn, enjoy and quit the feeling of wrongness sticked to it. I was very lucky he was such a great person, probably not everybody is so lucky.
Everybody has sex and talks about it , why not prepare your chidren for reality the best that you can?
Oh I think I might be too European in this regard. This was not such a big deal for us – I mean we have obligatory health classes in school and I think it is very important no matter your opinion or religion.
As I remember, in Kindergarten my kindergarten teacher got pregnant and that is when the questions first started and they explained the basics (no bs about a storch or some such) and even had a little book with interactive features and all was well – sitting right there with all the other books, I was just never interested in it before – so I get what is meant by self-censoring.
public/catholic kindergarten btw 😀
(it’s a previous version of this book i think https://www.ravensburger.de/produkte/kinderbuecher/wieso-weshalb-warum/woher-die-kleinen-kinder-kommen-33265/index.html)
Back home I talked about it with my mom and dad and it was just a normal fact of life, a treasured way for couples to express their love and trust.
I didn’t get obsessed, I didn’t have a teen pregnancy and as a matter of fact no one in my whole school had one… just saying…
Of course the depth is different when you talk with a 4, 8, or 13 year old about sex and I can understand that there is a lot of reluctance and tabu talking about sex – especially if you go into detail – most of it is due to growing up in other times, but it is not healthy.
Regarding books and sex it is much the same – self-censoring works, but frankly as a teen it was much funnier when a book carefully blended out the fact that there was sex in a relationship, than when there were a few vage or explicit references to the subject. People holding hands, kissing CUT next morning people drinking coffee…. I mean who are they kidding?
+1
First, I think that was such a good post about something both personal and political, the aproach to sexual education.
Like Momo I think this is probably one of the bigger cultural difference between many European countries (and probably some other “western or developed countries”?) and the US. Sex education is part of the curriculum, so regardless of your private beliefs, your child will have adults to talk and ask about sex, and in Sweden, where I live, young adults have special health care facilities, called “ungdomsmottagningar”, where they can seek free medical care and advise without needing to tell their parents. Of course it’s free, since we have free health care, but they wave even the small administrative costs that adults have to pay up to the “free limit” of 1250 swedish krowns per year, after which all visits are free anyway, but they do this so kids can go without having to tell their parents. Those clinics help not just with birthcontrol, STD, abortions and questions about sex, but also eating disorders or mental health. Anything kids might not want to talk to their parents about. And as long as the kid isn’t a victim of a crime, or is abused at home (in which case social services has to be notified), the kid decides who can be told. Doctor-patient confidentiality, regardless of age.
So I’m totally convinced that education and openess about sex lessens shaming and awkwardness, and reduce risks of unwanted pregnancies and STDs . Although I think all the openess was often quite hard on the poor adults, haha ?. They all tried SO hard to not be embaressed and treat the subject as a normal and positive thing, which means I think I’ve heard the “first time” stories of, like, ALL the adults around us in my teens, because some kid would always ask the teacher, and since they were trying to teach us that sex is normal and ok as long as it’s consenual and on your terms, and nothing to be ashamed of, and totally ok to talk about… ?
So I think the adults in the 80’s were trying really hard to change the social norms about sex and loosing the stigma and silence, but I don’t think THEY were as comfortable talking about sex in an open and non-judgmental way as they would have liked… But props to them for trying not to pass on their own upbringing and hangups on us! ? And I treasure all those slightly awkward conversations, because they show how much those adults cared about us, and cared about giving us a good, healthy relationship to our own sexuality. And I can honestly say all those grown ups gave us plenty of forums to ask anything we wanted or wondered about our bodies.
Thanks for that amazing post.
I grew up in a very strict household, with a mentally and physically abusive mother, an older sister (by 4 years) and a military lifestyle (dad was an officer – worked his way up, 25 years). We were brought up to believe that men would only want us for sex, and that, when we started dating, we were whores. My sister became pregnant at 16 and disappeared to live with my aunt, but came to visit, gave me a book on sex for teens, and said “here, mum and dad will never talk to you about it”, mind, she never did either heh. But read it I did, and I became the school Agony Aunt, answering all queries – crazy how some believed you can get pregnant from a tongue in the belly button…
I have an adult son, but discussed sex with him, openly, in his early teens, and in his later teens I discussed BDSM as well, and just like you, I left books around. Doing so, I found we actually have a much better, open relationship as he never felt judged by his choices.
Of course, each parent to their own, but after my childhood (extreme I admit) I truly believe we should be better at educating our children about sex, be more open. No one else is going to teach them. And if you’re open with them, then there’s a higher chance they’ll come to you if something goes wrong, and you definately want that.
