Anonymous wrote:Just let him read it himself. School will teach him more than you'd even want to teach him. My DD has not heard much of anything about the birds and the bees. The other day she asked me a question and I told her about periods. She said she already learned about that, that it goes at the end of a sentence!
One reason to be proactive, even though school will teach a lot of the biology, is that as your kid gets to 9, 10, 11, you are going to need to start to talk about things like consent, or protecting themselves from seeing pornography online. It is pretty hard to explain what porn is, and why you don't want to see it, if you haven't gotten the kid good and comfortable talking about sex young. When we tried to introduce (gently) this stuff when my son was about 9 he was utterly perplexed as to why people would look at naked pictures on the internet, or why someone would touch someone else sexually AT ALL. We had forgotten to talk about pleasure! We had just introduced the mechanics. My point is just that there is a whole world of stuff you are going to need to talk to your tween about, and it is much, much easier (and makes more sense) if you aren't doing the initial sex talk at the same time. They need the basics before they can absorb the social/internet element of sexuality.