The MamasteFit Podcast Episode 115 – The Talk: How to Educate Your Kids on Sex in a Digital Age with Jo Robertson

Roxanne: Welcome to the MamasteFit Podcast. On this episode, we’re going to be talking with Jo Robertson, all on how to talk about sex with our kids. When should we start to introduce that topic and why is it beneficial to introduce this topic earlier?

Welcome to the MamasteFit Podcast. In this episode, we have Jo Robertson here again to talk a little bit more about sex, but this time about how can we talk about sex to our children, especially as they start getting a little bit older, especially in this digital age. And so this is something that’s really important to us to be able to have this educated conversation with our children. It’s something that Roxanne is seeing a lot now, and now that she’s doing clinicals as a midwife where she’s seeing more teen pregnancies. And so we’re really excited to have this conversation with you, Jo, so thank you so much for being here again with us!

Jo: Well we obviously had such a good time last time, we needed to have a repeat. I can’t imagine what number three is going to cover.

Gina: Yeah! We’ll see.

Roxanne: We’ll think of something.

Gina: I think you have three courses, so we’ll just keep going down the list of what else can we get from you!

And so can you just introduce yourselves to our listeners again, in case they didn’t listen to the postpartum intimacy episode?

Jo: Yes, absolutely. And you’ll hear the is the two strands of my life, my two strands of my professional life. So the other big strand is that I do a lot of parenting education, and that all started when I was actually 17 and for some reason, somebody felt like it was okay for me to start doing sex education in high schools. And so I was at college, like your “college,” our “university” at the time, and so they had this whole model of peer to peer, young people talking to young people. And so I started that really young and I learned over the seven years that I did that how little young people actually knew about sex because I was getting trained at the same time as teaching them. And they would ask all types of crazy questions. If I wear two condoms, is that better than one? And if I have sex and then I go upside down, does that mean that I won’t get pregnant? All the things that you think, “Okay, that’s not safe! You are not going to be okay.” And so I did that and then I trained as a counselor and a therapist.

And then I started working with children and teenagers who had been sexually harmed. And in that process, learned a lot about consent and how basically it works, or where it goes very, wrong. And then how it is that adults harm children and what the impact is on them, like how do we respond to children when that happens? And then I decided to train as a sex therapist. Now it sounds strange to go from one space to the other, or even to be a sex therapist and do a parenting education. But for me, the two are so heavily linked because what happens or what education we get when we are young is how we tend to do relationships and sex when we’re older. And then the kinds of relationships we are in when we are parents influences the way that we talk about sex with our children. So it’s what we call a diadic relationship. It goes back and forth. And so for me, it fits really well because I get to hear real life stories, not just come from a theoretical place where it’s just reading and just knowledge, but actually I’m seeing the way this plays out with both teenagers and adults.

Gina: Absolutely. So for me personally, I did not understand my menstrual cycle. I remember I was really little, probably 5 or 6 years old, and I heard about this thing called sex. And I remember asking my mom, being like, “What is this?” And she was like, “It’s something bad people do,” and I was like, “Oh gosh!”

Jo: Whoa!

Gina: “I don’t want to do that then!” And it was such like a, I think it was like out of fear, like, “I don’t know how to talk to this about them, so I’m just going to tell ’em to not do it, and that it doesn’t exist.” And so the way that I started learning about sex was from my other friends who were like seven or eight years old, whose parents had mentioned it or like they somehow learned about it. I think like one of them, their mom’s like boyfriend had like Playboy magazines that were sitting out and so she was seeing that and then telling me.

And so I grew up thinking like sex was this horrible thing, like nobody should ever do it. And then my friends who were like seven telling me what it is, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s how babies are made?! That’s… I’m so confused by this.”

Roxanne: Yeah.

Gina: And so when I was like 26 years old, college educated woman and my husband and I were like, “Let’s have a baby,” I was like, I know how babies are made, but I didn’t understand like ovulation and that it wasn’t like any day of the month you can get pregnant. Because I remember my menstrual cycle class in high school was like 30 minutes. Like the boys went somewhere else and then they gave us this quick class and it was like a video, and I was like, I couldn’t conceptualize like this egg and how it was moving. I didn’t know there’s different phases of my period. Roxanne’s over here like, “Oh my God, I failed my sister,” but it was just not my background. Like I, it was not something that I really understood until I was trying to have a baby and I was like, “This would’ve helped me a lot if I understood what was going on within my body.” Not only with like how to engage in like intimacy with my partner, but just understanding that it wasn’t this horrible thing. But also understanding how to protect myself, too, because I’m like, if I didn’t understand like what it was, like, I would not have been able to like clearly communicate that if something had happened to me that maybe I didn’t want to happen. But it’s so wild to me like how little education a lot of us get, like in high school. Even here in America, like a lot of the stuff that I learned about was like from my friends.

Roxanne: Yeah.

Gina: Who were like, also didn’t know.

Roxanne: Yeah. Just the blind teaching the blind, and it’s just, we’re all blind.

Gina: And so I don’t want my 8-year-old to have somebody that’s heard about it, share it to her. And it’s also really important to me that she understands what the boundaries are with her own body.

And so when we go to the pediatrician, when they like take a look at their genitals, they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to look at your lady parts,” and she’s like, “What are you talking about?”

Jo: Wow.

Roxanne: What is that?

Gina: And I’m like, “She’s going to look at your vagina,” and she’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s fine. A doctor can look at that.” So we have conversations on, who can look at it, no one should touch it, and we’re easing our way into that.