I remember I used to sneak read those very trope-y romance books (think millionaire virgin wife etc) when I was 13ish-14? I was highly annoyed with those books years later regarding their misinformation with hymens…that it’s NOT a few inches inside like every romance book seem to describe it XD
…I could write it off as dated 90s romance books, but I’ve come across this in modern romance books too O_o
Hymens. Oh jeez that’s a pet peeves of mine. Basic anatomy fail. Why would anyone think it’s next to the cervix? Then it would fail at it’s function. Not to mention it’s I guess you would call it structural intensity is not the same in every woman. There is a episode of Adam Ruins Everything – The Truth About Hymens And Sex that I feel explains a lot. It brings up anatomy and the many misconceptions the world has.
Hee hee
I bought the kids a couple of (good and basic) sex ed books after discussion with them when they were 10-12. I then LOUDLY put the books in their toilet which we adults only use in extremes (think teenage boys).
Those books got read!! And not just by my kids….several of their friends came over to ‘use the toilet’!
Congratulations Ilona for providing a safe space where young people have felt confident to ask you questions they were not able to ask other adults in their lives. You have a gift that they have been drawn to. Thank you on their behalf.
My attitude raising my girls has been pretty similar to yours. Ignorance has never been a good thing for women. Sex education in the United States is still stuck in the dark ages. That is why I think our culture has so many issues with sex. No one talks openly about it in an educational setting. If ours schools had a good sex Ed program half of the problems could be solved with just that.
Dark ages.
I sadly have to agree with that – and I honestly think it has much to do with the way religious devotion is defined in many US American households.
Right after graduation, now 10 years ago, I spent a year in California as part of an Au pair program before attending university.
What I still remember most vividly about the initial emails and introductory seminars held by my exchange agency in NY was, that they stressed we should not ever, NEVER include any naked kid pictures of ourselves or family members in our application portfolios.
Apparently, this was a common enough case of cultural differences leading to communication break-down that they felt they needed to mention it about twice a day for a week.
They also stressed that girls going to Mid-West should avoid buying condoms in small towns, avoid having sex if possible, and if they felt they couldn’t, should stock up on condoms there in New York. Some went out to by a yearly supply that night.
I, a German, like the ~30 other girls from assorted other European nations, just didn’t get it. We truly didn’t get it until we arrived.
Today, I am have been teaching High school students for about 5 years in Berlin, Germany. I am teaching in a district where about 50% of my A-level classes are made up of Germans kids from migration backgrounds, usually Turkish, Kurdish or Russian. Many of them are practicing Muslims. They are great kids. I am mentioning this only because a devout Muslim is the closest one can probably get to what equates to a strict religious setting in the US-American sense in Berlin.
IN ALL THAT TIME, we have had ZERO teenage pregnancies. During my own school time, there were zero teenage pregnancies. I know nobody who ever told me about knowing somebody having had friends or kids who had that particular problem. That a convoluted sentence, but I hope I got the point across.
I am really happy to read so many responded in a positive manner here.
I also think that religion should not be mistaken for an excuse to teach your children to deny their natural urges. They will have sex when they are ready. As parents, you better make sure it doesn’t end their future. My grandfather is reverent in the Protestant church of Germany. It is possible to be religious and still educate your children on important matters of life.
As the CDC writes in 2018: “Still, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate is substantially higher than in other western industrialized nations, and racial/ethnic and geographic disparities in teen birth rates persist.”
I honestly think it’s a crime to cripple your own children that way by denying them education on such an essential matter.
Ok, I better end my harangue of parents that mistake religious devotion for an excuse to hurt their children in the long run.
I am truly glad things are changing. Women should stand up for their daughters, fathers should doubly so.
Sons should be taught how to treat their future sexual partners, whether in a relationship or otherwise, and the responsibility to educate them on these matters should lie with their parents, not the playboy issues under their bed.
I honestly think a guy whose parents took their time to educate him on these matters is a lot less likely to turn into a campus rapist at the next party because his buddy had some pills lying around and the girl didn’t say “no”. That is another consequence of a lack of sex education.
Because Ilona is completely right, they will get their information from somewhere, so you better make sure they understand “no” means “no”.
