Talking to Your Kids About Sex Part 1: When to Start the Conversation
Many parents feel hesitant about talking to their kids about sex for fear of taking away their innocence or overwhelming them with adult information. This desire to protect your child’s innocence is adaptive and normal. Kids need their parents to help shield them from aspects of life that their brains are not yet ready to process. However, many of our clients are surprised by how young their children are when they start asking questions about body parts, where babies come from, or what a specific sexual word means.
This leaves parents in a conundrum–how do they protect their children’s innocence while also addressing their questions.
Our children are simultaneously growing up faster and slower than previous generations. Children today have less freedom to play and explore their neighborhood without adult supervision, for example. Conversely, they have much more “freedom” or potential opportunity to access content online, such as from Googling, Youtube videos or video games. Even when parental controls are in place, parents are often stunned at the content that is still accessible for kids to see. For those kids without as much parental surveillance of their online lives, they can be overstimulated with various inappropriate videos or photos intended for adults. Those kids often go on to share what they have seen with peers in an attempt to process and feel less alone with it.
With all of this information a swipe away, the risk is that in the absence of accurate, clear information provided by a parent, kids end up feeling confused and alone with the information they are seeing or hearing from peers. Confused and alone are the last things parents want their children to feel.
We recommend parents take the lead on talking to kids about sex.
When should you start? One easy answer to this question is when your child starts to ask questions. We need to interpret our children’s questions about bodies, sex or sexuality as communication that they are needing more information. The very act of asking the questions shows your child already has enough conceptual awareness of the topic to formulate a question around it. Therefore, we need to honor their curiosity with an answer that provides them more information than they previously had. If we don’t do this, children will go elsewhere for answers to their questions, in the form of talking to peers, googling, etc. We want our children to know we are the ones they should come to. Therefore we need to provide them answers in an age appropriate, attuned way.
Another entry way into these conversations is if something relevant has come up in your child’s life related to the topic. Maybe they are going to have a new sibling–this provides a natural “in” for talking more in depth about where babies come from. Alternatively, maybe your 5 year old came out of their room at night and accidentally saw a sex scene in a movie you and your spouse were watching. If a child sees content related to sex, it is our job to help them make sense of what they have seen in an age appropriate way, even if we have not previously talked about sex with them. Some children will need or want more sense-making than others. The key is to offer the opportunity for them to talk about what they saw (e.g., “Last night I know you woke up and when you came downstairs, Daddy and I were watching a movie for adults. Do you have any feelings or questions about what you saw that we can talk about together?”). If your child has questions, use this as an opportunity to start an open conversation about sex (see Part 2 of this blog series for tips on how to have these conversations in an age appropriate way). If your child does not say much, take that as a cue to move on. Then watch for any behaviors that indicate they are trying to make sense of what they saw (e.g., mimicking a sexual gesture with their body). Return to the conversation at this point, as this is a communication from your child that they need some support in order to understand what the adults were doing in the movie, when that type of action is appropriate and not appropriate, etc.
Should you wait to talk about sex until your child brings up a question or has been exposed to the topic in some way? The short answer is no—it is still important to proactively provide opportunities for these conversations. So what is the “right” age to start? Ultimately, the best time to broach these topics can only be determined by you (and your partner) based on your values, what feels right to you as parents and your knowledge of your individual child. We do know that children are conceptually ready to talk in detail about bodies in the toddler years. As early as 4 or 5, children can be ready for more explicit information about sex and sexuality. 4 or 5 may sound young to you. The risk in not proactively approaching these conversations is that children will learn inaccurate information or will feel confused, alone and ill equipped to process information they are starting to hear or see. Another risk (that is hard to think about) is that your child may be more likely to be mistreated or even abused without accurate, safe and empowered information about sex, bodies, and boundaries.
How should you go about having these conversations with your young child? Stay tuned for a second part to this blog series that will cover specific tips and recommendations on exactly how to approach conversations about sex with your child.
We love supporting clients with all things parenting, including talking to your kids about sex. The scope of our services can range from a one-time consultation to on-going, more intensive, parent guidance. Contact us to learn more about our services and how they might be supportive to you on your parenting journey.