Birds and Bees

We took the plunge a couple weeks ago…we had the sex talk…or at least, we started the sex talk.  I’m certainly hoping it’s going to be ongoing over the next decade or so.  Here’s the story…

The kids are in elementary school now.  We are well aware that our son has been masturbating for quite awhile.  And our daughter has taken to asking us questions like, “how do mommies and daddies decide to have a baby?” in a really loud voice at really inconvenient times in really public places.  So we decided it was time.

But we didn’t know how.

After a little poking around online, I ran across a really fantastic set of books.  There are three books in the series.

• It’s Not the Stork is for kids 4 and up.
• It’s So Amazing is for kids 7 and up.
• It’s Perfectly Normal is for kids 10 and up.

We bought copies of the first two.

My son actually watched me pick them out online, so I knew that once the books came, we were committed.  He asked me why I was buying them.  I said it was because his sister wanted to know where babies come from, and I thought it would help if we had a good book with pictures in it to help explain things.

When the books came, my husband and I looked them over.  We really liked the illustrations.  They were cartoon and comic book like, so they were fun, but they were also accurate.  The text seemed straightforward.  There were a couple little cartoon characters of a bird and a bee (ha! ha!) who were supposed to provide some comic relief on the subject.  We thought they were mostly clever, but we did notice that some of their dialogue might give kids the idea it was weird to talk about sex with their parents, so we decided to skip over some things they said.

I admit, we gulped a couple times at the thought of actually saying these things out loud in front of our kids,  but we’ve come to believe very strongly over the last couple years that this conversation needs to start young and occur often.  So we knew we had to start somewhere.  We braced ourselves and dove in.

We read It’s Not the Stork first.  The children were enthralled.  This first book doesn’t really say much about the actual act of sex,  just one sentence.  One of my kids missed it entirely.  The other one just said, “Oh, so do you have to take your clothes off for that?” I affirmed that this was correct and we kept reading.

Some of the topics it does cover are: the difference between boys and girls bodies, how it can feel good to touch your private parts (but it doesn’t use the word masturbation), safe and not safe touching, different kinds of families (but it doesn’t use the words gay or homosexual), where sperm and eggs come from, what happens when a sperm and an egg get together, what a fetus looks like at 1 month, 2 months, etc., how to show love to a new baby, etc.

I liked that the book mentioned masturbation.  That is something that we’d tried talking to our son about previously, but we both felt so awkward about it that none of the conversations seemed to go very well.  But the book finally gave us the language to talk about it.

I had planned to read the 2nd book to only my older child, but somehow it didn’t quite work out that way.  My kids think they have to do everything together, so the idea of someone getting a whole book read to them and the other one being left out was basically wrong.

So we all read It’s So Amazing together too.   For me, this one was harder to get through.  This one went into slightly more detail about sex.  It talked more about masturbation and used the correct word to describe it.  It talked about puberty and wet dreams and the menstrual cycle.  It talked about homosexuality and condoms and HIV/AIDS. Some pages were hard to get through. Some I procrastinated on so that I’d have time to pray and mentally prepare myself ahead of time.

But regardless of how difficult it was for me to get through the book, it didn’t seem to phase the kids at all.  They just thought it was really interesting, and the nights that I said we couldn’t read it, they were extremely disappointed.

So, we’ll see how things go from here.  Hopefully, this experience has opened the lines of communication and they’ll stay open well into the future.