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Table Of Contents
Let’s Say You’re A Parent (from the Introduction)
But Will She Get It? Deciding whether your child is old enough to understand the facts of life
Naming Names: Choosing what to call your little one’s… thingy
The Primal Scene: Coping when your kid catches you in the act
The Tie That Binds: Influencing your teen’s choices about abstinence through closeness
The Rules of Love: Living with a love-struck teen
“Don’t–But If You Do…”: Promoting safer sex without
promoting sex

Table of Contents

Introduction
Let's say you're a parent

Part I
The nature and nurture of kids and sex

Chapter 1. How did this happen?:
The natural history of your child's sexuality

Chapter 2. What can you do about it?:
Guiding your child's sexual future,
and the trouble with talking about sex

Part II
Your child's sexual development

Chapter 3. All in the family:
Nudity, modesty, love, and sex at home
in your child's earliest years

Chapter 4. "Don't touch that–it’ll fall off.":
Managing your young child’s sexual behavior

Chapter 5. Think about it:
Considering your child's sexual orientation

Chapter 6. Going over the bump:
Weathering the physical changes of puberty

Chapter 7. Then comes love:
Flirting, dating and other heartbreaks of adolescence

Chapter 8. Ready or not:
Facing the abstinence decision

Chapter 9. “But if you do…”:
The art and science of encouraging contraception

Chapter 10. And so it begins:
Parenting your sexually active child, from the first time on

Part III
Risks

Chapter 11. Bugs in the system:
AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases

Chapter 12. With child:
Handling intended and unintended pregnancies

Appendices
Appendix A. Contraceptive methods
Appendix B. Sexually transmitted diseases

Index

Let’s Say You’re a Parent
(from the Introduction)

Let’s say you’re a parent. And let’s say that, like most kids’ parents today, you came of age sometime after 1960. It would be tough to characterize such a diverse group, but we’re willing to risk one generalization about parents like you.
Our hunch is that by the time you finished high school, you felt you knew more about sex than your parents knew. You talked more about sex than they did. And you believed, with a little luck, that you would have more sex than they had. In fact, of all of the differences you felt separated you from your parents’ generation, this one may have been the plainest. When it came to sex, you were cooler.

Then you had a son. Or a daughter.

And when your daughter, who just turned sixteen, finds you in the kitchen and asks if she can invite her boyfriend to sleep over next Friday, and you say you mean in the guest room, and she says no in my room, and you say what exactly are the two of you planning on doing in that room of yours Tamara Louise—frankly, you don’t feel so cool anymore.

What happened?

Well, like we said, you had kids. And, as it turns out, the sexual fumblings of adolescents look a teensy bit different when viewed from the other end of the kitchen table, even to someone who once had a tube top. Or pot plants growing in her dorm room. Even to someone who once ordered a drink called a Long Slow Comfortable Screw Against the Wall from a bartender with a bushy mustache.

Oh, your parents had it easy. When they panicked because you touched your little self in the high chair, or turned up naked with another five-year-old in the tree house, they had an answer. Their parents, and their parents before them, had handed down a universally embraced, one-size-fits-all method for managing every child’s sex life: pretend it isn’t happening. Failing that, say it’s wrong or it’s perfectly normal, tell her to stop, and pass the potato salad.

Our guess is, that’s not going to work for you.
No, you’re in a tighter spot than your folks, because just like them, your kid’s sexuality is bound to make you squeamish, but unlike them—and here’s the hitch—you think it shouldn’t. You think sex is a good thing, and you should be poised and nonjudgmental as you watch its first glimmers flicker across your toddler’s cherubic face.

You think—and good for you—that the moment you stumble upon your three-year-old rubbing against her stuffed panda, you should say something genuinely helpful, something…upbeat. And that, friend, is a gauntlet your fine parents, devoted though they were, never had to run.

So here’s the question. If you don’t do what they did, if you don’t want to tell your daughter to stop but secretly you really, really wish she would, what do you do?

A father who looked to be about forty-five recently asked one of us a question, and as he spoke, it seemed as if he was voicing the dilemma of an entire generation. “How can I give my daughter a healthy attitude towards sex,” he asked in earnest, “but prevent her from having any?”