I agree with all the things you wrote, and have done. I would like to add a couple of suggestions. One, as soon as a son or daughter is old enough, vaccinate him/her/they for HPV, a three-step series of shots. It might save a life. Second, show daughters and sons what a condom is, how it works (cucumber or banana), and where they are sold in a store (no age limit to buy them, no judgment/stigma, under $10 for pack of three). Condoms are not “the boy’s job” . Gonorrhea is showing up recently as penecillin-resistant, so protect yourself. Third, know the legal age in your state and what that means.
When my kids were around upper elementary(youngest) and Junior high (older), I remember all this hoopla over The Hunger Games. People were trying to say they promoted violence with kids. Since I had read them with my older, that statement was blatantly false. The books did contain violence but were a statement about the ethics of war. Younger kids might not have been sophisticated enough readers to get the correct message but the message was there.
My policy with my kids was that no books were ever off limits to them to read. I did insist on reading the books too and then we’d have book discussions. I did it book club style to make sure that if there were any issues with sex, consent, drug use, or violence that they were making the connections that needed to be made. We had lots of really interesting and good discussions. I’d also bring up random discussions about things I heard in the news that were going on with kids from sex trafficking, sex, porn to bullying or anything else. The kids learned early that we could talk about anything and that carried on throughout their teen years. To me, kids can never have too much information.
I want to say something difficult.
People worry about talking to their kids about sex. They don’t realize that there can be a huge risk if you DON’T. I was kept very sheltered. I thought I was going to die and was horribly injured when I got my first period. I cried and had to eventually read the tampon directions by myself in a bathroom. NO help or support.
A few of my mother’s friends and my sometimes babysitter (16 boy neighbor) had also been doing things that were inappropriate as well but I never reported it – because I didn’t understand and hadn’t been warned – this was something I only realized as an adult.
Eventually my ignorance cost me. I paid for it. Those who left me in ignorance did not. I was assaulted at 13 by a grown man. I remember being completely unaware of the act of penetration and hadn’t known that it might be dangerous to be alone with him. Zero clue. No one ever talked to me about men or sex or predatory behaviors or safe behaviors or … just nothing. So, without getting too graphic – I literally did not understand enough about the actual physical body to be aware of what he was doing. I was confused because I felt pressure and his hands were holding mine down. So, what could that feeling be?
Please don’t feel bad. I am fine. If anything I grew up strong and independent and I enforce my own boundaries now. No problems with sex or intimacy or relationships. I just recognize the cost of my parent’s (single mom) unwillingness to have the embarrassing discussions. I used to be angry with her and blamed her – but her life wasn’t so great either and she didn’t know any better. You do. We do. Do better. Remember that ignorance doesn’t protect your kids. It makes them easy victims.
Sorry to be super heavy but I think it’s a really important perspective. My adults let me be a victim. I am a HUGE proponent of education. You can make a mistake that can’t be undone. I’m fortunate I didn’t get pregnant and I contracted no STDs. I’m fortunate that I didn’t allow the trauma to warp my ability to be intimate. Some are not so lucky.
Thank you for listening.
That is, as you say, a really important perspective. It’s particularly important because you managed to work out a way through it that led you to a better life, and you recognize that not everyone is able to do that. Thank you for sharing this.
I feel for u. I was also raised by parents who refused to acknowledge the physical aspects of life- in any way. I’ve never seen them even hug or kiss each other, let alone show me affection. I had no idea the ppl who were touching me were doing something wrong until I hit 13 and learnt more in school. By then I’d been abused for years. Thank god my parents believed me when I finally came to them and made it stop but 9 years of abuse is not an easy thing to live with. Definitely educate yourself and your kids. It’s the only way to protect them when you are not around to protect them yourself. I’ve got two young kids now and I never don’t answer their questions. I’m not trying to over expose them but they know they can come to me for answers. Thanks guys for this thread! It’s an important topic and it needs to be taken out from under the rug.
Educating children about sex and their bodies does not make them more promiscuous, it makes them prepared and safe. Paedophiles specifically target children who are ignorant about their own bodies since they often don’t even know what’s happened. Ignorance is not bliss. Human beings are designed to be curious and the more stuff is hidden the more they want to know. We are all sexual beings and pretending otherwise is a fool’s game. Be kind, be appropriate and be alert.
I started reading romance novels when I was about 9. At first the sex scenes were some “forbidden knowledge” kind of thing. My parents never really discussed sex, but my mom bought me romance novels so I guess they figured that counted.
When I was 11 me and my friends were playing on a computer my dad had gotten from his friend. No internet access just playing games and messing around. The guy didn’t scrub his computer correctly and we found his porn folder, it was like detailed drawings of mid-evil times and sex. It was so foreign to what I was reading I didn’t realize that it was sex… I was 11 and it just didn’t click. I think I was about 17 when I realized what we had found. At the time I told my parents confused as to what was happening (I thought it looked painful and like something that would occur on a dare) and they wiped the computer properly.