But now, like she’s getting to a point where she’s like, “How are babies made?” And I was like, “The daddy gives mommy a seed and then the mommy plants it and then a baby is made,” and she’s like, “Okay,” and she was good with that, that was a good concept for her. And then more recently she’s been like, “Huh, the daddy gives mommy seed. Then how did Uncle Patrick accidentally give Emo a seed, because, Colin wasn’t planned?” And I was like, “Sometimes it just happens. They just accidentally…. Oh, God!” So I’m like, we’re at a point where we need to start having the conversation so that she could understand what it is, and that it’s not this taboo or shameful thing, but also like how to protect yourself as well.

And so I think it’s that’s where it gets hard for parents is figuring out, how do I talk about this in a way that is age appropriate without being like graphic, while also acknowledging like my own discomfort with it?

Roxanne: Yeah.

Gina: And so yeah, like this, obviously, this is going to be a whole conversation. I’m very excited.

Roxanne: Yeah. So Gina, Gina’s even said at seven, eight, is when she started getting curious and learning about this stuff. And her daughter is seven, eight. So it’s like a lot of people are like, “Oh, like I’ll just wait. Like they’re five, they’re six, they’re seven, like they don’t, they’re not even questioning these type of things,” but like this is like where you start planting the seeds to start talking about these conversations… We’re really liking the seed analogy!

Because, once they’re of age, this is not the time that they’re going to like start learning about their bodies and exploring and asking all their friends because they already have this, like, baseline. So like understanding your body and then knowing that it’s not shameful for doing these things, but we need to be safe about these things is what I hope to like slowly introduce.

Because again, like when we were older, like I never was like, “Hey mom, tell me about sex.”

Gina: Yeah.

Roxanne: “Tell me what you know.” And that’s because I was like, “That? No!”

Jo: So I’ll throw something on top of all of that, which is what makes us really different from our children now. And so they live in an entirely different world than we do now. So a lot of children learn about sex now from porn. And so the average age that a young person will see porn is 12. And so you can imagine how many kids then are seeing it before then.

Roxanne: Oh, probably a lot.

Jo: So I think that often a lot of adults assume, “Oh yeah, they’ll learn about it from a friend or from a sibling,” or, “I’ll be the one to educate them,” but if you do leave it too long, the chances increase exponentially that they’ll just learn about it online. And what they get from that will be a much more aggressive, non-consensual, quite derogatory towards women, racist kind of message.

So I didn’t add into my bio that I did my Masters in pornography and the global consumption rates of young people in consuming porn, and then the impacts on them. And the most significant impact is that if that is their model, if that is their education, then the harms are really significant. Yeah, it’s more important than ever that we get this conversation right, because there’s an industry really coming to find them, and they’re coming to find them much earlier than it did for us.

Roxanne: Oh yeah.

Gina: Absolutely. So how do we do it? How do we talk to our kids?

Roxanne: Yeah.

Gina: Let’s just dive right in. Like, how would you introduce this topic to your child, and when would you start recommending having this conversation?

Jo: Yeah, great question, because most people want a really clear timeline.

Gina: Just tell me what to do, and I will do that!

Roxanne: Literally, just tell me what to do.

Jo: Yeah, totally.

Roxanne: She has a course for that!

Jo: Yeah! Yeah, I do have a course for that, because that’s a really massive question that people ask all the time is just, “What is the script and when should I give it?” And whilst I’m reluctant to give a timeline, a really clear one, because every child is different- we can go into who’s more likely to learn about sex earlier than later, who’s more likely to be sexually harmed, for example. But as a, typical kind of timeline for most kids, you want to be talking about bodies, really from when they’re born and ideally using an anatomically correct terms. And so just going slightly against what you said there, Gina, we would call it a vulva as opposed to a vagina.

Gina: Yeah. Yeah, it’s so ingrained in me.

Jo: Yeah.

Gina: I’m like, it’s really hard to switch now.

Jo: It’s so hard. And for my husband, it was really challenging as well, so I used to ask him to practice out loud. Say the word vulva a lot of times because the more times you just say it to yourself, the more natural it feels. But I have three boys and some people might think, “Oh, you don’t really need to use that word very much,” but I actually really do because it’s so important that they understand the female body. But, we would use the word vulva and we would use the word penis.

And part of the reason, no, it’s two really core reasons we use anatomically correct terms. One is so that they can really confidently label to a professional if something has happened that wasn’t okay for them. So if harm has occurred, they can really, clearly communicate what’s going on. But also, the research suggests that when children understand their body, they go on to be much more confident. They have higher self-esteem, and they have better sexual health and better sex lives with their partners. So it’s really important and the research, the evidence is there, that it’s, we need to do it well. So you do that right from when they’re born, the way that you’re talking about when they change their nappies and when they get siblings. That’s a really critical time. They’re often looking at each other’s bits and going, “What’s that? And how does that work?” Or, they’re looking at you naked and it’s really great to do that as well. So be open as adults with, like, with your clothes off. It also has really great outcomes for children when they see their parents naked- not necessarily with each other on each other, but when they see Mom or Dad shower, it’s actually really good for them. They grow up with greater self-esteem, they grow up feeling confident about their body and have better kind of a relationship with their body and other people’s bodies in the future. So that, all that stuff’s really good.

And then, when they’re about four, so when they start doing play dates, and is that the word that you guys would use in America?

Gina: Yeah. We use play dates too.

Jo: Okay. So when they start having play dates, what you want to do is start talking about, really clearly talking about consent. Where does somebody touch you that is or isn’t okay? And not just your genitals, but actually if someone touches your arm or your tummy, your stomach in a way that makes you feel a bit icky, or you start getting a strange feeling inside your body, that’s a sign that it wasn’t okay for you. So even those things you want to tell Mom or Dad about. Because you know anybody who’s experienced sexual harm as a child knows so often it starts with much, lower level kind of minor touch and it graduates over time towards genital contact. And so we want to help them identify what that feeling is in their body, as opposed to just, “Oh, if someone touches your vulva,” because that’s actually at the hard end of sexual harm. And we want to start talking much earlier than that when they feel uncomfortable. So that’s what we call confusing touch. Sorry, I’m going to, I’m giving like a bit of a lecture at this point, so just jump in.