If you know where this guy is coming from, this book is for you.
This father is not alone. It has been distressingly apparent that parents want and need help in learning how to address their children’s sexual development. You can see it in the letters they send to advice columns. You can hear it on the radio call-in shows. It shows up on surveys.

You can hear it in the great societal debates about sex ed, sex in the media, sex on the internet. The one thing, perhaps the only thing, on which all sides seem to agree is that parents want to play a role in their children’s sexual development. But they’re not sure how to do it.

We hear it from parents in the clinic, in the office, and in the school auditorium. When a school announces that the next guest speaker for parents’ night will be a physician talking about, it’s not the usual ten or fifteen regulars who show up. It’s more like a hundred parents, with lists of questions and a willingness to stay all night until the last one is answered.

We can’t make it through a barbecue without being pulled aside, usually by an apologetic parent at her wits’ end. What do I say when he asks me how to make a baby? Or when she asks if she can marry Daddy? What about when he says he wants to have sex for the first time, and he wants to do it in his bedroom? The questions go on. My child is downloading porn from the internet…. My daughter wants to start taking the Pill…. I’m sure you’ve never heard this before, but my two-year-old is humping my retriever…. What do I do?

Actually, we have heard it before.

And so, after years of being asked, “Is there a book I can read to really understand this stuff?” we decided to write our own.

But Will She Get It?
(from Chapter 2)

Arnie: I know where the baby comes out. It comes out through the vagina.

Luke: No, it’s the bagina.

Arnie: Uh-uh. It’s the vagina.

Luke: Bagina. I know, because my mother told me.

Arnie: Well maybe that’s what it is on her, but my mother’s penis is called a vagina.
–Overheard in the backseat of a first-grade carpool

While you’re considering whether or not your little one can stomach the facts of life, it also makes sense to wonder, “Will she get it?” Perhaps, some parents suggest, if she isn’t yet capable of understanding the details, it may be better to wait to tell her.

Let’s take a look at this idea as it applies to the mystery of making babies.

Your child’s level of cognitive development definitely determines what she will glean about reproduction from a talk with you. For example, children as young as two or three can’t yet grasp the idea that something that presently exists might not have existed in the past. They can’t wrap their minds around the concept of creation, so when they ask where a baby comes from, they mean where. What place was it in before it got here? Your tummy? The freezer? Kmart?

As they get a bit older, preschoolers catch on to the notion that babies are created. Typically, they start by imagining procreation as an assembly process in which infants are pieced together from their parts by grownups, just like cars or birthday cakes. By the time they reach kindergarten, children usually understand that babies grow into being like other natural creations. As their ability to think and reason develops during their elementary school years, their comprehension of just how that natural process takes place deepens, until by age eleven, most American children understand that babies are the result of a developmental process kicked off by the union of an egg and a sperm.

Importantly, while children in all cultures are thought to go through the very same process of cognitive development, and therefore theoretically should be able to understand procreation at the same rate, in some parts of the world children seem to get the facts straight much more quickly. A study of children’s sexual knowledge found that while the majority of North American children could give a reasonably accurate explanation of how babies are made by age eleven, the majority of British children surveyed could do so at nine, and the Swedes, famous for their openness regarding sexual education, had the answer down at seven.

Apparently, waiting to tell your child about procreation until you think she will fully understand only delays her ability to grasp the facts. The sooner children hear about the facts of life, the sooner they will be able to understand them.

Timing your talks about sex suddenly becomes much simpler if you accept one basic principle of how children’s minds grow. Learning takes place at the edge of understanding. The best way to stimulate your child’s intellectual growth is to present him with ideas that require him to stretch his understanding of the world a little. You needn’t worry about those facts that are too far over the edge for him to grasp. He will either let them go or reconfigure them to fit his present conceptual abilities. The capacity to ignore information he can’t appreciate is one of your child’s talents you can count on.

Cognitive science has one other helpful hint for you. When choosing your words, keep in mind that preschool-age and early school-age children don’t do metaphor. Little kids’ thinking is literal, which means if you tell them a diaphragm is “like a little wall” between the sperm and the egg, they picture sheetrock. Animal analogies fare equally poorly, hence the child who had learned about the birds and the bees and who answered a query as to how to make a baby with a helpful, “Um, get a rabbit.” Speaking as literally as your child thinks will give her a better chance of getting your point.

