The Birds and the Bees

Do you know where babies come from? We bought a book for our then eight and two year old kids to explain what was going on in mammy's rapidly expanding tummy when I was pregnant (now the book would be "When mammy met Mr Ben and Mr Jerry on her way to Hazelbrook Farm"). Today parents are encouraged to answer their children's questions in an age appropriate manner, using the proper words like womb, penis or (gulp) vagina! We have nick names in our house for those things, I can only imagine the damage I'm doing to the kids by not referring to things by their proper names. So bearing this in mind we went to buy the book, there was a lot of choice, and eventually I found one that was age appropriate and didn't have any awful words in it (some I looked at actually covered the process of how Mr smith and Mrs smith "joined together" to make the baby), we decided on " Where Willy (calm down) Went", A book about a little sperm or squirm as my three year old calls him, and his adventure trying to win the race and get to the prize (the egg).


We were really excited to read it for the first time to our kids, so with baited breath we snuggled down in the bed for story time, waiting for the questions after we finished.....nothing at all! Questions came up in the course of my pregnancy and we answered her questions in a way she could understand, but the book about the squirm didn't prompt any questions. My experiences of the birds and the bees were interesting, I was told babies were found not in the cabbage patch but under the rhubarb in the back garden! As for the facts of life? At aged ten my mammy came into the bathroom when I was having a bath sat down and said she wanted to have a chat with me, her opening gambit was, "now you know Santa Claus isn't real? And from now on once a month you are going to bleed, and have terrible pains in your tummy!", then she gave me a book called Have you started yet? . Then she gave me a hug and left the room, I was in shock....Santa wasn't real?


I don't know which approach is better, my mum telling us nothing (later the only other sex education was "If you ever come here pregnant I'll throw you out", seriously, or our modern approach of being totally open with our kids (while trying not to feel selfconcious) and possibly giving them too much information. I can just imagine trying to explain to my little girl why I'm putting condoms in her lunchbox when she's thirteen? Or am I being naive, will she know exactly what it's for? Whereas at thirteen I believed that if you used tampons you weren't a virgin any more....didn't really know what a virgin was, apart from Mary mother of Jesus being a virgin. Or my friend who told me tampons could get "lost", inside you? Scary!