Talkin' to Kids About Sex

I am noticing an uptick in traffic, partly due to the nature of this post. If you are here because of a google search, please visit XXX Church, instead.

We have a pretty open policy in our house when it comes to talking about sex. If the kids have a question we will answer it. Since they are 8, almost 7 and 4, usually our questions are of the "where do babies come from?" variety.

Our hope is that by being open about sex and sexuality, that we can keep the lines of communication open with our kids into their teen years. We talk about what we believe and what the Bible says about sex and marriage. It's all very general and likely largely over the girls' heads. Tyler is picking up on more, but not much. All in all, we are all pretty comfortable with this arrangement.

However, I do sometimes wonder if we are doing the right thing by being so open. Are we damaging our kids by not making sex a taboo topic? Or if not taboo, something more serious. Is it totally inappropriate to talk about at this age? It's not like we talk about sex every day, or even every week. We don't, but it certainly isn't avoided.

Not everyone agrees with our tactics, and that is totally ok. Everyone knows their kids and themselves and what they are comfortable talking about.

In a world where we can't buy hamburgers without being subjected to scantily clad women practically engaged in soft core porn with their lunch, I figure we might need to talk about sex a tad more often than my parents did with me.

There are a couple reasons why we decided to take this approach to sex.

First, we felt strongly that we should be the ones to tell our kids about sex and kids know (or think they know) about sex pretty dang young now. Kids are being inundated with sexual images and themes every day; if I want to have any influence over my kids' decisions regarding sex, we have to talk about it now. Like yesterday now.

By discussing sex early, we get take charge of how and where the discussion goes, which for young kids, I think is only a good thing.

As they get older, we hope that our early influence would prompt them to wait until marriage for sex, because that is what we believe God intended for us. Ultimately, though, our kids will have to be the ones to make those decisions for themselves, as scary as that is for a parent.

Second, there are people in this world who abuse kids, young kids. We have warned our kids about inappropriate touching from other kids and adults. It has been easier to have these discussions because our kids know about sex and have some basic familiarity with body parts and who should and shouldn't be touching them (doctors can check your bodies, ONLY if a parent is present, but NO ONE else).

We had the "sex" talk long before we had the "inappropriate touching" talk, and I really feel like it was much easier to talk about abuse having already talked about sex in a separate conversation.

Have you talked about sex with your kids? I'd love to know what other parents are doing, especially if you have kids older than ours. What worked (or didn't) for you? Are you even considering talking about sex to your kids? Did I freak you out by mentioning it??

PS Aaron and I are working on a little list of the points we hit when we talked about sex and abuse with our kids.