Discussing sexuality with your child

Sexual understanding checkpoints
You probably had your first conversations about sexuality with your child before the age of six. Meg Hickling, a registered nurse and a sexual health educator in Vancouver, British Columbia, is the author of Speaking of Sex: Are You Ready to Answer the Questions Your Kids Will Ask? (Northstone Publishing Inc., 1996). She has been talking to parents and kids for more than twenty years about what kids need to know about sex and how parents should explain sex to their kids. Here are Meg Hickling's lists.

By the time they are six, children should know:

• the names of their own genitals and those of the other sex.
• that a baby grows in the woman's uterus.
• that a baby is born through the woman's vagina.
• that a baby is created when a man's sperm joins a woman's ovum through sexual intercourse.
• that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman can create a baby.
• that adults have sexual intercourse even when they don't want to create a baby, because adults who love each other also enjoy sexual intercourse. Children don't have sexual intercourse, though (which will relieve your child).
• something about menstruation.
• something about wet dreams.
• what condoms are, and that children shouldn't pick them up.

Between ages six and eight, your child needs to know everything a preschooler knows, plus:

• that the digestive system is separate from the reproductive system.
• that women have menstrual periods because their bodies are practising for when they will have a baby.
• that boys have nocturnal emissions because their bodies are practising for when they will make a baby.
• that both boys and girls change in different ways when they reach puberty. Girls grow breasts and start periods. Boys grow bigger penises and have wet dreams.

Between ages nine and 12, your child needs to know everything the previous age group has learned, plus:

• detailed information about puberty changes. basic information about sexually transmitted diseases (STDS).
• that becoming a teenager doesn't mean having to become sexually active.
• that there are many reasons for having sexual relations, including bad reasons like peer pressure and other reasons that involve force (rape), money, alcohol, or drugs.
• that whoever says No must rule a sexual situation.
• that real women's and men's bodies are very different from the media versions of perfect bodies.