When to Talk About the Birds and the Bees
Not long ago, Toronto mom Karen Bridson-Boyczuk’s then three-year-old son Adlai looked lovingly up into her eyes and declared, “Mommy, I wish you had a penis.”
“Why do you want me to have a penis?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“Because I just love you so much.”
Sensing a perfect opportunity to cover a little sex ed, she jumped in to explain the differences between mommies and daddies. Adlai seemed to take the conversation in stride, but Bridson-Boyczuk still worries.
“I’m terrified that in all of these conversations, I’ve got to say the right things and not horrify him,” she says.
If you’re like most parents of preschoolers who ask about their genitals or play doctor with their equally curious pals (both completely common behaviours for this age group, by the way) chances are you’re the one who’s feeling squeamish.
“Parents are really afraid to talk about it because they didn’t talk about sex when they were growing up,” says Margaret Cameron, a public health nurse in Windsor, Ont., who teaches a course on explaining the birds and the bees to kids up to age six.
Isn’t it a little early for this? Not necessarily, say the many sex educators who encourage the current trend toward talking about sex early on. An avalanche of inappropriate sexual messages hits kids before they reach kindergarten, via movies, television, radio, magazines, billboard ads and video games, experts maintain, so it’s important that parents become the first source of healthy, correct information.
The trick is to understand what young children want to hear. And it’s probably not what you think – or dread, says Cameron. She recalls one mom whose young son asked her where babies come from. After a long, convoluted lecture about vaginas, sperm and ova, her son, looking wide-eyed and worried, answered, “Oh, because Connor came from Chatham.”
Deborah Roffman, sex educator and author of But How’d I Get in There in the First Place: Talking to your Young Child About Sex (Perseus Publishing), agrees that it’s important to look at sex-ed from your child’s perspective. In fact, age and cognitive development has everything to do with how you need to frame your answers. Here’s a general idea of what you can expect at each age.
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