Gina: Oh, no, you’re good. Just keep going.

Roxanne: No, I love all of this.

Gina: I’m taking notes.

Jo: Yeah! Fortunately it’s recorded, so you can just listen! So at that same time, age four, you are also talking about what they might see at someone else’s house. So whether they see images, videos, cartoons on devices or in magazines- very rarely in magazines now, it’s much more commonly on devices- of people naked, touching each other, or touching themselves. So you don’t have to use the word pornography, like you don’t have to use that much later, but you can describe what they might come across so that they can tell you. So if you imagine that before the age of 12, 50% of kids will have seen porn. So that’s going to start quite early and work its way up, in increments towards 12. So you really want to start communicating with them when they are going to friends’ houses.

And people really feel uncomfortable about this, but cousins are quite a, they’re not high risk, but often that’s where a lot of exposure happens. Yeah, so you guys are siblings! And the reason it’s so, so great to play with other ages, so I’m not wanting people to not do that, but when they play with children of other ages, they’re more likely to experience the things that those older children are experiencing. Those kids know more, they may have seen more, they just have more, both wisdom but also knowledge. And so they often, with cousins, there’s a lot of learning and exploring. And so people think, “Oh, it’s my family, like I don’t need to have that conversation,” but it’s actually more important that you do because of that inter age play.

Gina: Yeah. I’ve actually been having, like a lot of like really direct conversations with my kids because I don’t want them to explore, like accidentally, with each other’s bodies, like not realizing that is maybe not appropriate. And so I have very direct conversations with them, because they take like baths and stuff together where I’m like, “Hey, like Eoghan’s penis is for Eoghan, and Eoghan alone. You girls do not need to be poking his penis.” Because they’ll, because the youngest one will see like his little testicles hanging there and she’ll be like, “Huh!”

Roxanne: Oh!

Gina: And I’m like, “Oh no! Poor guy!”

Roxanne: One, hurts so much, I’m sure.

Gina: And so they’re like, when they’re accidentally grabbing each other, they’re like, “Oh, this kind of feels good,” or, “Oh, I didn’t like that,” and so I don’t want them to learn on each other, start to explore on accident and be like, “Oh, that was not appropriate.”

So I just have very clear conversations with them when they’re taking baths. “Hey, everyone’s parts are for themselves, nobody else. We’re not going to touch each other there. If somebody doesn’t want to be hugged, we’re not going to hug each other. And we give them like, clear boundaries just with like physical touch.

But especially with the cousins, because we live really close, like my mom gives them all baths together. It’s just like a pool of naked children. But it’s the same thing, “Hey, like Colin’s penis is for Colin.”

Roxanne: Yeah.

Gina: Lily’s is for herself.

Roxanne: And we started that really early as well. Because yeah, as soon as Lily was old enough that they could take baths together, like Colin was old enough, she’d be like, “What’s up with that? That’s different than me.” And I’m like, “Yeah, you have a,” I said vagina, I was like, “you have a vagina and he has a penis because you guys have different parts.” And she goes, “I want a penis! Why can’t I have a penis?” And I’m like, “Okay, now we’re going real deep, and we’re only two!”

Gina: It’s always the penis though, for the girls, where they’re like, “What is that?” And I’m like, “Oh my goodness!”

Roxanne: But my son recently was like, “I want to breastfeed!” And I’m like, “Ah, no, Bud.” And he’s like, “I have nipples! I can breastfeed when I’m older,” and I was like, yes you do.

Gina: Actually, they’re useless.

Roxanne: Your nipples are useless! No. I was like, “No, when you grow up, you don’t make milk in your boobies like mommies do.” And he goes, “I want to breastfeed a baby!” And I was like, “Oh no.”

Gina: Eoghan also had the similar thing with me, and he was like, “When I get bigger, will my nipples be larger like yours?” And I’m like, “They’re not that big, okay?!” “So that I could feed the babies?” And I’m like, “My nipples are not that big, okay? They’re normal size.”

Roxanne: Yeah, they have no filters, too. So they do, they like commenting on other people’s bodies. Like when I had my baby, my kids came to the hospital and saw me immediately after, and my daughter’s just like looking at my belly and she goes, “Mommy, do you have another baby in there? Your belly’s still really big.” And I’m just like…

Gina: “Thanks…”

Roxanne: And I’m just like, “So Lily, sometimes we don’t comment on people’s bodies. We just, let’s focus on their personalities and like things that we like about a person.” And she goes, “Why can’t I tell you your belly still looks big?” And I’m like, “Because not everyone likes that.”

Jo: Yeah, I know.

Roxanne: But then also like how do you approach it? Because all of our bodies are different. So teaching them like we can embrace other people’s bodies because we’re all different, but not being like, we just never talk about people’s bodies.

Gina: Before we move on to that, let’s come back to…

Jo: The timeline?

Gina: What we were previously talking about, about the timeline, yes.

Jo: Yeah. I have so many things I want to say about that whole chat, the bodies thing!

