So yesterday I ran into one of the parents of girls who attend daycare with my daughters. She told me that her daughter was groped by one of the little boys. Now before you’re thinking I’m over reacting, we’re talking down the front of the pants touching skin, not a harmless game of grab ass.
The kids are 6.
Okay so I don’t think we’re dealing with a budding sex offender, however, I do think its further evidence that today’s kids are exposed to waaay too much sex and violence at way too young of an age. And it really doesn’t matter how he meant it, what matters is that the little girl is now having problems going to the rest room by herself and nightmares.
So after talking with the mom and this not being the first time one of my girls has been around or involved in something I would concider inappropriate, I decided it was time for The Talk.
Honestly, I never really thought about having The Talk until my girls were older. 3rd or 4th grade, maybe even 5th. But given that both girls are exposed to so much at school and at daycare, I decided it was time to arm them with information rather than pretend nothing like that would ever happen to my kid.
But deciding to have The Talk and actually doing it are two ENTIRELY different things. I picked a logical starting point for me: I went to the bookstore and a very helpful clerk pointed me to the section in the kids area called ‘helping stressed out parents talk about uncomfortable stuff’. Needless to say, I bought EVERY book I could find about girls and boys and babies. I honestly figured that since my girls were asking where babies come from, this might be a good place to start.
And so we started. We started with the book called What’s the Big Secret?: Talking about Sex with Girls and Boys. We went through the book, learning the proper names for everything (I skipped the page explaining about self touching. really not ready for that convo). Typical of my army training days, I conducted a check on learning. When I asked my 4 year old what a girls privates were called, she says “Gehina.” I fell out laughing.
Therein lay the key to making this a little less awkward and a lot easier to discuss. My girls giggled at the diagram of the boy parts and asked questions about the girl parts. And we talked about how the boys and the girls made babies. I reinforced the part about no babies for at least 20 more years for both girls. And at the end of it all, we talked about what to do if anyone touched them where they were not comfortable.
It wasn’t so bad. It was kind of like childbirth: the lead up and anticipation of the whole thing was waay worse than the actual event. It won’t be the last time we talk about it but hopefully, we started off on the right foot. Because if I don’t talk to my kids about it, someone else will and heaven only knows what they’d be told.
