Tell me again about when I was in your uterus.
Talking to our kids about God's plan for sex and sexuality.
Laurel, our 4 year old, has recently been asking us to retell her birth story several times per week. She’ll say “mom, tell me again about the time that I came out of your uterus.” This brings her older sisters great delight. “Yeah mom, tell us about when Laurel came out of your uterus,” they say.
What I love about this is that it’s a sign that the plan is working. Trained by the wonderful curriculum by The Birds and the Bees, we’re working to have conversations about God’s plan for sex and sexuality from the early years of our kid’s life. It’s become an ongoing conversation that, week in and week out, we circle back to that slowly drills closer to both the biological fact but also the spiritual truths of the topic.
A few big ideas largely from that aforementioned curriculum that we’re aiming towards on the conversation of sex with our kids:
We want our kids to know that we know A LOT about this topic and that it’s not weird to talk about. We almost always give our kids more information than they asked for and almost always from a medical/scientific perspective. Baby’s grow in wombs not in tummies for example. Speaking about reproductive parts in anatomical language turns out to be a huge factor in keeping our kids safe by the way.
There’s been a lot said about “purity culture,” but one goal we have is for our kids to be able to appreciate sex as the gift that God designed it and avoid a process of working through unhealthy attitudes towards it as something later in life.
It’s our hope that this can be a key area where we are able to maintain open and honest conversation with our kids through their teen years and into adulthood while minimizing the culturally typical estrangement from parental relationship?
Will any of this work?
Time will tell but it’s sure been fun to try.
I’ll end with a fun story about one of our earlier conversations with one of our daughters about this topic. Shortly before one of our youngest kids was born we were explaining the mechanics of birth to one of our girls when she exclaimed, “OUT THE PAGINA?!!! BUT IT’S SO SMALL.”
It sure is. God’s plan for childbirth really is a miracle.