Love & Sex in WNC: Tips for talking to your kids about sex

Dear Readers,

After last month’s debut column, I’m excited to say that I have already received several emails with advice-seeking questions and topic suggestions. Thank you so much to those of you who have emailed me. I plan to respond to as many as I can in April’s feature. 

In the spirit of keeping up with this month’s Kids Issue series, we are going to focus on questions I commonly get from parents about how to navigate conversations with their children about sex and relationships. We’ll explore a bit of the why and how before I send you off with some suggested resources on your own. 

Why are these conversations so important? 

• Prevention. As in prevention of unwanted sexual experiences, unwanted sexually transmitted infections that could go undetected for quite a while if you don’t realize what your kids are up to and unwanted pregnancies. Prevention of intimate partner violence can be included here as well. 
• You can’t count on school to do it for you. If I could change the way we typically do education in our culture, I would include classes on healthy relationships and sex throughout elementary school and beyond. I see these topics as equally important as other school subjects. Sadly, we don’t have comprehensive sex education in most of our school systems.
• If you don’t talk to your kids about these issues, where will they learn it from instead? The internet is a pretty wild place, and most of us are not prepared for what it has created — the good and the terribly bad. 
• Some would say that relationships are the most important parts of our lives. No matter how we do relationships — whether we are monogamous or polyamorous or something in between — I find that many people do not have a template for how to navigate these important life experiences well. 

Why are these conversations so challenging to navigate? 

I think the most obvious answer is that most people don’t have enough knowledge about the issues. It’s common for people to make it far into adulthood and not have any concept of what is normal for themselves or others. Many of us have had plenty of examples of conditional love or emotional immaturity but not a whole lot of examples of well-informed and mature adults engaging in relationships that we are able to witness.

It’s uncomfortable for parents to talk about sex with their kids and vice versa. Some might say that it’s challenging because neither party necessarily wants to imagine the other party actually engaging in anything remotely sexual. (Ick — I don’t want to even think about that.) 

We should also address the shame that many of us feel about sex — whether that be regarding our own bodies, how they function (or don’t), our proclivities, our sexual identities or orientations, or just the shame of not knowing. That shame has been imposed onto us culturally, and it exists whether you heard those messages from your own household, community or some other part of dominant culture. 

Because many of us carry our own shame about sex and relationships, we run the risk of inadvertently shaming our own kids if we don’t find a way to address our own preconceived notions about sex. What are your beliefs, attitudes and feelings about sex and relationships? And where do they come from? Are there parts that you don’t even necessarily agree with anymore but that still haunt you? 

How do I go about talking with my kids about something that’s so hard to talk about? 

Well, we’re not just talking about one thing. It might be easier for you to talk about relationships than it is to talk about actual sex. So think about navigating conversations about healthy relationships first. And what does it take to have a “healthy” relationship? If you don’t know the first thing about answering that question, you can start to think about the opposite — the things that you feel make for an unhealthy relationship. You can also ask your kid a lot of questions about what they think about these topics (rather than lecturing them). 

When it comes to sex, I think that an important thing to keep in mind is that we often think about it as “THE Talk,” and I find that so limiting and unrealistic. It’s more like multiple talks over the course of a lifetime — and not necessarily all the damn time but sprinkled in throughout the years and done at very age-appropriate levels. 

For example, something I wanted to instill in my son was the concept that his body belongs to him and that my body belongs to me. Boundaries, respect, consent, autonomy — those were the lessons that he first learned as a toddler, and those expanded as he grew older and could handle more nuanced conversations about these topics. 

It’s very important to teach young kids the correct terminology for all of their body parts rather than only using the cutesie terms for genitals or other parts that might make us uncomfortable. It’s also important for us to work through some of our own discomfort or shame when it comes to bodies so that when we teach our children about their own bodies, we’re able to do so from a place of normalizing, empathizing and validating their human experiences. 

Pacing is very important. It’s sometimes hard to know exactly where your kids are developmentally, and they can sometimes surprise us a whole lot. I find it best to move at your kids’ pace whenever possible. This might mean that you get it wrong sometimes because you’re having to do some guesswork. If you do get it wrong, you have an opportunity to model for your kid that humans aren’t perfect and that can then lead to yet another teachable moment.

It’s tough to consider these topics strictly from the perspective of a certain age or grade level because kids aren’t always fitting into the standard expectations that are dictated by school systems. They’re still not catering to the diversity of learning styles that we humans experience in a lot of educational settings — so that means you really do need to do your own homework first, consider your own kid and customize the lessons you teach them. 

Where are some places I can go for more resources? 

I really love the work of Peggy Orenstein. Her books are fabulous, and she has some fantastic resources for parents on her website.

Other books I recommend can be found at avl.mx/ekp. 

For teens, I specifically recommend Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan. 

I am also a big fan of Becky Kennedy, author of Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want To Be. Her approach, which she calls “sturdy parenting,” feels intentional, sane and humane — maintaining a leadership position without being authoritarian, while also approaching your kid and yourself with empathy. 

I hope this gives y’all a good starting place. I want to end with a ton of emphasis on normalizing the challenges we face as parents when engaging with our kids. If you have questions you’d like me to consider for a future column, please email me at jamie@outofthewoodstherapy.com and indicate Mountain Xpress in your subject line.