<p>I bought a book entitled, “Isn’t It Amazing?!” about puberty, etc. for the kids to read. My 11 yr. old (at the time) read one page and threw it across the room. My 8 yr. old devoured it. (she’s the daughter)…Questions seem to come at me when we’re driving on the highway for some reason. (which practically make me drive OFF the highway)…I answer the questions as they come and try to be as honest as possible without overdoing the information. My 7th grade son had reproduction in science class, but at parent night the teacher warned us that she’d only be covering what happens AFTER fertilisation and that it was our job to cover the “before” part…in that H. spent his entire adolesence at a Benedicten boarding school he can’t seem to bring himself to talk about all this so its up to me…oh well…we end up having a few laughs during these conversations for some reason…probably because the kids bring home the most amazing misinformation…I’m just glad they run it by me for the reality check!</p>
<p>DKE, I know about those “driving off the road” questions. The carpool had as many as five girls in it and maintaining a straight face and deaf ears sometimes took effort. I suppose it was indication that I was a trusted adult when one of the girls once asked, “TheDad, in…is the girl supposed to swallow?” </p>
<p>Aiyee.</p>
<p>And what a range of girls/attached parental attitudes there were in the car at the time.</p>
<p>“TheDad, in…is the girl supposed to swallow?”- that is the funniest thing ever</p>
<p>my parents never talked to me, they tried once when i was 16 but i shut them down quickly… i took the usual sex-ed classes in school and i always played sports for older teams(b-ball 13-17 team and i was the only 13 yr. old and i made varsity track when i was a freshman) when i was younger so i learned stuff from the older kids.</p>
<p>Sex ed isn’t appropriate until you get married, in my opinion. I requested my parents pull me from 5th grade sex ed for that reason. If I had taken the test I would have written “ABSTINENCE” in big red letters on the back and turned it in. Instead they made me do a report on the circulatory system (topic was my choice so I enjoyed it). Never had a sex talk with either parent because abstinence was all I needed to know. If only some of the girls out there thought the same thing.</p>
<p>well maybe the worls would be like that if this was the 1920s and people still were dillusional to believe that kids werent having sex… I think its important to have sex ed b/c not everyone wants to be abstinent and you cant teach ppl into being abstinence so u might as well do what you can and show them safe options to choose from</p>
<p>I didn’t have a great background in how to talk to your kids about your body- sexual parts or any parts.
I didn’t know how fertilization happened until I was 11 years old- and that was because my best friend told me- whom I didn’t beleive or speak to after that for months.
In 6th gd, we had the obligatory films ( divided by sex) the girls film put out by a maker of sanitary pads- discussed menstruation, but nothing about how it was connected to sexual development-
that was about it.
I did my best to teach the girls that there isn’ta part of their body that is bad or shameful and to learn the correct terms
I disagree that if you plan on being celibate- that you don’t need to know anything about your body.Health doesn’t stop at your waist.
I think it is important that how to prevent pregnancy/diseases be taught in the schools, because we need to teach basic facts in a variety of ways. IF they get it at home fine, but what if they don’t?
School may very well be the last place they have any information about diseases and their transmission, whether sexually transmitted or otherwise. Same thing for pregnancy .</p>
<p>I taught Sex-Ed in a public school for 13-years. Even at that I found it much easier to have many of those discussions with other people’s children than my own. I suspect it has to do with a different level of vested interest in each.</p>
<p>Some of these stories are downright hilarious.</p>
<p>I started out not knowing much. In 3rd grade I was at the church summer camp and I was eating lunch with the teacher and my best friend who was a year younger, and the topic of babies somehow came up and I revealed that i didnt know where they came from. My mom never broached the subject of sex with me. I got a small bit of exposure in my later elementary years through films like Top Gun and Goldeneye and through some discussion with a more curious friend of mine (recalling our conversations knowing what I know now is hilarious)</p>
<p>After I graduated elementary school, I was 12, about to be 13, and you know, I felt sudden impulses. At that point I had to know what was going on and what I was doing, so I looked to the internet. My mom had the AOL parental controls on young teen, but I downloaded 3rd party browser and researched the topic of sex extensively. At that point I went from being the kid who knew nothing to one of the few 7th graders who had a pretty good knowledge base. </p>
<p>Fast forward to the present. I go to a Baptist school, and my practice as well as the practice amongst most students (certainly not anywhere near all) is abstinence. However, that doesn’t mean that a lot of the guys don’t still make tons of sex jokes. However, there are still a lot of students who know absolutely nothing. We’ll be reading Othello in class and there will be some pretty overt references, and you hear about 3/4 of the guys laughing and a few of the girls, and a few people will sit there like nothing ever happened.</p>
<p>And since everyone else is doing it, here’s the funniest question I’ve heard a kid ask about sex. In 6th grade after we watched “the video”, someone asked “Does oral sex mean that you do a lot of talking?”</p>
<p>My own inadequate experience with my parents affected how I wanted to discuss the topic of sex with my own children. My parents said almost nothing and what I learned prior to high school, was learned through friends and reading books. As a freshman in h/s, I had a wonderful Home Ec teacher who taught us more about life than she did about cooking and sewing. I still remember some of the great conversations we had in that class as we were whipping up blueberry muffins and cutting patterns for skirts that we would never wear.</p>
<p>I have four Ds and, as a result, this topic has fallen to me over the years. My H lucked out! 
I have always responded to questions as they were asked, trying to be as open and as informative as the situation required. I remember one D asking me, when she was six, how a neighbor’s baby had ‘gotten into her stomach’. This D was not the one to be put off with a simplistic answer so I told her the actual logistics of how fertilization works. She looked at me and said ‘that’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard!’ I can still picture the look on her face, it was priceless. :)</p>
<p>We’ve had long and frequent conversations over the years, not just about the mechanics but also about the emotions involved with making a sexual commitment to another person, especially if it’s done without the ‘confines’ of a relationship. All of my kids had sex ed in school, starting with rudimentary lessons in health class probably in 3rd or 4th grade, and becoming increasingly detailed each year. Because I was always open with them, it seemed that their friends whose parents didn’t discuss the topic, would often manage to bring their concerns up when they were at our house. TheDad, we also had the ‘swallowing’ conversation, on more than one occasion.</p>
<p>After many years of counselling youth, I can say that it worries me that there are so many districts which subscribe to abstinence only education. It has been proven time and again that abstinence only, does not work. Kids have sex, and anyone who thinks they don’t is kidding themselves. I’m not saying EVERY kid has sex, nor am I saying that EVERY kid has sex regularly, but the majority of kids DO engage in sexual activity prior to leaving high school. Sexual activity is not always a planned, scheduled event. Providing information to kids which will keep them safe does not encourage them to have sex, it gives them the tools with which to handle themselves should they be in a situation where things happen which they may not have originally intended. To encourage abstinence is fine. To encourage abstinence without also teaching them about sex and safety is wrong. Knowledge is important, especially with regard to something as important as this.</p>