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The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Just for laughs - a sex talk with my tween". The thread was posted in the "Tweens and Teens" forum and described a converstation between the original poster and her 11 year old daughter. The original poster's daughter had just completed a class about puberty and seemed comfortable talking about such topics with the original poster. The original poster took advantage of this opportunity to have a broader discussion about sex with her daughter based on the idea that it is better for her daughter to be informed before sex actually becomes an issue. The original poster explained the converstation which legitimately had me laughing out loud. I don't want to give the story away, but suffice it to say that it involved dressing up like cows. Personally I applaud the original poster's ability to have open dialogue on such topics with her daughter and I give her extra points for creativity. Many posters had reactions similar to mine. But not all. One poster in particular was quite angry because she believed that the original poster's daughter would immediately tell her own daughter about what she had learned. This poster much prefers for her daughter to remain ignorant until such time as, well, it was not clear until what time exactly. Strangely, despite this poster's displeasure with the possibility of the original poster's daughter spreading the word to her own child, the exact same poster later insisted that "kids are supposed to ‘learn’ this from other kids." The issue is not that the original poster's daughter might tell this poster's daughter about sex apparently, it's that the original poster talked to her daughter about sex. If the original poster's daughter learned about sex from an older sibling and then told the other poster's daughter about it, I guess that would be okay. Needless to say, quite a few posters disagreed with this thinking. Their main argument was that it is better for kids to learn about sex from their parents than from other kids, especially other kids who might be in the process of pressuring them for sex. Moreover, with so many kids having access to smart phones, kids are being exposed to sex and porn at a much younger age. But then the original poster received criticism from an entirely different angle. Whereas the earlier scold poster had accused the original poster of "pushing oral on your child", the new criticism seemed to be that the original poster — by including warnings about being pressured and mentioning that oral sex still has dangers of spreading disease — might have been too dismissive of the practice. Posters with this perspective were eager to minimize any threat of disease and, instead, emphasize the pleasure that could be derived. Because that discussion would not be appropriate in the original poster's circumstances, these posters ended up making strange bedfellows with the initial scold poster. The same poster who accused the original poster of "pushing" oral sex ended up on the same side of the debate as posters who absolutely want to promote oral sex as a pleasurable and safer alternative to intercourse. The dispute about just exactly how safe from disease this actually is basically took over the thread, leading me to lock it. What a disappointing end to something that had started out seeming to be such fun. That of course, some might say, could be a suitable metaphor for many sexual experiences, especially among those who don't know better.