Naming Names
(from Chapter 3)

If touch teaches your infant that she has a body, words teach your toddler what you and the world—the world of rules and language—think of it. During her first few years of life, as your child learns the names of the objects around her, they come into existence for her in a new way. This is as true for her body parts as it is for the animals in the alphabet book and toys on the shelf. So, you might want to give some thought to the words you’ll use for her...thingy.

Most parents ultimately discover that language is not entirely cooperative in the effort to name a child’s genitals. As we see it, the thoughtful American parent has four basic options to choose from. She can sling locker room lingo, speak Latin, offer general directions (“down south”), or resort to one of a host of terms that sound better suited to snack foods.

“Hi, honey, did you wash your woowoo? Your hoho? Your winkle?”

Some parents, out of genuine discomfort with all four options, plead the fifth. They avoid naming their children’s genitals at all. Girls, it seems, are especially at risk for receiving the silent treatment. A recent study of children between 15 and 36 months of age found that while 95% of the boys had been taught the word “penis,” only 52% of girls had been given a specific name for their genitals. Forty percent of girls were given no word at all. In fact, girls were more likely to have been taught the name for boys’ genitals than for their own.

Of the available ways of referring to your child’s genitals, not naming them at all is one we would strenuously advise against. Young children need words not only to talk about themselves but, perhaps more importantly, to think with. Wordlessness significantly limits a child’s ability to understand her body.

What about the other four options?

After silence, our least favorite are the mysterious location euphemisms. Words like “bottom” or “down there,” when used to refer to genitals, cloak a girl’s entire sexual and excretory endowment in a dense fog (the Bermuda Triangle comes to mind). The popular but vague “private parts,” when it’s the only term she learns, seems to us similarly unhelpful in unveiling for her the secrets of a child’s body.

Locker room language at least has a kind of earthy directness to recommend it, but frankly, despite their appealing barnyard referents, we can’t quite imagine teaching our children to say “cock” or “pussy,” let alone some of their coarser companions. This is really the language of hot sex talk, on the one hand, and of open aggression, on the other.

Which leaves us with Gray’s Anatomy or Twinkies.

Cute words for genitals, breasts, buttocks, and so forth are fine as long as they are used alongside a thorough education in their “official” names. Pet names, like wiener and willie, have the distinct advantage of making genitals sound like fun things you wouldn’t mind having attached to you. Still, these words can be awfully misleading. “Milkers” drains breasts of their sexual feelings, while “hooters” suggests that when you grow up you could teach them to call a square dance.

Which is why, whatever pet names you occasionally use, you should also school your kids in the anatomical words that go with them. When should these words be taught? No age is too early to teach a child the names of his own body parts. We typically teach children language before they can use or understand it, and these words are no exception. As for the genital names of the other sex, you can teach them when you give your child the words for her own parts or when she asks you, such as when she sees someone naked at home.

In the accompanying box [found in Chapter 3] is our list of the best anatomical terms to teach. You’ll notice we don’t stop at one word for a boy and one for a girl. We recommend you give your child names for each of the key parts of her genitals. Being able to distinguish these components is immeasurably helpful to your child as she tries to learn how her body works. The more specific the language you teach her, the more specific will be your child’s appreciation of her genitals, their feelings, and their functions. At the least, toddler girls should learn vulva and vagina, and boys should learn penis and scrotum (or testicles).

The Primal Scene
(from Chapter 3)

Children present some practical challenges to your unfettered carnal enjoyment of your partner—like lack of time, lack of sleep, and lack of privacy. One year after their child’s birth, most couples are having sex as frequently and enjoyably as they did before. But if you have reached this stage, you may find sex involves a challenge you haven’t experienced since your roommate days: you want to have sex, but suddenly you discover there is always someone else around.

Dennis, a Dad who installed a lock on his bedroom door before his daughter turned two, put his feelings this way: “Hey, I’m not in denial about my daughter’s sexuality. I’m happy to have a sexual kid. But as far as her knowing about my sexuality? Not cool.”

