What would you do if your kid suddenly comes to you and asks "What is sex?"

I bet that would hold any parent unarmed. Though it's somewhat expected, parents seem to be never ready for this talk, no matter how much books or Internet articles they've read. Still, no matter  how awkward, they  answer the best they can and often, their son or daughter would get it and just back away. This is what usually happens when a teenager brings the topic up.

However, what would you do if an eight your old asks you that question?

Yes, EIGHT years old. That seems too young to even have the slightest spark of sex in the brain, right? Regardless of age and innocence, Julia Sweeney's adopted daughter one day asks her mother the dreaded question.

Julia's response? Complete and total honesty.

While having dinner in a restaurant, Julia's daughter discusses frog reproduction with her because it was a school requirement. She explains that the frogs lay some eggs, they hatch and turn into tadpoles, then finally, into frogs. Only trying to correct her, Julia adds that it's only the female frogs that can lay the eggs and the male ones only help in fertilization.

Confused and surprised, her daughter demands to know how exactly does this 'fertilization' work. Julia, trying her best to be honest, replies by saying that sperm cells from the man's penis would fertilize the egg by having the penis go through the woman's vagina.

It sounds like a really serious (and sensitive) answer for an eight year old, but Julia's daughter gets it. With disgust in her tone, she clarifies that both parties have to be nude for it to work, and being quite innocent, she expresses that a man and a woman must NEVER be together without clothes.

Julia tries to clear the muddle she's gotten herself into with pure truthfulness by saying that yes, a man and a woman can be together naked if they were much, much older than she was. Her daughter then accuses her of doing it in the past, and to that, Julia had to say yes.

Further into the night, her daughter grows more and more curious about sex and how it works. Questions about people having sex in public started rising so Julia just stuck to her original plan and answered the truth.

Once they got home, their cat makes an appearance so Julia's daughter asks if the same sex process for humans also apply to cats. When she got an answer of yes, she couldn't figure out where the legs went and how they...well, did it. To answer her more pressing question, Julia suggests the Internet where they watch different cat mating videos on YouTube.

Totally sucked into it, her daughter innocently wonders if it applies to dogs as well. Soon, dog mating videos were on their screen. After a couple more videos of dogs uh...hooking up, Julia's daughter asks if there were any videos of humans having sex on the Internet.

Probably stunned on the inside, Julia simply retorts by saying that people would never do such a thing, although in reality, everyone knows that that's not the case. When her daughter didn't press on the human sex videos,  Julia narrowly missed shooting her daughter into the world of Internet porn.



While some parents still retort to lies to answer their children's questions, teenagers or otherwise, I like Julia's style of explaining the sensitive topic of sex. Bringing the truth out in the open was a good choice in my opinion, because let's face it, kids would know about it sooner or later so it's better that they get the right answers from their parents than the more disgusting version from a friend.

I wish my parents did the sex talk this way. When I was a kid, I've heard the words sex a lot of times in school already, so I tried asking my parents. Like most unarmed and totally unprepared moms and dads, they tried to get the topic out of my head so I went to look for answers elsewhere. My classmates seemed like a good source so they gave me the answers I assumed were correct.

As I got older, more words seem to add to my vocabulary. Virgin, virginity and rape came up so once again, I tried to squeeze some information out of my parents. Again, they brushed the topic off so I looked it up in the dictionary.

Well, at least the dictionary actually gave me answers. They're better than what my parents gave me though back then, I didn't really get what the hell "untouched or undefiled" meant. Still, I made do with the definition and never asked my mom and dad what virginity meant again.

The topic of rape, however, was a different story. I heard it on the news once because of some wack job trying to rape animals. I asked my mom what rape meant and she surprisingly gave me an answer. I don't remember what it was exactly, but I got what it meant.

I know all parents differ in their parenting styles, but this is probably the best sex talk I've heard so far. Sure, it may have happened in such an early age, but again, it's better to have the birds and bees with mom than with your horny classmate.


An Awesome Disaster by e.viray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.anawesomedisaster.blogspot.com.