I am the oldest and I think my parents just didn’t consider how best to approach sex with their kids. I don’t know if any of my siblings had a honest sex talk with my parents. It ended up being a moot point for me as I am asexual and once I realized I didn’t have to let guys rub on me or grab at me because that was “what people do” my life got way smoother.
I still enjoy romance novels, I prefer books where sex is mentioned but not pages and pages of blow-by-blows because once the “forbidden knowledge” part of the allure wore off I generally find the scenes uninteresting.
I want to say I legit teared up in appreciation when I read your comment that “Some kids are asexual”. I was 25 before I realized it was okay to be me. I was 25 when I heard the term asexual (not in biology) for the first time. When you are moving through life and feel like you missed a step, finding out there are others like you makes a difference. Awareness makes a difference.
It took me years to find the term “asexual” as well! I just went through my teens convinced that everyone else was pretending to be obsessed with sex and boys all the time because that’s what they thought they were supposed to do. Come to find out, I just didn’t feel what they did! Props to Ilona for including it in her mentions and educating her kids/their friends well.
My parents didn’t do an amazing job of talking through sex with me but I wonder if I would’ve pursued the topic more if I was interested in it? Lord knows what trouble I could’ve gotten into if I had been interested without being armed with knowledge…
Anyway, you comment about the sex scenes in books really hit home with me. I like description to a degree but I tend to prefer it when the actions directly hint to the emotions of the people in the scene, if that makes sense. But sex scenes in movies or TV shows tend to squick me out or just make me uncomfortable. I would love to do an informal survey one day seeing how different asexuals react to different type of sex scenes in assorted media. It think it could be really fascinating.
Education is always best, just look at the statistics. I am in my mid 20’s now and I had a pretty conservative up bring in regards to sex, but I was also a very avid reader by the time I started middle school. Fantasy and romance books were really my first education with sex because my parents mantra was “collage, job, marriage, sex, then kids” which is all well and good but didn’t really tell me much. I never felt like I couldn’t talk to them about it and they did teach me how to protect myself but I knew if I asked them about any details about sex I would not get any real answers and it would always end in their little mantra. So books and the internet where all I had. It worked for me since I did self censored when I was younger and I was not all that interested in it as a teenager, but not all are so lucky. While in college I stumbled on to some well done youtube sex ed channels that debunked mis-information and was informative. When I was ready to look there was information out there for me to find but I still wish that my parents where a bit more open about it and while it has not caused me any truly negative impacts it could just as easily have.
More information is always better in my book!
Thank you Ilona for this post. I think possibly the tide is turning a bit on sex education, but, not nearly enough. I’ve never understood the general thoughts of society in the United States toward sex. The taboo cloud hangs low and dark.
My parents were very strict Southern Baptists. Sex was NOT discussed. Ever. Even when I became a teen and began having menstrual periods, there was no discussion. No teaching about life. Ever. They never stepped up to the plate and talked to me about this part of being an adult. Even now, long after both are dead, that infuriates me. Any sort of problem, was to be dealt with by praying to God. They never felt it was their responsibility. So, I was very sure to be the opposite with my daughter on this subject.
You kids are very lucky to have you as a parent. The posts on this thread are proof your manner of handling this is needed. If only…..
I’ve heard so many stories like this, so obviously this is a common experience. I grew up Southern Baptist as well, but this was definitely not my experience. Funny story: When I was five, I came home from school and asked my Mom where I came from. She figured this would happen later, but obviously I’ve heard some things from other kids and now is the time. So… at five, I got the full run-down. Mom tells me I stared blankly at her afterward and then said, “okay, but what is our address?”
I had the opposite problem with my 5-year-old son. He was very much into how things work, especially if he could take them apart. And he remembers everything. His first questions about sex snowballed. He kept asking for more explanation and more details. I was a professor by trade, so I kept answering… until I realized that he was expecting me to teach him how to do it, step by step. No, just no. I could just imagine him attempting to lecture his fellow kindergarteners the next day. I told him the how-to lecture had to wait until he was ten.
Nicely done. I was very open with our kids about sex, feelings, everything. My D’s friends would ask me questions, like yours did, for the same reasons–religion, lack of communication, etc. Educating your child about life issues does not mean giving them a license to have orgies, promote drug use, or drink themselves into a stupor, as so many people seem to think it will. It means that your child will have concrete information to make informed decisions.
