When your child asks where babies come from, do you break a sweat and blame it on the stork? Have you had a conversation about oral sex, masturbation or contraception with your teen? If you haven’t started “the talk” with your child, sex therapist Dr. Laura Berman says you could be making a big mistake.
Dr. Berman says kids today know a lot more about sex than we think they do. In fact, Berman says children are being forced to make sexual decisions by middle school, from receiving sexually explicit text messages — also called “sexting” — to feeling pressured to perform acts like oral sex.
What you need to do as a parent, Berman says, is arm them with knowledge that will guide them well into adulthood. “You want to start these conversations early with your kids — before they find themselves in the circumstances where they’re having to make those healthy sexual decisions.”
O, The Oprah Magazine and Seventeen magazine joined forces for a groundbreaking new sex study that surveys moms and girls ages 15 to 22. The bottom line? Parents aren’t talking to their kids enough about sex.
“What is so fascinating to me is 90 percent of the mothers, our readers, thought that they had had the conversation with their daughters about sex,” says Gayle King, O magazine’s editor-at-large.
“When you talk to the daughters, you’ll find out, well, no, you didn’t really quite have the conversation.”
Although some mothers shy away from the conversation because they don’t want to seem like they’re condoning sex, King says you have to arm your daughters with as much information as you can. “Knowledge is power,” she says.