If you feel as Dennis does, explain that when your door is closed, she should knock and then wait until you say it’s okay before opening it. Then get a lock. Unless you are an extremely light sleeper, keeping your door locked throughout the night may prevent your kids from waking you if they need you. But for the part of the evening (or morning or afternoon) when you are having sex, a lock works wonders.

And what if you didn’t lock the door, because you don’t have a lock, or you were sure the kids were asleep, or for once you were briefly able to forget that you are the steadfastly dependable mother of three and lose yourself in a moment of simply feeling sexy? What if in the middle of enjoying the full force of that feeling with the father of those three children, you and he discover that at some point—and for all the many times you two will later review this evening, you will never really know when—your four-year-old has wandered into your bedroom and is waiting at the foot of the bed for one of you to notice him.

You notice him.

What are you supposed to do now?

First, let us point out that no one can tell you what effect seeing his parents having sex will have on your child. There was a time when all manner of psychopathology—from headaches to hysteria—was traced back to the inadvertent viewing in childhood of what analysts called “the primal scene” (an apt description on a good night). Anthropologists disagreed, pointing out that in some non-Western societies, where people seemed to be no more neurotic than we are, children see or hear their parents having sex often. Even in the U.S., a child seeing a parent having sex is common enough—about 20% of parents report being seen, most often by a child between ages 4 and 6—that if it always led to psychological problems, we’d be a nation of loonies….Okay, maybe that’s not a good argument.

At any rate, we now believe that your child’s reaction to an event like this depends in large part on whether or not he views what you were doing, or the fact that he saw it, as bad. And your immediate reaction to having been caught in the act may have a great deal to do with that particular determination.

So, if you discover your four-year-old standing at the foot of the bed when you’re having sex, first, resist the impulse to pull the covers over your head or to pretend it hasn’t happened. Instead, stop what you’re doing, cover up enough to feel comfortable talking to him, and then try calmly to find out what he wants.

Let’s imagine it is the proverbial glass of water. You might tell him you’ll get him one if he wouldn’t mind waiting outside your door for a minute. (Stalling has an undeservedly bad reputation. We like it. It allows for thinking before talking, the preferred order.)

Pull yourself together and take him for his water.

While you are doing so, even if he doesn’t seem to have any curiosity about what he just saw, explain it very briefly. You might try,

“When you came in, we were having sex. It’s a way that grown ups like us show that we love each other. Do you understand?”

Let him ask any questions he has. When you have answered them—and chances are there won’t be many—you can make your second point.

“When we close our door, it means we want to be private. Can you knock before you open the door from now on?”

And that’s it.

You can now tuck your little one into bed, go back to your room, and perform CPR on your partner.

The Rules of Love
(from Chapter 7)

Some teenagers, once they start dating, are happy to tell their parents all about what’s going on in their newly pounding hearts. Most clam up. If your teenager decides never to talk with you about his secret loves, you may still feel the need to discuss at least a few things with him. Some decisions have to be made, like, what time does he have to come home at night? What if his grades slip, or his new love takes time away from family responsibilities? And what if you think the girl he’s seeing isn’t good for him? These are the parameters of adolescent love, and sooner or later you’ll have to decide how to set them.
Setting rules has never been particularly easy for the parents of teenagers. But two principles of effective parenting will help give you an edge if you want to negotiate the rules of love with your teenager.

First, adolescents respond best when their parents share the reasons behind their decisions, explaining their logic and appealing to their child’s rational side. And second, adolescents do best when parents ask for their opinion about how a rule should be set. In general, parents who loosen control over their kids’ decisions in adolescence actually appear to influence their choices more than parents who clamp down. When it comes to adolescents, you have to give power to get it.

With these principles in mind, let’s consider how to manage three of the key dilemmas your teenager’s dating life may pose.

When Love is Blind

Let’s say you don’t like the boy your daughter has chosen as her new love. Unfortunately, should you find yourself in this position, there is very little for you to do. Though it can be hard on you and on her, romance is an area where (within certain limits) you should let your child make her own mistakes.

Pitting your child’s loyalty to you against her attachment to a new love is a famously losing proposition. The forbidden boyfriend becomes more alluring. She clings to him and withdraws from you, isolating herself with the boy you don’t like and making a bad situation worse.