So yeah, so we’ve established early age, age four, talking non-specifically about porn, but still what they might see, touch, et cetera. At eight, that is really a great time to explain sex. And the reason it’s eight is because more and more of our girls are going through puberty earlier, and I actually don’t think it’s fair to not fill them in on what’s happening with their body, because a lot of girls talk about that being quite actually a traumatizing time. Things are happening, and they think that something is broken with them. If they bleed before you’ve told them what a period is, et cetera, then they honestly think that they’re dying. And I think that they need to understand why those things are happening in their body because it all helps them make peace with it. And so 8 is a great age, but also it’s the age that they’re quite vulnerable with friends to hearing about things from other people. And like one of my kids who’s actually 10, he had a friend tell them that sex potentially lasted for two years.

Gina: Oh God!

Roxanne: Can you IMAGINE?!

Jo: I know. And yeah, they hear things now, you know, much more on the playground, and that’s really normal and fine. It’s just what you want is that if you’ve already had the chat, then they know they can come back and talk to you about it anytime. Because when we are silent, we are actually still sending a really strong message. It’s very loud and clear that we are not the person to talk to, that we are not comfortable with that conversation, and that they should stay just chatting with their friends.

Also, kids have what’s called an anchoring bias. So often the first place that they hear a piece of information, they perceive that as being the most accurate. So they come home and they’re like, “Sam, or Sally, or Fred, or whatever, said that sex lasts for two years,” because they got that information first, they then receive any secondary information through that filter. Does that make sense?

Roxanne: Yeah.

Gina: Yes, it does.

Jo: What we want is we want to be the anchoring bias for them that then when they hear or see about things out in the playground or at someone’s house, they’re filtering it through the lens of what we have already told them. So we become their glasses that they see the world through, as opposed to the world as their glasses that they then interpret our information from.

Gina: I think it is really important to be open about this conversation so that your children know that they can come and talk to you when they do have those confusing touches or those confusing feelings, or they’re not sure about something that they were told.

This was definitely not something that I felt comfortable talking to our parents about.

Roxanne: No.

Gina: And it’s because I vividly remember being five and asking our mom, “What is sex?” And she was like…

Roxanne: Not ready.

Gina: “We don’t talk about that.”

Roxanne: But it’s also, her culture is like very private.

Gina: American culture is also very prude as well.

Roxanne: So it’s like you don’t talk about it out loud. Especially like when we were growing up, it like was never brought up as like this thing that people do, and like we just knew you just don’t ask about it. You just, you knew that babies, like, appeared, and you just didn’t know where they came from until you’re older.

But I do remember when you had your first period, you thought you were dying.

Gina: I was like, I don’t… Like, my stomach hurt, my mom was at work and my dad was home. And so my stomach was like really hurting and I was like, “Oh my God,” and so my dad let me stay home, which I’m very thankful for. And then I would go to the bathroom, or I’d be like, “Why do I keep having this like dark brown streak? Like I do not remember pooping myself. Like I don’t understand what this is!” And so I kept changing my pants. I’d go to the bathroom and be like, “Oh my God, my stomach hurts so much,” and then change my pants, because there’d be another streak. And I’m like, “What is happening?!” Like it didn’t click for me that it was blood. I just thought I was like skid marking my underwear and I didn’t understand.

Roxanne: Just heart breaking!

Gina: And so I must have changed my pants like six times that day. And I’m like, “I don’t get it! I don’t feel it happening!” And so my mom came home and saw like my 18 pairs of pants in the bathroom and was like, “Oh my God, you got your period!”

Roxanne: And you’re like, “What the hell is that?”

Gina: And my mom like, told my dad like, “Oh, Gina got her period,” and his response was like, “Do not tell me about that. I want nothing to do with it. I don’t want to know about that. That’s disgusting.” And there was so much like shame from it that I was like, “Oh my God, I could never talk to this guy about my period. Men do not want to know about your period.”

And so every time I’d get in my period, I was like hiding my tampon, like in my palm to go to the bathroom.

Roxanne: Oh yeah. Because you’re not supposed to have a period.

Gina: Our parents are great people, everyone that’s listening. This is not their strong point.

Roxanne: We love our parents!

Gina: There was one time when I was like a teenager and we went to go visit my grandfather. And my grandfather lived with my uncle and my male cousin, so it’s just all dudes. And then my, I think my mom didn’t come with us, it was just my siblings and my dad. And I had gotten my period and I like didn’t know what to do with my pad because I was like, “Oh my God, I can’t put it in the trash can because then they’ll see that I have my period and men do not want to hear about my period,” because this is the message that I received from my father. And so I flushed it down the toilet- a horrible idea! And then the toilet got clogged.

Roxanne: Oh, I forgot about this!

Gina: I had to unclog the toilet.

Roxanne: Oh, I forgot about this. The trauma.

Gina: Oh my God, my pad is going to come out and they’re going to know that I’m on my period!

Roxanne: It’s not that she clogged the toilet, it’s that they’re going to know she’s on her period.

Gina: So 20 years later, I told my dad about this, and I was like, “Did you know that when I was a teenager I flushed a pad down the toilet and it got clogged, because I was horrified that you were going to know that I was on my period?” And he was like, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea that my reaction to that created this like visceral response in you.” So for those of us that are, for those of you that are listening, if your daughter has a period, this is a normal function that happens in the female body.

Roxanne: I will say like being the younger sister though, like when you’re not the oldest, you do not…

Gina: I experienced all the trauma for us.

Roxanne: Gina experienced the trauma, so that when I got my period, I knew I would just go to Gina. I was like, “Hey Gina, that thing that you had, I think I also have it. What is it?” Because of course like you didn’t learn about it in health education until like freshman year, when most people have already got their period, so that’s a terrible time to have health education. It should be in like sixth grade when most people are having their period.

Jo: Sixth grade. What? What age is that?

Roxanne: Twelve. So I mean in the early 2000’s, 12 was like beginning portions.

Gina: I think I was in like 9th or 10th grade by the time…

Roxanne: I was in eighth grade.

