My mom gave me the "biological" talk when I was 4 or 5, but I didn't find out how babies were really made until I was 10 or so when some friends teased me about not knowing. I got my period talk around the same time too.

I got the talk when a friend of mine got pregnant. And then again when my mom found the Band-Aid Box from freshman year (it was filled with free condoms from Student Health, lol) of college.

Ditto. I never got it. I learned on my own. The word in my house was ABSTINENCE. When I left for college, my mom told me to bring nothing else home other than my degree.

I never got the talk...a book...nothing!

This was the closest talk I ever received...mind you I was 12...

Me: Mom do you believe in sex before marriage?
Mom: No

Me: What if the man and woman are engaged?
Mom: Then they can wait.

Me: What if it's the night before their wedding?
Mom: Then they can wait one more night.

That sent a message loud and clear that we weren't going to be discussing anything! LOL

I didn't get it from my parents. God Bless public school education. We got the "period" talk in 5th grade. Then in 6th grade we had the whole sex/std/pregnancy/anatomy talk with FULL COLOR pictures. We had a very similar talk every year until I graduated from high school. Somewhere along the way, I must have learned something because I'm still a virgin and my brother doesn't have any little ones running around either. It was generally understood in my family that babies would not be tolerated.

My mom never sat me down for "the talk". We simply had open communication for as long as I can remember. I asked questions and she answered them, in an age appropriate way, for as long as I could remember.

I have taken the same position with my daughter. She is asking TONS of questions as she has started to develop and I just answer her honestly and candidly. I encouraged her to read "Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret" and she came home bursting with news when her friend started her period. She was in third grade and hung out with a 5th grader in latch key all the time. The 5th grader started. She has always been curious and has asked questions. I am hoping that by establishing open communication early on, it will continue when she is a teenager and she will always feel comfortable asking me questions.

I adopted my mother's style because I felt she was a good mom that way. I'm curious though, about those of you whose moms were unable to talk about things, whether you think you'll be more open with your own children?

Dee

Oh how I loved this book!!! I read it over and over as a pre-teen.

Mine was a combination of the book, Dee's method of open communication, and a very liberal school district which taught intense sex ed from 5th>11th grade. When I say intense, I mean that, by 10th grade, we had to insert a diaphragm into a model for a grade! It was also co-ed, and concentrated on the correct terminology and exactly what happens without getting embarrassed. It was obviously a good system, because I graduated with over 700 classmates, and there had only been two pregnancies. As I so often say about sex ed, knowledge = power.

To this day, I get confused by sexual slang, but I can tell you all about what happens to the body (physically & emotionally) during sex and/or abortions and/or pregnancy!

Oh, the best part? We always had two teachers, a man and a woman. Years later, I found out that my female sex ed teacher was an ADPi!! :eek:

6th grade here as well..the whole anatomy talk. My mom found out that the class was going to be split to watch both films and she insisted that she and I watch them first. A real winner for both of us...she decided to come to school that day and we watched it during my lunch...to this very day, I tend to shrink away from turkey pot pie....

I don't remember having "the talk" so much as a lot of little "talks" that were appropriate to my age and whatever questions I was asking. (Which were, if I recall correctly, pretty explicit!)

Plus, there were always medical books in the house and that allowed me to figure out stuff that they weren't telling me!

I hope I can be as open with my children as my parents were with me.

i never got the talk either. i guess my mom did not want to face it

My mother gave me a book called When God Chose Man.

I was in high school before I understood how the sperm got into the woman's body in the first place.

Thank TPTB for my friend Erica, who lent me several books. My favourite is called The Guide to Getting it On. It tells you everything you never wanted to know about sex.

And allow me to emphasize that knowing about sex, birth control, condoms, STDs, etc., did not make me become sexually active. I waited a long time before I did.

I don't know what age I go the talk, but I got it from my dad. (I'm a daddy's girl). One thing I remember was the part where he was telling me that at that time the people I loved were my parents and how much they loved me. Then he statring saying that when I got older, that I would start dating boys, and that I would fall in love with them some day. And that I'm going to love a boy more than I love my parents. And when I get married and have kids, that I'm going to love my kids more than my husband and even more than my parents. I swear I wanted to burst into tears when he was telling me all of that and it was so hard to hold it in. I couldn't even imagine loving someone more than I loved my parents.

Another really good book for such things is Our Bodies, Our Selves.

fifth grade along with the disney movie....
and then amplification from the mom