The risks of forbidding a relationship are serious enough that you should reserve this approach for those occasions when you believe the boy is putting your child in danger—say if he is known to be violent, or to drink and drive.

For all other unfortunate boyfriend choices, we recommend supporting your child and quietly praying it will end. This strategy needn’t be entirely passive. Stay closely connected to your kid, resisting the impulse to withdraw in frustration. Keep tabs on her schedule, and involve yourself when possible, inviting the two of them to join in family activities. Make sure she has at least one nurturing relationship in her life—the one she has with you.

Then wait. The average life span of a fifteen-year-old’s love affair is three to four months.

When Love Trumps Homework

You may find you like the kid your son is dating, but you don’t like what the dating is doing to him. It’s troubling when your child sheds some of the duties he has so responsibly fulfilled for years in the pursuit of love. Yet, important as it is to maintain high standards for his behavior, now is also a time for you to modify your expectations. Getting to the gym is great, but learning to love is important, too.

If your son is neglecting important activities, ask him to talk with you about what matters most to him these days. How does he see his new relationship fitting in with his male friends, the soccer team, and so on? Go over the responsibilities that he has neglected, and try to decide together which ones can’t be missed.

Then make a plan together to address them. He should not be getting a D in math, so ask him to decide how he might pull up his grade, perhaps by going out less often. You can also look for ways to lessen his burdens and make room for the new relationship, say by getting someone else to rake the leaves, or letting him out of Friday night family dinners. These days, love and math may be better uses of his time.

When They Want to Stay Out Late

Once your children start spending their evenings out with friends, you should give them a curfew. Children whose parents make a habit of knowing where they are, whom they are with, and when they are coming home drink less alcohol, are less likely to smoke, get better grades, and have fewer disciplinary problems at school. They also wait until they are older to have sex than kids who are less carefully tracked.

How you maintain and negotiate your curfew matters a good deal more than the specific time you choose. Curfew times range widely, varying with a child’s age and with the norms of the community. Invite your kids to help work out a reasonable deadline for school nights out, and perhaps a later one for weekends. Then decide together how the curfew will be enforced (avoid excessively punitive responses to a missed curfew).

The nightly enforcement of curfews calls for some flexibility.

Renegotiating times for special nights, and making a provision for your teen to phone you should he run late, make for harmony at home.

The Tie That Binds
(from Chapter 2)

A good deal of what science has to tell us about how parents can influence their kids decisions about sex and abstinence comes from children themselves. Ask them the right questions, and kids can tell you how parenting affects their sexual lives. Imagine sitting down with a group of adolescents and asking them about their parents: Do they like the way they relate to them, what do their folks think about sex, and so on? Then ask them if they’ve had sex, and try to see if the ones who are sexually active feel differently about their parents from the ones who aren’t. Do this with about, oh, 10,000 kids, and you have some pretty good data.

When a group of researchers did just that, they found support for one key insight into the way parents influence their children’s sexual development. Adolescents who are happier with their relationship with their parents—who feel closer to them—have less sex.

There have been a number of these inquiries into the relationships between parent-child closeness and teens’ sexual choices, and although the question has been asked many different ways over the years, the results have been fairly uniform. Children over the age of twelve who feel close to their parents or satisfied with their relationship become sexually active later than children who don’t. When they start having sex, they have it less often and with fewer partners. Closeness works for mothers and for fathers, and it has similar effects on boys and girls.

The quality of the parent-child bond can even affect a teenager’s use of contraception. In the large study we mentioned, teens who were very satisfied with their relationship with their mother were almost twice as likely to use birth control during sex than those who weren’t. A year after they told interviewers how they felt about their parents, the least satisfied teens were four times likelier to have gotten pregnant than the most satisfied. That’s a big difference.

How does it work?

As with parenting style and monitoring, it is easier to say that closeness works than to answer precisely how. But a good guess would pin the effect on your values, specifically the fact that, as an adult, your ideas about sex are likely to be more carefully thought out than those of the kids with whom your child hangs out.

The daughter who feels close to you will identify with you more strongly than will, say, her sister who feels distant. Identifying with you means modeling herself, at least in part, on your example. And so your close daughter may base a greater part of her value system on yours, including, for example, your belief that sex is a pleasure to be tempered with responsibility. Her sister, who feels less close, may give the opinions of her friends greater weight. As she enters middle school, she may be more likely to see sex through their eyes as a novelty, or an adventure, or a ticket to popularity.

