No parent wants their child to grow up too quickly or be exposed to things they’re not emotionally equipped to handle. We want to give them room to be children without adult worries. It’s our job to protect them, physically and emotionally, while we help them grow up at a gentle pace.
Wanting to protect kids’ innocence is often why parents don’t want to tell kids about human sexuality. You may figure that waiting until they’re “old enough” to learn about the birds and the bees (maybe age 12?) will let them stay children longer.
That’s a well-intentioned thought, but it overlooks one crucial thing: You’re not their only source of information.
Learning from You—or from Porn?
Even a hundred years ago, parents didn’t control everything their kids learned about sex. There have always been friends, older cousins, and friends’ older siblings who delight in shocking younger kids with sexual information or who want to help them be informed. When more people lived on farms, it wasn’t hard for kids to figure out that the way a cow and a bull make a calf isn’t all that different from how parents make babies.
Today, of course, there is infinitely more information available to everyone, kids included. Kids watch TV and movies that are a lot more explicit than back when TV couples slept in twin beds. They hear pop songs with catchy but raunchy lyrics. The kids on the bus may be better informed—or at least may know more sexual language—and are as gleeful as ever about shocking the littler ones.
And, of course, there’s the internet. Which is an absolutely wonderful resource for sex ed and everything else—including, alas, loads of easily accessible pornography.
Little kids are curious about everything. When they don’t know a word, they may ask you…or they may look it up online. They often aren’t savvy enough to search for sites with good medical information; they just Google the word. I’ve met many young people who tell me that when they were in elementary school, they found pretty upsetting images when they searched, say, “oral sex” or “what is sex?”
You do not want those kinds of images to be your child’s introduction to human sexuality.
Information vs. Sexualization
So how can you protect kids’ innocence without leaving them vulnerable to harmful information? Give them healthy, accurate information, starting earlier than you might think.
There’s nothing developmentally inappropriate about a preschooler knowing the penis goes into the vagina. That is just a fact. So are all the other facts about anatomy, puberty, periods, sexual feelings, pregnancy, labor, miscarriage, birth control, sexual orientation, etc. All that is normal human stuff, and children will not be harmed by knowing about it (especially when they ask).
What you don’t want them to be exposed to are adult sexual experiences. You don’t want them to see people having sex or hear about what turns people on. If you use sex toys or erotica yourself, don’t leave it where kids can find it. The juicy details of what adults may do is erotic information that pre-puberty kids aren’t ready to process. (And even kids in or beyond puberty don’t need to know much about their parents’ sexuality, ever.)
You also don’t want kids to be sexualized—to be seen as a sexual object by someone else. Their own sexual feelings are fine: Even young kids may have crushes or may figure out that it feels especially good to touch certain areas of their body. But looking or acting “sexy” should be discouraged, especially for kids who haven’t even reached puberty.
A Better Kind of Protection
So, instead of trying to protect kids’ innocence by keeping them ignorant, protect them by giving them the right information. They can handle biological facts, especially when those facts come from someone who loves them. Even better, when you become a trusted source of accurate information, your child is less vulnerable to crude, inaccurate, or out-of-context information from sources that don’t have their best interests at heart.