Gina: …there was a class about it in high school.

Roxanne: Yeah. But I was in eighth grade when I got my period, so it’s like I hadn’t even reached that class yet. So I was having these things, but I didn’t fully understand what was happening in my body. When it should happen in like sixth grade, if not now, probably like fifth grade because girls are having their menses starting at 10, 11 now.

Jo: Yeah.

Gina: Yeah. So what are your thoughts on my traumatizing childhood story?

Jo: I think many women will identify with the feeling that, that part of our body, our vulva, our vagina, our periods, are a bit gross. And I hear this from couples all the time, that the female is like, “I just don’t, I don’t like that part. Like it’s yuck,” and it all comes from the shame. But also the language that we use still around periods, which is, “sanitary products,” “female hygiene products” like, we are not unhygienic when we have our period. That is so messed up as a message. Still, we are quite entrenched in this language or messaging around it being yuck, yucky, bad.

And there then we have, yeah, just what you’re saying, women who are struggling in their sex lives, who don’t feel confident in their body, who feel like they need to hide things, who feel like that their partners won’t understand them. And there’s so much with periods with a whole menstrual cycle, which we talked about last time a little bit, that’s really important to understand.

I want my boys to know that it’s not just when I’m bleeding that my period is impacting me. It’s when my anxiety increases, it’s when I feel more lethargic and tired, because then they understand with future partners, if that’s who they’re inclined to date. And also they might coach female athletes and that’s really important for them to understand. They might work with female colleagues, so they need to understand that there are bigger impacts. And my husband was a professional sailor and he talks about growing up how they would be out on the water, sailing for eight hours at a time. And the girls, I said to him, “What would happen with the girls when they had their periods?” And he said, “I never even thought about it.” And I said, “Obviously no one was thinking about them because they wouldn’t do that. That’s really unfair on them.” And then he said, “Yeah, that’s terrible.” And then he said, “I remember once seeing a girl bleeding out under her wetsuit,” they used to wear wetsuits, full body wetsuits, and he said, “I remember seeing this girl bleeding down through the bottom of her wetsuit and being a bit confused,” because there was quite a bit of shame in their family as well around it. His mom never ever talked about her period. And so he’s gone on a big learning journey with me, both around the hormones and with the vulva!

Roxanne: Yeah! And my son, of course is like, “Do I get to do this?” And I was like, “No, you don’t. You get to do something different,” and he goes, “But what do I do?” And I was like, “I don’t know if I’m ready to go into this as well.” But I’m like, way ahead, my kids are three and five, so like a little earlier than eight. But I want them to also be excited and celebrate when their period comes, because then it’s like a huge transition in your life, like going through puberty, like your emotions are changing. It’s a huge change in your body. And I want her to be excited for that, but know that it’s a beautiful thing.

Jo: Yeah.

Roxanne: And I want her to be excited to get it, but also I’m like, “I maybe need to pump the brakes a bit.”

Jo: No, you don’t! You don’t at all. And I’m definitely, so when I say 8, I said, or around 6, so being really clear at 8, around 6, but the puberty education really is the whole time because it’s all part of using anatomically correct language. And I’m exactly the same. My kids can, and they’re all boys, like they can see me change my tampon if they want to. Like it’s very open. Eight is definitely when you want to have had that conversation by, so that all kids feel really prepared, particularly our girls.

And they often, yeah, are asking questions about how babies are made and they want more specific language. And that’s actually really easy to describe. So the main way that babies are made is by a penis going inside of vagina. It gets hard so that it can go inside, and then that’s called having sex. And at the end of the sex, he releases ejaculate and there’s lots of little sperms in there and they swim up. And if it happens at the right time in the month, then it reaches an egg and the baby starts to be formed. That’s actually quite simple and you can draw it out if you want. There’s some really amazing books. But you can explain, also, there’s other ways that babies are made. So babies can be adopted and that’s how they become part of a family. But they can also be made using IVF and you can explain that, because there’s a variety now. And so they can tolerate that messaging because to them it’s just science. We are the ones who laden it with shame and awkwardness and strange feelings. They often feel completely fine with it because if we use a relaxed tone, and we come in just prepared to say briefly, what I call brevity over breath, like just say a few things, don’t give them a whole lecture, because they will forget 90% of what you say. So we tend to think that we need to have what’s called, “The Sex Talk,” which is a one-off occasion where we give them all the information and then we’ve done it. We’ve ticked that box and we are finished. I had this extremely robust conversation with my then 8-year-old, and we talked about everything. We talked about how it’s important it feels nice, that it’s something adults do, that it needs to be consensual, like we really covered the things. And then two days later I did what we call a check-in, and I do this all the time, so you go back and you do the check. And I said, “Hey, the other day we talked about sex and everything that happens with the body when babies are getting made,” and then I said, “Did you have any more questions about that?” And he said, “What is sex?” And I said, “Remember, like when the penis and the vagina, and goes inside, and the sperms, and the eggs?” And he had honestly forgotten the entire thing. And imagine if I had thought, “Oh, tick, I’ve done it. It’s finished now,” imagine he would grow up thinking I had never talked to him about sex. And that I was going around talking to other parents and saying, “You need to talk to your children about sex,” and I never did that with him!

And so they will forget at least 90% of every conversation. They forget that when we tell them to go and put their shoes on, they forget that 90% of the time. And so it’s the same with every conversation, and so we have to keep circling back. So imagine you need to have that conversation at least 10 times. And that’s why I really love books because they, we can keep them in their bedrooms and they can read them at night whenever they want. Because what you have got is a household which is flourishing in information. And I had the same, which was really great because I was a very curious kid, I always wanted information, particularly about the body. And what our kids have now is they have the internet.

