127: Talking to Kids About Sex – Amy Lang

Amy noticed that even she was having trouble talking to her own child about sex, and she imagined it would be even more difficult for people without her work background. She discusses the difficulty of discerning the right amount of information to share with kids, especially with the poor cultural examples in the US but reiterates that it’s crucial for parents to push through their discomfort.

Amy advises us to look at our own lives, our own sexual decisions and early relationships, and our current relationships to get a good idea of what can happen without quality education about sexuality and relationships. She emphasizes that sex and relationships constitute a lifelong social-psychological health issue and that parents can’t rely on schools to teach these things to their kids.

Sexual Health Requires Healthy Relationships
A lot of sexual health is about relationships, Amy asserts. She explains that many things can go wrong in relationships that will negatively affect the lives and health of people if they don’t know enough about what healthy relationships look like and what isn’t okay. Amy suggests that parents should want their children to grow up with a lot of information so that they can feel good about their decision-making skills and so that they can build safe, healthy relationships and quickly, correctly notice when relationships become unhealthy.

What Kids are Learning Now
Amy points out that most people are only getting educated about sex in the 5th and 9th grades, and neither of those sessions is comprehensive in any way. She explains that most young people learn the most about sex through ography, sexualized entertainment media, and their friends. She points out that this gives kids a lot of very adult information about sexuality without providing them any context for that information.

Amy advises that parents contextualize ography for children. She believes it’s important for kids to know that the models are acting, an