postcard-from-l-a: ‘The talk’ with 11-year-old begins with ‘Eww!’ but may lead to a ‘Sigh!’

There he is, aging right before my eyes. In the churchy light of early morning, I can see the peach fuzz emerging on his face. Pre-whiskers. What’s next? A pimple? Puberty? Dear Gawwwwd.

So, I sit my 11-year-old down for “the talk.”

Like never before, his mother is worried about all the smut that’s out there and how it might be showing up in places she can’t monitor: a buddy’s phone, a teammate’s iPad. She worries about how this new rawness might torque his initial understanding of love and sex.

Her fears are complicated by the fact that I don’t really want him to grow up. The little guy is on the cusp of many things. Girls. Dances. Hurtful whispers. As with the first day of kindergarten, I feel like I’m releasing him out into the jungle again.

For the talk, my wife, Posh, dug out a copy of “How Babies Are Made,” a book I first used to teach our older children about biology and sex.

“When your life began, you were very, very small — even smaller than the dot made by a pencil,” the book begins.

“Babies come from pencils?” the little guy asks.

So far so good.

Of course, some basics never change. According to this book, it takes two entities to make a tulip, it takes two chickens to produce a fertilized egg.

This is fine with him, for he’s never been a loner. Like his mom, he loves people. Unlike his dad, he’s drawn to others. If it takes two to tango, so be it.

Then we turn the page: a diagram of two chickens coupling up.

“Eww,” the little guy says, then clutches his hands to his chest and falls off the couch.

Thump.

“Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww,” he says from the floor, a wounded warrior.

Before you know it, we are on to humans.

A silly act, sex. They call it an “act” because there is so much posturing and role-playing involved (I’ve never been entirely comfortable with it myself).

Yet the book features a drawing of a man and woman hugging in bed. (Judging from the woman’s smile, I suspect this is not the man’s wife.)

But the issue of seduction is for another time. He’s still wrestling with the biology of it all: sperm and eggs, umbilical cords, breast milk. We’re building a bridge. Eventually we will cross it into that other, more-complex territory.

That’s about it for now. I ask the little guy if he has any questions, and he says no, though he admits that he threw up a little in his mouth when I tried to explain the uterus. (I called it “the baby cave,” because “uterus” seems so scientific, so void of poetry.)

You know, when I was 11, sex had more mystery to it. Back then, Miss July with her tan lines was the image indelibly stamped on my brain. What’s today’s smutty equivalent? I suspect it involves a Jacuzzi, several starlets and a goat.

“Kids today are facing a 24-hour digital buffet of hyper-sexual material,” says certified sex therapist Bill Bercaw, who runs a Pasadena practice with his spouse. “It can affect a young developing brain in disturbing ways. ... Science is just beginning to catch up to it.”

His wife, Ginger, urges parents to “normalize the discussions” about sex so children will feel free to come to them. She says “the talk” should actually be a series of talks that begin when children show a curiosity about parts of their bodies.

Around our house, normalizing discussions has always been a big goal of mine.

Look, all I know is that it’s a scary world, more so now than even 15 years ago, when I had “the talk” with his older brother. Like his mom, I want to protect him from the stain of too much too soon.

And where does it all go? How much more indecency can we take? Will the fascination with porn hit a wall and bounce back to less-disturbing images that leave the mind room to wander … to speculate … to a gauzier Victorian Age, in churchier light?

“We just now are seeing the pendulum swing back slowly in the other direction,” notes Bill Bercaw, sensing a backlash to the over-the-top vulgarity. Porn has desensitized many young adult patients, he says, to the point of sexual dysfunction.

And when do we talk to our children about broken hearts? Jealousy? Rejection? For that is what my son will soon be facing too — that moment when the hugs he gives so generously now (to family) may not be freely returned (by some new crush).

Is that a conversation you have as he enters the speedway of middle school romance? Do you teach your children, as Joseph Campbell said, that love is simply “friendship set to music”?

Or as Mencken said, that love is like war: “Easy to begin but very hard to stop.”

Like a lot of things.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

twitter: @erskinetimes