Roxanne: Yeah.

Jo: And they are really likely to go and search something up, to ask a question, and then the answer that they get will be porn. It’s, that’s what’s going to happen. And so for example, when during Covid when schools were all like largely locked down on PornHub, the questions on their search of, “How to…” so how to do whatever, fill in the blank, went up by 240% because kids weren’t getting the education from their school that they usually were, and so they went to alternative sources where they knew they were going to get that information. But like I said, what they’re going to get is something highly non-consensual and much more aggressive. And all the research is there that on the mainstream porn sites there’s very little consent in a lot of aggression. So you need to get in there first and you need to do it regularly.

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Gina: So I think one of the concerns that folks have in regards to like talking about sex to their children, or why there are folks that are like against sex education in schools, is if we educate somebody on what sex is, they’re going to go and do it. We’re going to have 10 year olds having sex, or we’re going to have all these kids that are going to get pregnant.

Roxanne: Oh yeah, teen pregnancy.

Gina: If you show it to them, they’re going to go and do it, which is, I don’t think is true, based on the research and presenting the information. But how would you address that? Because I think that’s usually what the biggest concern is. Like, why would I talk to my kid at eight years old about sex? They’re going to go and try to do it then, because they’re going to be like curious.

Roxanne: Yeah.

Gina: Because that’s usually like the argument that I see about why we should not have sex education. It, to me, is the equivalent of don’t teach someone to buckle their seatbelt because if you do, then they’re going to get in a car accident, but…

Jo: Yeah, absolutely. And so I always go to the evidence. So what does the evidence say as opposed to, what does our fear say? Because feelings aren’t truth, right? They’re a feeling, but that doesn’t make them a fact. And so what do the facts say? They say that when we talk about sex with our young people, they are much more likely to delay. They actually have sex, the kids who get sex education, have sex later than the kids who don’t. And they also have safer sex, and they have more satisfying sex in that they feel better about what happened. So kids who get no sex education are more likely to have sex earlier. They’re also less likely to use contraception, and they’re more likely to feel negative about what happened. So that’s what the evidence says, and that’s what it says all over the world.

And you know, it’s exactly what you’re saying. Like we don’t take that approach with any other health issue. We don’t take that approach with cigarettes. We don’t take that approach with drugs. We don’t take that approach with driving. We always are preventative in every other issue. But for some reason with this one, we don’t believe the facts, we go with our feelings. And largely that’s because of shame that we had growing up. So we are bringing in our childhood shame and projecting that onto our children. So we feel uncomfortable, and so we assume it’s going to have bad outcomes because it doesn’t feel right to us. But that’s actually not the facts. The facts are, if we want our kids to delay, if we want ’em to have sex later, which I think most people do, then it’s more important to talk about it.

Gina: I don’t want there to be shame with it, whenever my children decide is a good time for them. But I want them to understand that there are risks to having sex with other people, such as unwanted pregnancy, STIs, like how can we protect ourselves? How can we make sure that we’re in a relationship that is like a positive one?

Roxanne: Yeah.

Gina: That we’re not in an abusive relationship, or that it’s always consensual. And so I genuinely feel like if I had a more solid foundation in sex education as like a child, as a teenager, I would have been in much better relationships for myself when I was in college, like when I started having sex. Like I would’ve been much safer with it. I would’ve had a better understanding of my own body and how it was important for me to also feel good during it too. Because there was definitely a lot of pressure or this feeling for myself that it was about the guy and making sure that he was having a good time. And then the female orgasm, like I was like under this impression that it was super normal for girls not to orgasm, and that it was kind of that, no, most girls don’t. And I’m like, “Why not? Like why? Wait, why not?”

Roxanne: But that was a question that you asked yourself was like, “Why can’t I also?”

Gina: Yeah. I was like, no, you can only… that doesn’t happen very often.

Roxanne: Yeah.

Gina: It’s really only about the guy. But if I had, if our mom had, or our dad, or both of them together, had sat us down and was like, “Hey, this is what this is. These are the risks involved with it. If you don’t want to have an unwanted pregnancy or unplanned pregnancy, don’t. We gotta be safe with it. If we don’t want to ha get a disease, we need to be safe. These are ways that we can be safe. These are some different options for it. This is why it’s important to be in like a positive relationship that you feel good in. And it’s, the pleasure is for both of you, it should not be painful,” and going over all these different things that like I had to figure out on my own. And like you said, like I was anchoring on incorrect biases and incorrect information. I was thinking, “Oh, I’m not supposed to, like it’s normal for me not to feel pleasure during this because all my magazines, all my Cosmopolitans, like Seventeen, was like, “Ways to make your guy feel great,” like, “Ways to enhance his experience,” and I’m like, “Oh…”

Roxanne: But I think it’s also like you’re saying, you learn a lot from your peers. So like our friends and like other people that were around us would share their experiences, and that was like the normal experience that everyone was experiencing. And then it almost gets like when there isn’t sex education, like you’re just learning from everyone around you. And if everyone around you is also having sex, you’re like, “Okay, this is the time that we’re also supposed to do it.” And so if it’s at 14, 15, everyone’s just going to do it at 14, 15. But if it’s educated, if you’re educating them younger, then if they all are going to wait, then you feel less weird.

