My parents sheltered me, too. Consider the following:
- I got "the talk" when I was 7. It consisted of my mother's giving me a book called When God Chose Man. So complete was this instruction that I did not learn until much later that you have to take your clothes off to have sex.
- I didn't know what a condom was until I finally got up the nerve to ask one of my friends in 9th grade.
- I have always had really bad, heavy, and irregular periods. I asked to go on the Pill for that reason when I was 14. My mother's reply was, "No. You're not going to have sex. I forbid it."
- My parents are raising my little brother to believe that only gay people get AIDS.
Refusing to talk about something doesn't make it go away.
When he was five, my friend's little brother wandered into the living room where we were watching TV with his mother. He asked, "Mommy, what's a blow job?" She told him. Nothing racy, just fact. He said, "Oh, ok. Thank you," turned around, and wandered out.
If you don't treat something like it's forbidden, then children have a much healthier respect for it. You don't give them nasty compound guilt issues.
I'm going to explain everything to my children from Day 1. Not sit them down, not make a deal out of it, just make it clear that these are normal, acceptable topics of conversation.
Good points about my parents' child-rearing technique to follow in a later post.
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