by Martha Kempner

I am an unrepentant eavesdropper.  On a bus, in the supermarket, or even in the ladies room, I keep my ears open to interesting conversations among strangers.  Seated next to another table for two, I am far more likely to listen to their conversation than to attempt to engage in one of my one.  I suppose this doesn’t make me the best dinner date but it has led to some great stories.  Like the one about the 30-something guy from the Bronx who was clearly on his first date with a 22-year-old blonde who had recently emigrated from Russia.  When he couldn’t start a conversation about ice-hockey (a topic he seemed to have assumed they would share a mutual interest in), he said to her, and I quote, “Are you into current events, because I’m really into current events.”  This has become somewhat of a catchphrase in our house. 

The other day, after a late but successful trip to do our taxes, my husband and I found ourselves in a cute diner in Westchester, which in the middle of the day was full of moms dining in pairs or quads while their children were at school.  I could not figure out the age of the pair sitting next to us but I gathered from their conversation that they each had children between the ages of 6 and 10 or so.  They were discussing what to listen to on the radio in the car and one suggested that she often puts on the news which prompted the other to tell a ”funny” story.  Apparently, a few weeks earlier, she was watching a 60 Minutes story with her children about the situation after the earthquake in Haiti when, as she described it, the worst thing happened: the reporter focused on a 13-year old who was pregnant.  And her son asked the hardest question: “how can a 13 year old get pregnant?”

Really?  She was watching footage of the aftermath of a devastating earthquake that left thousands dead and thousands more homeless and set an already poverty-stricken country back by at least a decade.  Images out of Haiti included injured people without food, water, and medical care, dead bodies lying in the street, and desperate individuals searching for relatives who are most likely dead.  Yet, to this mom the most disturbing image was that of a pregnant teenager. 

 I can imagine that the questions that come up for many children when viewing such horrors are scary and possibly unanswerable.  How can such a bad thing happen?  How come they couldn’t just go to a hospital?  Why isn’t there enough food?  What happens to the children whose parents died?  Could this happen here?  Yet, to this mom the most difficult question she could imagine answering was about how a teenager could become pregnant.

I know that as a society we have always been uncomfortable talking about sex  (especially with children) but I find the idea that sex is harder to explain than poverty and death discouraging. 

Please know that I am not criticizing this mother, I understand that explaining sex (or even conversations where sex may come up) can be a very scary proposition for many parents.  For one thing, most of today’s parents grew up in households where no one ever talked about sex.  For another, our society gives such mixed messages about sex that it is often very hard to know, even when talking to our own children, what we should and shouldn’t say. What if we say too little, might it damage our kids forever?  Or worse, if we say too much and they repeat it to friends, neighbors, and teachers, will it ruin our reputation? 

Still, we have to get better at this.  We have to break the cycle where parents find it so hard to talk to their kids about sex that they simply never do.  That is the only way we will be able to raise generation of sexually healthy young people who have the information and skills they need to make responsible sexual decision throughout their lives.

So here’s my first piece of advice.  We should all relax.  Talking about sex is like talking about any of the myriad of things our kids are going to ask us about over the years.  It might not be easy but, like everything else, we just have to muddle through and figure it out as we go.

This 60 Minutes segment could have been a great moment to pass on both information and values.  She could have started simply by saying that women, even young women, are capable of getting pregnant once they reach puberty. Or if she wasn’t ready to discuss puberty, she could just say some young women are physically capable of getting pregnant as early as thirteen.  And follow that quickly with “but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”  Then she could have started a conversation with her son about how hard it is to have a baby at 13.  The news story would be a perfect launching point for that because everything is hard in Haiti now.  She could have gone on to try figure out (together with her son) when they think it’s best for women to have babies – they might have decided in their twenties or thirties or that age is less important than having finished school or gotten married. 

If I’m right and the son she was talking to was around 10,  that would probably be the end of the conversation, and it would have gone a long way in teaching him information and values and opening up the lines of communication for more discussions as he got older.  (By the way, you’ll notice that the topic of sex never really did come up.)  A parent having this conversation with a teenager might want to be more specific and get into how pregnancy occurs and how it can be avoided.  For teenagers, the conversation about how difficult it is to raise a child could have gotten more detailed and more personal as well.

I am not saying that conversations with kids about sex are easy or that we will always know the right thing to say.  I’m just saying it’s no harder than many other topics we get asked about and we can’t afford to avoid it anymore.  Hey, I’m a trained sex educator and I got flummoxed just the other day when my 3 ½ year old asked me how the baby got into her teacher’s uterus.  While I get points for the fact that she said uterus, I think I lose them for my answer which seems to have conjured up images of babies waiting in chicken eggs.  Of course, this was no better and or worse than my answer when she asked me where people go “when they get dead” and when we can see them again.  I muddled through that one too and will have to do it better next time as well.  But I know there will be a next time and I think the most important thing is that she keeps asking and I keep answering.