Like when I was 18, I was like the last one to lose my virginity because all of my friends had lost it before me- granted, Gina was two years older, so like obviously she was older than me, but like I was like the last one. And I was like, “What’s wrong with me? Like why haven’t I done this yet? Something must be terribly wrong with me because no one wants to have sex with me at 18. But that’s like a silly statement because, like, you are 18! You know what I mean? So it’s like you have to like… but then I like carried that feeling inside for like ever- I’m going to cry a bit- for the rest of my life because like everyone around me, someone wanted them, and then no one wanted me. And so then you try to find that. But I don’t want that to happen to my daughters because like we are all like, obviously I feel I love my husband now, and I found someone and it like ended wonderfully. But I feel like having a foundation of understanding that sex is not like the end all, be all. And like your relationship isn’t 100% founded on this. And just because like you were 18 when you lost your virginity and all of your friends lost it earlier than you, that nothing is wrong with you. And I want my children to know, one, not to have a baby when they’re 14, but also to love their bodies and love themselves so that they can have a healthy, strong relationship their entire life.

Jo: Yeah.

Roxanne: Whew. I didn’t expect that.

Jo: Wow.

Roxanne: Thank you for this little therapy session.

Jo: It’s so powerful to share those stories because they really give us insight into how some young people might be feeling, and I’ve actually not heard someone express that before.

One of the things that I really want my kids, at least, to understand around risk is that there’s also emotional risk. It’s not just physical. It’s not just pregnancy. It’s not just STIs. It’s also the emotional harm that can happen when we gift our body to someone else, and we feel like they haven’t respected us in the process. So I talk about how the, four C’s with, with the kids, of sex, which is Consent Capable- so it’s adults who do that, and I’m thinking about your 8-year-old kind of message. And, Comfort, it’s important it feels nice, that it’s never painful, exactly what you said, Gina. And then, Care- that we feel cared for by the person that we have chosen to have sex with. Because when we don’t choose it, it’s not actually sex, it’s abuse. So I am really careful around my language there.

But I, yeah, the Care piece. So it’s not, they can go on the pill and they can use condoms and lower their risks of basically everything. However, those things don’t protect them from the emotional risk of giving their body to someone else for a time, and then feeling like that gift wasn’t honored. And maybe that sounds really prudish and moralistic or something, but it’s actually just true. Because sex is not removed from our emotions. And people who think it is, like actually it’s just not. We bring our emotional landscape, whatever’s going on for us into our sex life all the time. And if we feel used or like it’s been transactional in some way, it’s actually quite harmful for the person. So it’s bigger than just using a condom and a pill. It’s also caring for yourself.

Gina: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s probably like where I was really trying to find the words for, because it’s easy I think to educate on, “Here, this is a condom, this is how you use it, this is different contraceptives.”

I think the deeper part of it is like, how do I share with my children to be in a respectful relationship with somebody else when it comes to sex? Because I think intimacy is like one portion of our relationships with other people, but it’s such an impactful thing. And when I look back on like when I was in college, or like earlier relationships, like the times where I felt like icky, like after sex, were the times where I did not feel respected, or it felt very transactional. And I was like, I don’t want my children to have that feeling where they’re like ashamed. The times where I felt the most shame were the times where it felt that there wasn’t this level of respect to this person that I was sharing this… sharing myself with. And I think a lot of it is like similar to what Roxanne was saying, like I look back on these very negative experiences of mine and I’m like, “I just do not want my children to experience that in any capacity, both my son and my daughters.” And I want to be very intentional with the way that I share about this with them, because when I think about the things in my life that were the most harmful for me, like mentally and emotionally, it seemed to revolve around sex.

Roxanne: I agree.

Gina: Yeah, like honestly like I think like the, sex ed topic are the things that seem to be like the most negative for me within my life. And so I feel very passionate about wanting to be very intentional with educating them so that they don’t have to suffer the same way that I did, or that I know other women do, or other men do. Because like when my husband was growing up, he was more exposed to like teenage pregnancies and he essentially was like, “I’m just not going to have sex because I do not want to accidentally get someone pregnant, and I don’t quite know how not to do that, so I’m just going to touch nobody.”

Roxanne: Yeah.

Gina: But it was like, that was his exposure to it, and so it’s, yeah. Yeah.

Roxanne: I think the, easy part, more so for me, in my mind, is explaining the science of, “This is what happens: you’re releasing hormones and these hormones do this,” and the anatomy portion, but it’s the relationship and emotional part that’s honestly harder for me to explain.

Like, my daughter is five, and she has a “boyfriend” at school and Gina thinks it’s super weird.

Gina: I think it’s weird.

Roxanne: And like, she’s like, “We’re going to get married when we get older.” And so she, they’re both very intentional like that they’re not getting married at five, that’s silly. Who’s going to get married at five? We don’t have a home! When we are older, and after college, we’re going to get married and we’re going to buy a house together. And Henry’s like, “I’m going to build the house!” And like it’s, they’re like building this life together at five. And I’m like, “I don’t know how to navigate this without being like, ‘You are five. You’re probably not going to.'” Because like maybe, I don’t know, there’s 1% of people who meet at five and get married, but probably not going to happen. But I also want her to feel comfortable telling me all of these things and all of these feelings that she’s having, because she is navigating that, and I don’t want to dismiss her feelings. But I also don’t want her to like…

Gina: To settle for this five-year-old.

Roxanne: He’s a very, he’s a very nice boy… But, I don’t want her to start questioning relationships. And what if like she and Henry stay friends, and they stay fiances, and then they’re teens and they’re like, “We’ve pretty much been dating for 10 years at this point, at 15!” And they’re like, “Let’s take it to the next step.” I want her to feel comfortable to talk to me about it. But I don’t know how to also be like, you are five years old, you’re probably not going to marry this boy.

Jo: I think just let her live in a nice fantasy bubble.

Roxanne: Yeah. See, Gina?!

Jo: There’s so much that our children do that actually we are imposing so much of our own concerns and fear and anxiety onto them, and they’re actually doing really normal child stuff.

