Parents Need Right Words, Right Time to Tell Kids About Sex

The mother of two teen-aged boys remembers open and frank discussions about sex with her sons as they were growing up.

“I got a couple of good books from my pediatrician’s office,” said Linda Forlifer, whose sons Justin and Adam are now 16 and 19. “We just talked about it. I wasn’t embarrassed.”

The boys’ memories have a different cast to them, however.

“My mom is pretty good about things, but everything I’ve ever learned and my friends have learned has been from each other,” said Justin Cooke, a junior in high school. “Most of the stuff I heard from my parents I already knew.”

“My folks were always there to answer questions,” added his brother Adam, who goes to college in Massachusetts. “But I’m a reader and most of what I know I found out through books.”

In this age of birth control clinics in public schools, of increasingly explicit sexual material in the media, of a generation of parents who weathered the so-called sexual revolution, it would seem that those once onerous parent-child discussions about the facts of life would be easier to handle than ever before.

They certainly seem more urgent, with the rise of AIDS and the increasing sexual activity among young people.

But talking to parents and their children often shows a dual perception of what actually went on in talks of the birds and the bees.

“It’s a very, very complex issue,” said June Reinisch, director of the Kinsey Institute, which has surveyed American sexual attitudes and habits since the ‘50s. “Of course many parents find it very difficult to talk about sexual behavior with their children. In fact, many find it difficult to talk about it with their sexual partners.”

She added, “One of the big problems is that people are lacking information. If parents are comfortable and have good information, they can be wonderful sex educators. They can contextualize the sexual information into the fabric of family values, ethics, morals and religious beliefs. Sex is embedded in all of these.”

Pirkko Graves, a Baltimore clinical psychologist, has noted “instances when parents can say all the right things in a simple way but the child hears it in his or her framework. The correct messages are filtered through a child’s belief systems or emotions and you get interesting distortions.” For example, when a parent explains pregnancy by talking about a “seed” being planted, a young child may envision a tree or other vegetation growing within a woman and get very confused, she said.

Such distortions may come as a surprise. Karen Johnson (not her real name) thought two years ago that her daughter, Patty, now 13, had a pretty clear understanding of sex and its role in a relationship. “My husband and I kiss and hug openly,” she said. “We try to give off the aura of a loving couple.”

But an offhand conversation, during which Patty learned that her mother had had a miscarriage between her two pregnancies, turned out to be a real eye-opener. “She looked at me,” Mrs. Johnson recalled, “and said, ‘You mean you and Dad did it more than twice!’ There was genuine shock in her voice.”

Confusion like this is easier to straighten out with preadolescent children than with teen-agers on the verge of sexual experimentation.

“This really needs to be done prior to puberty,” said Reinisch, “because around the age of puberty, around the seventh grade, children start to discount what adults tell them. The trick is to get the information in while they’re still believing what adults tell them.”

Dr. Leon Rosenberg, a Johns Hopkins child psychologist, agrees. “By the time a child is 9, parents should have been able to sit down and have a full detailed discussion about the details of sex and morality. The more information kids can get from their parents, the better.”

“When I was 5 or 6 I first had questions about how you get sexually transmitted diseases,” said Hamilton Johns, 11, a seventh-grader. “I talked to my mom and my dad and it wasn’t embarrassing; they let me speak very openly.

“I think it’s best to find out from your parents. Your parents will talk to you seriously about it. Your friends will just joke and laugh and make fun of the subject.”

His father, Paul Johns, is president of the Parent-Student-Teacher Assn. at Dunbar High in Baltimore. Dunbar is one of seven schools where city health department clinics began dispensing contraceptives this year, a policy Paul Johns favors because it is done in the context of health care and counseling.

He remembers beginning his sons’ sex education by answering questions like “Why do women have breasts?” and “Why do girls have to sit down to go to the bathroom?” From there, he said, “it just evolved.”

Jonathan, 17, his older son, also recalls open discussions as he was growing up, and still feels that he can ask his parents questions. “I have no problem talking to them if the need arises,” he said. “But I don’t bring this kind of stuff up too much any more with them.”

Gathering material for a book, June Chaplin, a Baltimore photographer, and David Aitken, a former high school and college English teacher, interviewed 100 teen-agers about their sexual experiences.

Surveying sex education books before they began interviewing, they found a dearth of practical information about sex. “The books just talked about grooming and dating behavior,” Chaplin said. “They were dishonest and condescending. You might get a vague idea that the penis is inserted into the vagina, but not how, or what happens next. And that’s what the kids told us they needed to know.”

Although some of the teens they interviewed said that they had received useful sex education information from their parents, they also found, Chaplin said, “that a lot of kids don’t want to hear it from their parents. Quite a few kids said to us, ‘Thank God for porn movies.’ ”

Reinisch agrees that appropriate erotica--”if it is concerned with sex among young people, if it is presented tastefully without violence or coercion”--along with books, community programs and school health education classes are all good ways for young people to learn about sex. But, she added, “if the parent can do it right, that is the ideal situation.”