So much better than going with information on a bathroom wall.
Very well done. I wish my mother had been as open. In fact, all the information I had gotten as a teenager was from friends or health class. When my oldest nephew was about thirteen, I had to have a talk with him about body odor. Neither of my parents discussed bodily functions with their children and neither did my brother. It was left to me to have these discussions with my sister and my nephews. Parental embarrassment is fine. In fact, admit to your children that you’re uncomfortable with discussing sex and bodily functions but assure them that you want them to have the knowledge to make good personal decisions. If a parent doesn’t know how to address the subject, get a book and read it.
Amen. What a mine field. So glad my children are grown up.
Which sex ed books do people recommend?
I am actually a U.K. family planning doctor, but my own kids (11-12)eyes glaze over when I say anything!
Perhaps I say to much!!!
Contraception is free in the uk, but this does not stop a shamefully high teenage pregnancy rate. There is still a lot of misinformation. Sexwise is a good family planning website. Zanzu contraception is a German website that amazingly translates with verbal and written basic contraception information into loads of languages. You can pick English to whatever language you need. Just the thing when you are trying to explain to a Bulgarian teenager about the contraceptive implant! (Well that was part of my day).
Thank you for raising this. I honestly think you guys are fabulous.
My son was absolutely unwilling to discuss sexuality and the basics of human reproduction with me. When he was walking away from me with his ears covered, I decided we needed to find another way. At first, I bought a couple books and left them out, but he didn’t seem to be reading them. Luckily, I had a stash of books that I would rather he not read for a variety of reasons, but discovered he had found them. So I put the books there, and eventually they started appearing in other parts of the House, so I’m pretty sure he read them. At that point, I told him I would prefer if he decided to have sex later rather than sooner, but regardless, if he needed condoms, this is where I keep them. I figured that was as good as it would get.
Great post! I was a voracious reader as a child, and my Dad had a fuzzy memory, so he had a tendency to give me books without realizing exactly what was in them. He gave me River God by Wilbur Smith when I was 10-11. I re-read it when I was older, and it was a totally different book! I did not remember any of the very graphic…everything that is in the book. I think I skipped it or ignored it.
I think there is value in seeking out the good young-adult fiction, because it has so many great messages for teens, but I also think reading adult books is totally fine. And now that we’re in the age of the internet, I feel like kids who are super into reading are also much more likely to be into fanfiction….and that can be waaaaay more explicit than any published book! So they might have seen it all already anyway.
Some people may label me “religious”, but I prefer to say “Christian” because religion, to me, can sometimes be just a template for living according to certain rules without ever thinking very much about the reason for or meaning behind those rules. With my daughter, I chose the direct method as well, and let her questions and curiosity guide me regarding how much she needed or wanted to know. She surprised and entertained me for many years with her questions and some of the peculiar notions she came up with. I also believe frank and open discussion is the best way. She always knew she could talk to me, and her friends did, too. I let her decide whether virginity is something to value and protect. Instead of handing down an edict, I simply explained that many things in life are common, and things are only special if you decide you will make them special. Therefore, if you treat sex like a common bodily function, that’s all it will be. If you regard it as a very intense emotional and physical experience that is heightened by a true emotional bond, then it can be transcendent. She will be 21 this year, and I think she is doing fine and making choices that she can be proud of.
We have three kids – G23, B22, G19. I have always tried to keep open lines of communication about sex and answer honestly. Our girls went to an all girls Catholic high school, which to me had a pretty decent course about sex-Ed, respect, protection. This course also covered dating, college party’s, drinking and drugs. My girls shared this same information with their brother. A couple of things I have told my kids about these type situations is to trust your gut if it feels/seems wrong it is. Also that “No means No a thousand times No” (song “No” by They might be giants”).
As for books, our oldest was the one who read super fast and loved to always have something to read. I did read some before she did in case there were things I wanted to discuss with her.
Here are some authors my kids read in no particular order
Tamora Pierce
Cornelia Funke
Eoin Coffer
John Green
Anthony Horowitz
Diana Wynn Jones
Angie Sage
Daniel Pasolini
Orson Scott Card
CS Lewis
Douglas Adams
John Flanagan
Cassandra Clare
HTH anyone looking for books for their kids
I would just like to thank you for this post. My daughter is 9 and can go through 3 large chapter books a week. We’ve already discussed sex with her due to her being very mature and it was brought up on an Anthony Bourdain episode that she picked up on. Anyways, I like that you give your perspective on sex in books. I was a young strong reader and was reading YA at 9, 10 years old, some of the books had sex scenes, others didn’t. like your daughter I also read it like any other part of the book. I also didn’t even notice when there were swear words. Knowing eventually my daughter will graduate from Harry Potter this brings up a good topic for my husband and I to discuss. We are a very open family and discuss all topics with our daughter as long as they’re age appropriate or well, maturity appropriate I would say. Thank you again!