What I would love people to do if they’re worried about relationships- but also touching, parents get really worried about touching. And if there’s been touching of genitals or showing or being naked together and talking about each other, people really freak out about that. And there’s actually what we call a traffic light system for sexual harm. And there’s a whole lot of behaviors in the green light, like really normal, natural curiosity, nothing to worry about. And I would put “boyfriends,” “girlfriends,” “I think I’m going to marry this person,” also in that camp. We actually expect that stuff, that’s not strange, it’s normal curiosity, totally fine.

Then there’s orange, which is where you want to be, you want to do a little bit more intervention, a little bit more serious conversation with them.

And then there’s red where you really need to get a professional involved.

And there is so much of that content, if you just search it online, that can just, what I call, “take the heat out of it.” It can feel really stressful, but actually it’s totally fine and really normal. Curiosity is their job, our job is to help them through it. That’s how they develop, is through their curiosity. They also develop through making mistakes. Our job is to be the soft landing place where they fall when they make a mistake, not to be the hard wall that they come up against because they’ll just never talk to us again if that’s the case.

So if you find out that 11, that they were searching something online, if you find out at 9 that they did something with another kid that you feel uncomfortable about, be a soft pillow for them, the soft landing place, not the hard wall, because you need the relationship to hold.

I have an example of a, just a school mum that- I find myself in lots of these chats and at school and in the playground with parents- but a school mom, she’s…

Roxanne: I feel like I would just talk to you all the time on the playground!

Jo: Yeah. In the middle of the night, and she didn’t have my number, but she messaged me on Instagram and she said, “I’ve just found out that my child is reading all of these erotic novels,” on her e-reader and she- you often can’t put a filter on an e-reader, so it’s really difficult to manage. That’s not a reason not to do it, but it’s a reason to talk about it with them. But they, anyway, she said, “I can see even what percentage of these books that she’s read, she’s reading like 90 to 100 percent of these books. There’s over 20 of them.” She sent me the cover of the book, and then some of the text throughout, so I got an understanding of what it was she was coming across. Anyway, she said, “I have no idea what to do.” She came from Asian descent and she was like, “This is so uncomfortable. My parents never talked to me. I have no idea what to do.” And then I said, “This is not the moment to hold back. This is the moment to go hard. You talk about all the things, you answer every question. There is nothing she hasn’t already heard at this point, or read. So you answer everything.” Anyway, I talked to her about six months later and just as a follow up, like we were chatting a little bit throughout, but as a kinda more intentional follow up. And I said, “How did it all end? All of those conversations?” And she said, “I’m so glad that…” she was like, “I wish it hadn’t have happened, but I’m also so glad because now we are going into the teen years, we’ve already talked about everything, and we are so much closer now than we were before, and nothing is uncomfortable now. And so I feel like anything that happens that she sees or hears about or does, I can totally handle it.”

And so we get so freaked out that actually we can use all of those moments, those boyfriend, girlfriend moments, I’m going to marry them, as a platform for conversation. They’re organic opportunities that we can throw a little bit of wisdom on top of, and they will end up being so much better off as a result.

Gina: Absolutely.

Roxanne: That makes me feel better.

Gina: Yeah.

Roxanne: I’ve been the soft landing place.

Gina: You are the soft landing place.

Thank you so much Jo, for coming and chatting all about….

Roxanne: I’m sure we could talk for so much longer.

Gina: We could talk forever. We’ll just have you come back on the podcast. Stay tuned for Jo’s monthly episode on the MamasteFit Podcast!

So thank you so much for coming on the episode to talk all about how we can have this conversation with our children that I think a lot of folks are really uncomfortable or nervous about, but it is really important. Do you have any last advice for folks that are entering this phase of parenting where we’re going to start having to have these conversations, and then also where can people learn more from you?

Jo: My last bit of advice would really be, jumping off that last story, is that all of these conversations, they provide such great platform for relationship. We want to be close with our children, and this is one of the ways. So even if it feels uncomfortable, their knowledge and the relationship they have with you, is more important than your discomfort. Don’t let your discomfort lead your relationship, let your desire for a really healthy relationship with your child, push you through your discomfort. So that’s one, just so I really want people to take that away.

I have a whole parenting course that covers all of these topic topics in a lot of depth. And it’s called TrickyChatsParenting.com. So it’s really easy to find. It’s much, much cheaper in US dollars than it’s in New Zealand dollars, so that’s really positive. But basically we cover everything. So you know, for example, if something does happen to your child, if they are sexually harmed, how do you respond? Like, what do you do? And so we talk about that, puberty, exploitation online gaming, filters, like all the things, and I called it Tricky Chats because that’s often how we feel about it. The other name that we actually had was Awkward to Awesome. And what I like about that- which we didn’t use because everybody identified more with Tricky Chats- was you can take your relationship from slightly awkward to actually really awesome and you can be really close as a result.

So I also am on Instagram @TrickyChatsParenting, but the, yeah, the website is where you’ll get the whole course and all the information.

Gina: Awesome. Thank you so much again, Jo, for coming on the podcast and chatting all about this topic with us. We’ll get you on here again for another conversation, I’m sure, because Roxanne and I will have more questions. But thank you again for sharing your expertise with us and our listeners.

Jo: You’re so welcome! It was fun.

Roxanne: I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as Gina and I enjoyed filming it with Jo Robertson, talking all about introducing sex as well as introducing how we talk about our bodies with our children because the more we can educate them, the more that they can feel comfortable in their bodies, and also coming to us with any concerns that they’re having.

And if you’re wanting to learn more on how to approach these topics with your kids Tricky Chats Parenting with Jo Robertson is probably very recommended, it’s what I’m going to be checking out myself so that I can learn all of the tips and tricks from her.

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