Mommy, how are babies made?

[Nikki]

Do your kids know how babies are really made? If so, how did you go about explaining it? How old were they?

If not, then when do you plan on telling them and HOW do you plan on telling them.

My daughter said something that she heard at school that greatly upset me and I feel like I need to explain a lot of things to her before she gets wrong info. As of now, my girls (8 and almost 7 years old) think that God blesses a woman with a baby. That's all they know.

UGH. I DREAD this. I feel like they are WAY too young to have a sex ed lesson!

 

[Nikki]

:-? No replies?

Is there not anyone here that has some advice or can answer my questions?

 

[Rob]

Right now my girls are 7 and 5 and I don't look forward to the time that their mother and I have to sit down and have this talk but I know it will be coming soon. My wife and I have discussed when the right time is to have a talk with them and this is what we have agreed upon. As of right now our girls know that when two adults fall in love and get married that sometimes God blesses them with a child. When they start asking more questions is when we have decided to give more answers. As far as age goes, we are expecting to be dealing with this around the age of 9 or 10. I don't like the idea of having to have this talk with them at such a young age but the fact is by 5th or 6th grade the public schools start teaching it and since I can't afford to put my children in private or home schooling I have to make sure I teach my children properly before they are brainwashed by the school system : I'm hoping I might get off a little easy though because my oldest daughter says she never wants to have children because she just cant handle kids :

 

[Nikki]

Hi Rob,

My oldest will be entering 3rd grade this year and my youngest will be in 2nd. They start teaching sex education in 5th grade here. I learned everything from school and friends as my parents didn't openly discuss that with me. I want to be the one to teach my kids about the "birds and the bees". I want my children to feel comfortable coming to me with questions. There were so many things that my friends would say and I had no clue what they were talking about. Because of that, I got teased something awful and they would torment me by asking me "Well, what does _______mean"? If I answered wrong, I got teased. Then when I DID learn things from them, I was pretty much mortified. I didn't learn about sex until I was probably 12 years old. I WISH I could keep it that way with my girls, but they are already hearing things from other kids at their young age and I just freeze up when they question me about certain things. I don't know how to answer.

It's so hard being a parent! I don't want to tell them at too young of an age, but I also don't want them learning from classmates or the school. I also don't know how to go about it without completely freaking them out. Although, that may be a good idea and they may NEVER want anything to do with sex! :

 

[Rob]

Well Nikki, I know exactly how you feel. My parents tried to keep me as ignorant about sex as was possible during the time I grew up. I can remember them banning a tv show once because in one episode they used the word virgin and I shouldn't have been allowed to know the meaning of that word, the sad part is I was 14 at the time : I learned things the wrong way myself and that is probably a big part of the reason I ended up making some of the mistakes I made earlier in my life. I would assume that you are probably going to have to have the talk really soon. I think they start teaching sex education in the 5th grade here too but my oldest daughter will only be in 2nd grade this year and not around the 5th graders yet. Next year when she enters into 3rd grade though it will be a different story and she might hear quite a bit from those 5th graders of what they have learned in class. I'll probably never do this again but I'm going to quote something G. W. Bush said,

I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war.

Raising children has got to be one of the biggest challenges of all time but it also has a huge reward. I geuss the best thing to do is talk to them about it as soon as they are old enough to be capable of understanding, that is the only way I can figure to keep someone else from getting to them first. Then the only thing left to do is continually talk to them, make sure they feel comfortable coming to you and talking (which is probably the hardest part because this means not getting angry when they come for advice or have questions), and then pray that what you have done works.

As far as freaking them out, I would keep the discussion age appropriate. By age appropriate I don't mean don't tell them everything but tell them in a way they will understand for their maturity level. If I were to try to explain everything to my children right now I would have to stick to words that they could understand. I wouldn't reccomend using barbie dolls or GI joes either as I know some people my age who still have nightmares because of their parents doing this :