As an OB/GYN I would love to reinforce from my years of experience that teens and young adults have sex… good sex, bad sex, safe sex, unsafe sex. Teens from good home with intact families and strong religious principals and teens with unstable and unsupported living situations. Teens who are educated and supported are more likely to have safe sex and not put themselves in horrible situations. But teens frequently do dumb things, just like kids and adults.
So much this. No matter how much you try, they do something stupid and then you sit there and wonder where you went wrong.
As HS teacher I felt absolutely marinated in teenage sexuality everyday everywhere. BUT we are what are called “Mandated Reporters” which means all kinds of sexually related issues must be reported. Even when students are telling you something prolly not illegal but spoken in such a confusing way you must report it to be on the safely legal side. As a result many teachers plainly state to their ENTIRE classes their restrictions as mandated reporters several post that information in their classrooms and essentially create a no-info zone. Add to that terrified poorly informed parents++ red hot highly Conservative religious groups and weak administrors and nobody knows anything about positive sexuality.
Wow.
In Germany, they teach sex education as part of biology class. No religious groups, no Conservative parents, no trouble.
It’s just another part of the curriculum.
I really don’t understand how it turned into this convoluted mess in the United States.
Shouldn’t the right teenage pregnancy rates push politicians to make it a mandatory part of the curriculum?
I’d like to know what the title of the book (written about sex and aimed specifically for teens) was. Also, if anyone else has any suggestions on similar books I’d love to hear about them, as well.
Me too! Following this post
This is probably not what Ilona was referring to but when I was growing up “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was a revolutionary book about women’s health. I just checked Amazon and they have a teen version, “Changing Bodies, Changing Lives: Expanded Third Edition: A Book for Teens on Sex and Relationships” that might be helpful.
Thank you!
I just want to say thanks for writing your post. Difficult/controversial topics like this can be hard to talk about, especially when it’s not an anonymous forum. I appreciate you utilizing your public following/platform/fame to tackle important topics.
I love this post! I was the teenager who had no clue! My parents did a good job on the menstruation information, but sex ed was seeing the video with the girl crying in the MDs office saying “we only did it once!” and lots of information about the sperm and the egg. I wasn’t sure what “it” was, so when we got home, my parents asked me if I had any questions. I said “I get most of it, but how does the sperm actually get to the egg?”. *crickets* then, “well, time to go in now”. I had my first serious boyfriend my freshman year in college and my roommates were appalled at how clueless I was, so they bought me the book “The Happy Hooker”. That was quite the education (and I’m so dating myself). I was determined it would be different with my kids, and we had many talks…usually in the car with both of us facing forward. That seemed to help. They’re grown now, but I’m sure they still remember.. Oh no, Mom…not more sex stuff!!!
Yeah, I had something similar with “but how does the sperm get there?” It felt like an hour (a horribly awkward, embarrassing hour) before she launched in to a quick description of penises and vaginas and don’t do this until you’re married. Because.
For education about menstruation, I got another very quick description and a booklet and “just ask if you have any questions.” At 8.
Hell, my sex/body/anatomy education was so lacking, I thought you peed through your clitoris. I thought the urethra came out there because all the education I’d received kept stressing how the clit in women is like the penis in men in terms of similarity of sensation and fiction. I didn’t know this was wrong until I was at a medical discussion my grandma was having with her doctor about how she needed a catheter, either continually or every time she led she decided on every time and said her daughter, my mom, would do that for her (yep, first my mom heard that). And all three of us had that same misconception , so to speak! We were 47, 67, and 88. Frightening.
Could you share what books you bought for your kids? I have tweens and like to be prepared
Thank you all. I’m 17, and I can say that this approach would have been much appreciated. My parents were fine, they gave me my first sex-ed book and then I pretty much educated myself via library biology books, textbooks, and a truly enormous quantity of sci-fi, fantasy, and romance novels ranging from demure to very sketchy. I seem to have turned out ok so far, though a little more discussion would have been appreciated.
