In the Event of Children Interruptus, Stay Calm

It was a sweltering afternoon. The kids were in the backyard engrossed in play. Inside, the parents exchanged knowing glances and dashed to the bedroom.

They closed the door, stripped naked and stretched out on the bed next to each other. Just as they were starting to caress and kiss, the still air was shattered by the voice of their 6-year-old blasting in. “Here’s the mail!” their daughter announced with the neighbor girl in tow.

“I rolled off the bed onto the floor and hid on my knees while my husband threw on his robe that was beside the bed,” recalled the woman, who said that she and her husband each assumed the other had locked the door. “He took the mail, said calmly, ‘OK you guys, go outside and play now’ and went into the bathroom.”

The couple, who asked for anonymity, weren’t sure what had registered with the girls.

“The most embarrassing thing was, I had to call my neighbor and tell her what had happened, just in case her daughter, who was 7, said anything,” recounted the woman. “I thought, oh my God, what did they see?”

That was six years ago, and the woman, now 42, said her daughter never asked questions afterward, and she doesn’t know if her neighbor’s daughter ever did. “I never heard, and I wasn’t going to ask,” she said.

It happens. Children accidentally intrude upon parents while they are being physically intimate. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but in a poll conducted by www.wholefamily.com, 50% of parents who participated claimed that a child had stumbled in during the sex act, or at least while they were trying to get into the act. Human sexuality educators and psychologists advise parents to buy a lock for their bedroom door and teach their children that a locked or closed door means they want privacy. But even locks don’t always prevent children interruptus. So parents would do themselves a favor, the experts said, by thinking in advance about how they want to deal with a child walking in on them mid-sex.

“Parents should remain calm, not overreact and keep their wits about them,” said Deborah M. Roffman, who has been a human sexuality educator for 30 years in the Baltimore area and is the author of “But How’d I Get in There in the First Place? Talking to a Young Child About Sex” (Perseus, 2002). “How they respond determines how the child will respond and whether or not the experience will be traumatizing.”

Obviously, most parents are shocked and embarrassed when they roll over, basking in the afterglow of lovemaking, to see that their 3-year-old has been standing there wide-eyed for who knows how long. Many parents fear that a child witnessing parental lovemaking, something Freud called “the Primal Scene,” will become sexually aroused or permanently confused. Not so, say psychologists, who add that a single incident is not harmful or damaging. Indeed, many of the world’s children sleep in the same room with their parents (75% by one estimate), observing parental lovemaking throughout childhood without damaging their adult development, writes human sexuality educator Debra Haffner, author of “From Diapers to Dating: A Parents’ Guide to Raising Sexually Healthy Children,” (Newmarket Press, 2000).

Like Roffman, Beverly Palmer, a psychology professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills, urges parents to stay cool when a child intrudes. “If your embarrassment is all that the child takes away, then that is a problem because the child associates what the parents were doing with something that is not OK,” said Palmer, a clinical psychologist who has a practice in Torrance specializing in sexuality.

Parents should first take a deep breath and gently ask the child to leave the room (yelling “Get outta here,” for example, would be a bad move). Assure the child that one or the other parent will come to talk to them in a minute. Start by asking the child: “What did you see? What were you thinking about? Is there something you want to talk about?” If children are not forthcoming, said Roffman, parents shouldn’t pressure them but assure them that they are available for questions anytime.

“The child may be very confused, scared or curious and might even think that someone was hurting someone,” said Roffman. “If the child doesn’t know anything at this point, [try] a simple statement like, ‘You may have been surprised by what you saw because you didn’t know that adults like mom and dad enjoy each other’s bodies by kissing and touching.’ ”

Children may ask why their parents were naked. “You can say Mom and Dad were naked because we enjoy holding each other’s bodies and hugging and kissing because it is warm and cozy,” said Roffman.

The younger the child, the less specific and more open-ended the communication should be, the experts say. What parents say to a 10-year-old, who probably knows more about sexuality than say a 6-year-old, will be different. A 10-year-old probably is less frightened and confused than a younger child but may experience more embarrassment and shock, said Roffman. The child still needs to hear that “sex is a special way couples like Mom and Dad hug and kiss and touch each other” and that the act gives the parents pleasure and makes them feel close and loving toward each other, she said. And if the child thinks this is disgusting and gross even after the explanation, the parent can provide reassurance that it’s hard for children to understand because sex is an adult activity.

If a child is preschool age? “Trust me, they are not likely to understand what is going on,” Haffner writes. “This is not the time for the big talk on the joys of intercourse!”

This, apparently, is a common impulse. “Parents often over-explain because they are assuming what they think the child’s interpretation of events is. But it is much better to respond to what the child’s needs are at this time,” Palmer said. “The most important thing is to shut your mouth and open your ears. The child only needs information [on topics] about which they have questions.”

Even if the child hasn’t a clue what is going on, Haffner writes, parents should not ignore that intrusion because one can’t know what a child saw or heard and whether or not it frightened them. The negative moment can be embraced to teach a child that parents need privacy.

Rarely do adolescents accidentally burst in on their parents’ lovemaking sessions. But if they do, parents can assume their teenagers know what is going on. By that age, adolescents have had sex education classes in school, been exposed to a tidal wave of sexual information and messages from friends, the media and the Internet and generally have had the birds-and-bees talk with their parents. Adolescents will probably run screaming in the other direction at the thought of their parents “doing it.”

“But even an older child can misinterpret something sexual they see as not pleasurable, but negative,” said Palmer. For this reason, parents should reassure a teenage child that sex is something adults (or married people, depending on one’s values) do to show their love toward each other. “You say: ‘I hope this is something you feel you can come to me with if you have any questions,’ ” said Palmer, who added that parents should always talk about sex without personalizing it.

As for the couple whose daughter burst in on them with her friend, they did recover. Once the girls went back outside, the couple locked their door and went back to what they were doing. Later, the woman told the girls always to knock when the door is closed. And since that day, the couple never forgot to double-check the bedroom lock before stealing an afternoon for themselves.