Of course, it’s also possible something else is going on–for example, parents may simply feel closer to kids who happen to follow their rule–that explains the research findings.

If closeness were something you could simply give your child, like a hot lunch or mittens, no kid would go without. Closeness doesn’t work that way, because unlike monitoring or even style, it isn’t a thing you do. It’s a quality that emerges in a relationship through the ongoing interplay of two personalities. In this case, one of those personalities belongs to your kid, so closeness isn’t solely up to you. Some kids are easy to feel close to, some are hard, and some pairings just seem to work for no discernable reason other than pure chemistry. Then there’s your partner’s personality, and your other kids and the roles they play in the family as they compete for closeness and configure the possible routes to achieve it. That warm feeling of closeness with your child, as desirable as it is, can’t be dialed up. But it can be worked toward.

“Don’t–but if you do…”
(from Chapter 9)

Let’s say you don’t want your child to have sex, at least not yet. Should you promote contraception? “If I talk to her about the Pill,” you might wonder, “will she think I’m telling her it’s okay to start having sex?”

And what about making contraception available? Some parents worry that if their kids have easy access to contraception, another barrier to sex will be broken down. They will have more sex than if they had to worry about arranging protection, and given the failure rates of contraception, they would end up more, not less, likely to get pregnant or catch an infection.

On the other hand, as Stella, who bought her sixteen-year-old son a box of condoms, sees it, “It’s not like these kids are so sold on condoms. They’ll have sex when they have the opportunity. If a condom’s there, they’ll use it—I hope. But if it’s not there, they’re not going to turn down sex. I’ve made damn sure he knows how to take care of himself when the time comes. The stakes are way too high to ignore this issue.”

As far as we can tell, teaching about contraception or making it easily available does not encourage adolescents to engage in sex. But it does appear to make them more likely to use protection when they do have sex. Some scientists even believe that learning about contraception may help to drive home the risks of sex and thereby discourage some teens from having it.

Now, the data to support this point of view are not definitive. We have, for example, evidence derived from studies of high school condom availability programs. These programs, which not only educate teens about condoms but also make them easy to get, have been shown to increase their rate of use by sexually active teens, but in no case, including a study of thirteen thousand students in New York, did the programs increase the rate at which kids became sexually active. Unfortunately, this research doesn’t easily translate to what happens between you and your child at home, and the studies themselves have some limitations.
There are also data from studies of parent-child communication about contraception, which find these talks don’t increase the sex adolescents have. But again, because of limitations in the studies, we can’t tell you we’ve got proof. We can say that we think it makes logical sense, that it corresponds with our experience with teens, and that most researchers would agree.

What may make the difference in your child’s interpretation of your advice is how you present it. The trick here is to talk about contraception in a way that conveys your reluctance about sex and your endorsement of safety. This may already be a familiar conversation for you, the don’t-do-this-but-if-you-do-it-do-it-safely talk. (Remember “Don’t drink, but if you do drink, don’t drive. Call me, and I’ll pick you up”?) You are trying to develop in your teenager the ability to make adult decisions, and adult decisions are complex. So your advice will have to be complex, too.

Obviously, you are not planning to toss your kid a box of condoms—with a hearty: “Have a blast!” You will fit contraception into a larger context. We will get to what methods you can recommend in a few pages, but when you reach the point of explaining how to use a condom, you also can invite him to talk about what sex means, whether it is appropriate for him at all now, and what place it will have in his current relationship. Take a balanced and reasoned approach like this, and we don’t think you will have opened the floodgates of promiscuity.

You might try something like,

You know I don’t think you’re ready to have sex. I think kids should wait at least until high school/ college / marriage / they’re in love. But I know that some of your friends are having sex, and you might decide to do it, too. So I want to make sure you know about contraception.

“My friends thought I was encouraging him to do it,” Stella says. “I’ve thought about it. Maybe there’s some truth to it. I told him he’s too young, but who knows if he’ll listen. Still, I’d rather take a chance that having condoms makes him a little more likely to have sex than put my head in the sand and think he won’t have sex because he doesn’t have a condom with him.”