Today is My Last Tuesday (plus Sex Ed for Preschoolers)

You turned the page!

So now I have something less than four workdays left. And then I will be unemployed. (Says Greg: A student!) Income-free. Whatever.

Of course, when you are the mother of a technically-preschooler-even-though-she-goes-to-kindergarten, education doesn't just happen in the school between the hours of 9 and 3:30. For instance, when we were driving up to Ann's cottage for our second annual mommyblogging cottage weekend (Ann, Marla and Josephine were also there), I got to explain bedrock.

You don't have to drive far to find yourself on the Canadian Shield around here, and when you do, the roads have been blasted straight through the bedrock, which rises up steeply on either side of the car like rust-coloured mountains covered with a thin green fuzz of shrubbery and evergreens. All the rock, Mummy! she said. Wow.

It's fun trying to explain bedrock in a way that a four-and-a-half year old will understand--that bedrock is everywhere and if you dig down far enough you'll find it no matter where you are, but here it's a lot closer to the ground so you can see it all over.

Or stars, which I got to tell her are actually much bigger than the earth, only they are very very far away. (But I'm going to let her keep believing that fairytaleland is on Jupiter, and when she is old enough we will buy a spaceship and go there together.)

Or that rivers have currents and only go in one direction, whereas oceans have tides and the water goes both ways. And lakes are still.

Or that sometimes babies are born when doctors cut their mummy's bellies open, but most of the time babies are born when they come out of their mother's vaginas. And most of the time babies drink milk that their mummies make out of their nipples, but sometimes babies drink milk out of bottles. And that sea turtles don't make milk for their babies.

And that girls have vulvas and boys have penises and that's what makes them different, not clothes or hair or toys or size; and that girls also have lots and lots of little eggs in their tummies, and girls can grow up and decided to turn some of their eggs into babies. That they don't have to, some grown-up ladies decide not to, but a lot do. That you don't have to be married to a boy if you want to have a baby, that sometimes two men marry each other or two women, and sometimes a lady decides she doesn't want to get married and turns her egg into a baby on her own. Because families can come lots of different ways, and they're all great. But, yes, boys are important too, because they make the seeds that the eggs need to grow (only not until they are almost grown up), and most of the time what happens is that a grown-up man and woman decide they want to turn an egg into a baby and so the man puts his penis into the woman's vagina and that's how the seeds get out, and then one of the seeds finds one of the eggs and it turns into a baby and starts growing, and isn't that cool? But it's something you can really only do when you are a grown-up.

But it doesn't work that way for snakes or birds or fish, because they put the eggs on the outside of their bodies and then they turn into babies on the outside. But we turn them into babies on the inside, and so do cats and dogs and guinea pigs and cows and horses and deer and I've lost track of how many other animals we've had this chat for.

She knows about umbilical cords and belly buttons and, thanks to her habit of walking into the bathroom and my bedroom without knocking first, a fair bit about puberty and menstruation.

If you're wondering if this doesn't make me tremendously squeamish, you bet. But I figure it's my job to wrestle my squirms down so that Frances can get factual, accurate information that she can understand without getting all of my own childhood programming into the mix, just like it's my job to swallow down my body insecurities so she doesn't grow up paranoid about getting fat.

I wonder where we got this idea that we need to protect children's innocence re: sex from? It wasn't so long ago that most kids grew up on farms or at any rate in the country where mating animals would not have been an unusual sight. It doesn't seem to have traumatized all previous generations to grow up understanding the biological role of males and females and the nature of sex, though they might not prefer to think about their parents doing it. Frankly I very much prefer not to think about my precious, beautiful little girl growing up and becoming sexual one day, but it's going to happen, and when it does I want her to have the tools to communicate about sex factually and calmly. I don't want her to be hampered by my own squeamishness and get all flustered the first time some boy she likes wants to go farther than she does.

Plus, the research I've seen indicates that kids are more comfortable with transgressing gender norms and stereotypes when they understand that sex is biological and that only genitilia can really distinguish between boys/men and girls/women. This is an important goal to me.

If you're wondering if this doesn't make Frances tremendously squeamish, not a bit. She finds the whole thing fascinating. When she has questions, I answer them. I don't answer more than she asked for. I ask her to tell me what she thinks I said so I can clarify if she's confused or if I didn't explain it as well as I should. I bought her a person puzzle and a body book that show, besides muscles and bones and organs and blood vessels, anatomically correct reproductive organs and some information about reproduction (in the book) that is age appropriate and, apparently, lots of fun to play with. (Plug: The Human Body by Owl publications is GREAT for this age group and probably a few years older. I can review it if anyone is interested.) She has already decided that when she grows up she is going to turn one of the eggs into her tummy into a baby and become a Mummy, and she will also have pets and a garden.

All of the explicit, messy, sometimes icky, squirmish, detailed and factual information so far has only stoked the impassioned pre-Mummy flames. She'll be five in December. So far as I can tell, she understands and remembers all of it. And when she doesn't, we talk about it. Again.

Before Frances was born I really hadn't expected to have so many discussions about genitals with my three-year-old (this started last year for us, beginning I think when she got the ideas that a) girls had weenies on the inside, and b) babies were born from belly buttons from the kids at her daycare. So that tells you just how early these peer conversations start up). But she had the interest and was asking questions, and I decided pretty quickly that I wanted two things: When she gets information from friends and from school about sex, I want her to: a) know that her mom has reliable information and that she can be relied on to share it, and b) be innoculated against the misinformation of her less-well-informed peers. Yes, even at eight. Even at six. I can still remember the time in grade one when my giggly classmates put our teacher on the spot by asking her what a girl's private parts were called. Or my classmates in grades two and three who used to draw their interpretations of penises on the backs of their school notebooks.

If this doesn't convince you not to turn the page, Dear Readers, what will?

Don't you know that there's a Monster at the End of this Blog?

Posted by Andrea at August 26, 2008 9:54 AM under Female Trouble

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