I was really luck as I grew up with two surgeons as parents and 4 older siblings. I think I’ve known the physiological mechanics of sex and pregnancy since I was about 6 or 7 and understood the social implications when I was around 10-11 (older siblings kinda unavoidable). It was never a taboo subject in my house and really as I saw my older siblings go through puberty I knew exactly what to expect when I came of age. I got on birth control when I was 16 and that was that. I did read adult books as a teenager but yeah it didn’t change the way I thought about sex. If anything the more ridiculous books made me more aware of unsafe relationships and helped me navigate dangerous situations. If I ever have kids (I’m a college student now wanting to go into Vet Med so it’ll be a loong time away from now ) I will probably as open with them as my parents were with me. Then again every kid is different so who knows what the future will hold.
When I was a young teen, I found copies of Romancing the Stone and Clan of the Cave Bear (yikes, lol) lying around. Also, another something about a woman and the pirate/privateer who sweeps her off her feet…after kidnapping her very politely and being aware of her claustrophobia. 🙂 I felt like I had to read in secret. (I got in trouble once for getting caught watching Madonna’s Like a Prayer video on MTV…you know, ’cause she was the ‘antichrist’ and all)
I love this post. thank you for sharing your experience!
Excellent post. Age appropriate in terms of nuanced content is one thing and censorship another. With my son I never put a lock on any device or banned him from anything but would talk and steer him away from books or visual content that talked, showed , referenced rape , dominance etc when he was younger till about 14. As I never really stopped him from asking me or my husband about sex/ body/ watching stuff with mild nudity sex etc or reading stuff with mild swear languages , sexual situations and so on he was more easy about things I steered him away from. As he realized I was saying no to something forbidden but has a reason for doing so. For example no game of thrones at 13 but it’s fine at 16. He gets the differences and nuances now and the importance of. Consent . I think it’s more important that boys get these very crucial differences and boundary lines and can understand the context of consent and therefore where it’s crossed over into harassment , violence , dominance they can see that as wrong and not just the oh she says no but she meant yes because hero is ultimately going to be her boyfriend nonsense. We have a very easy open relationship with him where he can be/ talk so it works. They are going to google/ surf/ read …porn, anything they get told they can’t do etc so better to let them be prepared and informed the right way.
There’s only ever one result of teens (and pre-teens) not getting proper informed education about sex, contraception and relationships:
Increased teenage pregnancies (along with STDs).
Religion-based education that preaches “abstinence” until married and not giving proper guidence (probably along with creationism) … let’s just say it would be very long post if I got into that.
I was an advanced and avid reader myself: and I grew up in the 60s and 70s. I always knew I could talk to my mother about anything and that she would be supportive but it was awkward and I didn’t like to do it (you know, teenager stuff). I understood the basics about sex and reproduction from an early age but don’t remember specifically where this knowledge came from (preInternet here!) except I probably read it somewhere. LOL In the 70s, when I came of age, women were “embracing” their sexuality and there was ALOT of information out there, but it was mostly of the “how to get and keep a man” variety. Though I was a fairly promiscuous teenager (hey! it was the 70s!) I married when I was really young, and I saw so many of my peers become single parents, I knew I never, ever wanted to do that: I was married for almost 8 years before I had the first of my four daughters. They all grew up in a household where both of their parents had a lifelong, loving, physical relationship, and most of them found out the basics of reproduction early, as they saw their mother having (yet another) baby. I still recall my eldest daughter, at the age of four, breathlessly telling an elderly woman at a church-related daycare event that her mom was having a baby and it was going to come out of her vagina! (Bless that woman, she never batted an eye: just murmured how nice it might be for her to become a sister).
My eldest daughter was also a precocious reader, and I never censored what she read, but I did ask her about what she was reading (especially if it was something I knew had “advanced” themes) and we had some good conversations in that regard: especially as related to sex and relationships. I like to think that was the major theme stressed in my household: sex has it’s place, there’s nothing essentially wrong with any kind of sex, but it’s more to be defined by the relationship in which it occurs.
I was also the mom who was there for the friends of my children, and I cannot stress enough how important I find this role to be. Friend’s mothers, aunts, whoever it may be — I think is immensely helpful to teens to have a female who is not their mother that they can talk to and feel they will get honest answers. Not to disparage any sort of mother/child relationship, but I think sometimes you need validation, information, advice or reassurance from an adult woman who is not your mother. Even if (especially!) if they tell you the same thing your mother would have, it just has a different weight coming from outside that parent/child paradigm. In any event I thin the most important thing you can do is be available and open; and of course, realize that it’s how you are living your own life that tells your children more than what you say. Kids see more than what you say.
