Sooner or later your child will learn the details about his or her sexuality. The issue isn’t whether your child is going to learn it—the issue is in what context is he or she going to learn it. You have the opportunity to provide your child a healthy and proper understanding of sex or he or she will most likely be exposed to a perverted perspective of sex.
The Center for Effective Parenting concluded that
parents who avoid discussing the topic of sex with their children are doing their children a disservice. Such children may get the idea that sex is bad, which can affect them throughout their lives. Such children may seek information elsewhere, and this information can be incomplete or erroneous.1
Authors Robert Crooks and Karla Baur point out that when parents become actively involved in their children’s sex education, they “minimize some of the pitfalls faced by children and adolescents who turn to their peers for sex (mis)information.”2 And the truth is kids who feel their parents speak openly about sex and listen to them carefully are less likely to engage in high-risk behaviors. So it really comes down to your kids getting the right information about sex from you or misinformation from others.
But whether you are actually talking to your kids about sex you are still teaching them much about it. Whether you use words or not, your body language, attitude, relationships, the way you treat others, your comments about your children’s friends, what you watch on TV, and what you “click on” at your computer—all of these things are teaching your children about sex.
Youth specialist Maggi Ruth Boyer nailed it when she said,
You communicate with your daughters and sons all the time about relationships and sexuality, simply by the way you live your life—by the way you treat, appreciate, and touch others. So, communication is happening, even if verbal conversations are not. Don’t underestimate the power of your facial expressions and your expressions of affection.3
Even if you don’t talk consistently with your children about sex, they will still “hear” you because your body language and behavior will be speaking louder than your actual words.
I (Josh) recently had a conversation with Paul Roberts, who has worked with the Toronto branch of Youth for Christ for 40 years. He told me that most young people know far more about sex than their parents realize. Talking about sex is part of their world and is much more common and “out there” than a generation ago. Paul related that kids are often more comfortable with the topic than the parents trying to speak to them.
So often, parents will say, “It is so hard to talk to my child about sex.” My immediate response is, “You think that is hard? Believe me, it’s nothing compared to the conversation, ‘Mom, I’m pregnant,’ or ‘I’ve got HPV.’ Now that is a hard conversation!” If you don’t have those tough talks with your children while they are younger, you will probably face much tougher talks later.