“As soon as parents start talking about sex kids fear judgement.” Linda Simpson, columnist Huffington Post

One point I want to make is a term I just heard recently — developmental compression.  100 years ago, there are were no teenagers, you were a little child and then you were a working adult.  Today it’s reversed, we don’t have little children for very long.  The knowledge is out there for kids but they don’t have the emotional capacity to understand it.  That’s why it’s so important, as difficult as it might be, for parents to talk about sex with their kids.  

One thing I say repeatedly to parents is — listen, and be nonjudgemental.  What happens is that as soon as you start talking about sex with kids they fear judgment.  If kids have a really sound grounding in sex-ed, they’re still going to try things out, but they are going to have more information when making their choices.  Every kid is going to look for information about sex, and even if it’s not them, their friends are going to show them. 

Being a young girl today is challenging.  I’ve seen things play out in real life where a friends granddaughter who is 12 years old was being stalked online by a 28-year-old.  She thought it was wonderful.  This man is really interested in me.  But at 12 you don’t have the emotional capacity to make informed choices.  So she was doing things she shouldn’t do.  That was very difficult for the family.   

Whether with a son or daughter, kids need to know they have a safe place to ask anything, and parents have to get over their squeamishness about the subject too.  It’s such an important part of parenting, that so often when a question is asked parents don’t give the kids the time to think it out for themselves.  They need to be part of that problem-solving process.

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