My Everything: The Parent I Hope to Be, the Children I Hope to Raise by Einat Nathan

Author:Einat Nathan [Nathan, Einat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306924040
Google: rt-9zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2021-04-06T00:24:01.630523+00:00

twenty-nine

How to Talk About Sexuality

SEX EDUCATION. WHAT IS IT BESIDES AN EMBARRASSING memory of a teacher in junior high standing in front of a sketch of the human body? Who even talked about things like that when we were children? And we turned out okay, didn’t we? And what about our own ability to be open and talk among ourselves about sex, sexuality, pornography, urges, masturbation, and other topics? It would be much simpler if we didn’t have to deal with it and if our children just understood these things as they developed and transformed into sexual beings.

Let’s pause for a moment on this “we turned out okay” thing. In the past, this information was not so easily available. The worst that could happen was that a child, who still experienced herself as a child on almost all levels, would feel alarmed and shamed when she suddenly encountered something unexpected regarding sexuality. Today, on the other hand, we are dealing with an influx of information into the home that’s only a click away, and that information reaches the children directly—unorganized, not necessarily backed by any educational agenda or even realistic or factual details. The child is forced to deal with information that she has no ability to interpret on the emotional level, and we fall asleep on our watch and wake up in alarm when our child uses her sexuality in places where she still can’t deal with the consequences, when she has to cope with peer pressure and doesn’t want to be perceived as weak and so goes along with it, when she joins the big leagues when she is still just a child.

The thing is that, to us, they always seem too young to talk to about sexuality. It’s a story we tell ourselves so that we can take our time and go on speaking to them in the language of birds and bees, switching channels when a kiss appears on the screen, or telling the four-year-old that the tampons she saw in the bathroom are a special cleaning aid. The truth is that they are never too young. They have to get truthful answers to questions when they are very young so that when they approach adolescence they don’t feel as if they should be ashamed or find out everything by themselves. You really don’t want to leave this topic to the mercy of the internet or their friends’ older siblings. You also can’t plan that when they turn seventeen, you’ll light a candle and sit them down for a talk in which the fathers explain to the boys and the mothers explain to the girls why and what they should be careful about. Because unlike the time when we were adolescents, they will already be past thousands of confusing sexual experiences of different kinds, and you will be embarrassing and irrelevant.

The foundations we lay when they are young leave the communication channels open for the days they really won’t want to talk to us anymore. It’s

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