Wonderfully Weird Parenting: Part lV

Last one in the series, I promise.

I am wonderfully weird, because I actively seek out opportunities to talk to my children about sex, while they are young. Don’t get the wrong impression. I don’t sit them in a row on the sofa, and address them with the aid of a flipchart, or a power point presentation. No. It’s more just a question of, quite literally, the birds and the bees. There’s always some hanky panky going in nature, which you can use to bring the conversation round to where little fledglings come from, and from there, you’re just one tweet away from where human babies come from. (Interesting phrase, come to think of it, “the birds and the bees”, because for all my own sex education, I do know how birds reproduce, but I don’t really have a clue how bees do it.)

We have a book for young children, which I occasionally slip into the bedtime reading pile. On a given evening, I might read The Three Little Pigs, Where do Babies Come From?, and Dazzling Diggers. It used to cross my mind that it might be hard for the kids to distinguish whether the Babies one was fact or fiction, especially if interspersed between the pigs and the diggers, but children are remarkably good at filtering information over time. Perhaps they start off thinking it’s a fairy story, and a rather bizarre one at that, but at least I’ve introduced the subject to them. Now we also have a couple of books suitable for older children, which are more detailed. No doubt the second and third children in the family will read those ones at much younger ages than the oldest has done (I’m a third child myself, I know these things).

The reasons I decided not to wait until the children asked, and then deliver ‘The Talk’, are fairly simple. I didn’t want to miss the boat, and find that some well-meaning but ill-informed friend at school had done the job for me. Or worse, some ill-meaning one. It’s so much easier, as a parent, to pick your own moment. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself cornered, and the moment will pick you. It’ll be the night before the lesson when they’re going to cover it at school, when your child thrusts a grubby letter into your hand saying “Mum, you’re meant to have signed this by last week to say it’s ok for me to be there, but I forgot to give it to you”. Or it’ll be at Sunday lunch with relatives, when your 5 year old pipes up “how did the baby get into Auntie Moira’s tummy?”, and you have to mumble something about “tell you later, now get on with your spaghetti” while Uncle Peter says he’s just getting another beer and disappears to the kitchen.

It’s just easier to talk to younger children. It’s like apologizing. The longer you leave it, the harder you make it for yourself. Younger children are unembarrassed, and don’t say “that’s gross” as often. You don’t have to go into any more detail than you want, because at a young age, they are happy with very little, and often not terribly interested anyway. And here’s something experience has taught me. It’s not a question of having ‘The Talk’. It’s more a question of ‘The Talks’. For a start, you’re never going to cover it all, in the right level of detail, with all the associated thoughts on relationships and responsibilities, on one occasion. So unless you want them to find out most of their information from other sources, you’re going to have to reconcile yourself to more than just ‘The Talk’ in any case. You might as well start early.

Incidentally, if anyone knows where bees come from, then do let me know. Or do you think I should ask my mother?