Still, I thank God every day that my kids all grew up to be fine, strong women who are doing well. And I also give thanks I never had a son because I would not have a CLUE how to deal with that! LOL
I think part of the appeal of the non-parent is that the kid doesn’t have to look at them every day.
My parents were always very open with me about sex and sexuality. It probably helped that my grandmother is a gynecologist, so raising a boy by herself (plus all of my dad’s friends from around the neighborhood) she got allllll of the weird questions like “does anal sex still count as sex” and “does the pull-out method work?” – not as much of the pregnancy ones, but still boys wanting to learn and thankfully having an actual professional they could talk to without fear. For me, I got the basics (and the details of the basics – there’s only one way to get pregnant! All the others are just nonsense.) and at 14, became a Top Reviewer in the Young Adult section of Yahoo! Answers, just answering sex questions all the time. No, you won’t get pregnant from anal sex. Yes, you can still get an STD from unprotected anal sex. No, you are not supposed to reuse your condoms. Yes, condoms and other barriers (dental dams, etc.) are the only way to protect yourself against STDs (pulling out will not prevent you from getting an STD.) At FOURTEEN I was able to answer these questions for people both slightly and significantly older than me online, and answered the same ones for my friends at school if they felt like asking me. I bought my own sex books specifically to give to my dad so that he could give them to my little sister. I was a very proactive child when it came to all kinds of knowledge, and this was just another one of them. I’m grateful that all of my research in the mid-2000s lead me to romance books, and then specifically to paranormal romance (because fantasy was my favorite genre as a little kid, and still is!) so now I’m a huge fan of y’all’s books, Patricia Briggs, Anne Bishop, Nalini Singh, etc. in my mid-20s.
oh whoa, I think I was already 17 or near that when I actually pay attention to a steamy/sex scene in a book I read, before that I think my mind often auto-skips it.
Thank you for posting this. I have done my very best to be a safe zone for my kiddos to talk to me about, literally anything. The price of ignorance…can be (not saying it always is) sexual abuse. I was in that category. I didn’t even know that what was happening was wrong, other than a gut feeling that something wasn’t right. As parents, my husband intend to allow our children to read any book they want. We will urge them to talk to us if they have questions or want to talk to us. They are not yet at an age to read anything adult themed…they have no desire to do so. Good post with solid info :). Thank you again.
Something I’ve found recently, and have found very helpful, is Esther Perel’s podcast, Where Should We Begin.
Perel, who is a therapist, counsels a different couple every episode. It is so normalizing to hear about other people’s problems. (No names are mentioned.)
I found that this side of relationships was not covered by any sex ed, so all I knew was what I was exposed to in my family. But kids aren’t exposed to the nitty gritty of relationships, so had to figure it out for myself. Also, things come up that people have never dealt with before, nor seen anyone else deal with before. Having an inside peek into what happens in a relationship – how things can go wrong, and some of the ways people try to get out of their mess/rut/pit is incredibly useful.
To clarify, there’s nothing bad about these relationships, it’s just that humans are complicated.
This might be something that people with teenagers could use as a resource, perhaps in the car (I’ve heard it helps if everyone looks straight ahead). Or for humans more generally. 🙂
Perel also has a TED talk that was good if people are interested.
Fantastic post, and thank you so much for acknowledging that asexuals exist, too.
Ilona,
Thank you very much for this post you have no idea how much I appreciated it. I have 3 girls still toddlers but the sex talk has always been in the back of my mind. I wont go into details of my background but I just needed this. So thank you. I also want to thank the readers who made comments. Alot of your stories also reinforced the fact of being open, honest and making sure my girls are educated.
I made my husband read it too!
One thing that we recently found was a gap in teen info was when a group of older teens at our house started sharing that you had to have penetrating sex to get an std. So much attention is directed at pregnant sex schools gloss over the rest. Had a nice discussion that started with canker sores and went from there….
I have always enjoyed Sharon Shinn books. One title that stayed with me was Gateway to Women’s Country. She tends to have strong female characters.
When I was a nursing student in 1969 it was against the law to teach birth control to the young single pregnant women that came into the hospital to have abortions. How about that. I remember one doctor writing on a chart “ this young lady who is here for her second abortion has decided that she will faithfully take the birth control pill. She has decided that bloating due to the pill is preferable to bloating due to pregnancy. “
Later when I was working on my genetics degree at the University of Guelph I volunteered on the sex Ed committee. I managed to get them to install condom machines in the laundry rooms in all the resident buildings. Quite the hullabaloo when their parents came to visit and the moms went to do laundry and found those machines. ?