My 6-y-o suddenly asked me yesterday one of the corollaries to the "where babies come from" question. I posted about his question and my answer on HMS Blog.
I do not think we can consider too carefully our answers to these questions. When our kids ask us questions about sexuality, we have to be candid without revealing details of anyone’s private life; we have to be accurate without overloading a child with facts they’re too young to process. And given our culture’s confusion and outright rejection of morality surrounding sexuality we must ground everything we say in Christian love. We may have to provide biological details, and when it comes time to provide them we shouldn’t fear them; but we can’t ever let a richness in clinical details take the place of a richness in moral context.
Nor can we pretend that babies "are made" in a moral context. There have always been kids who came from abnormal families. When I was a child, that chiefly meant broken homes: friends whose parents were divorced, who lived with mom and mom’s boyfriend, who had older stepsiblings they saw on weekends. Now there are even more examples. Sooner or later our kids will befriend a child who has two moms or two dads, or a child whose never-married mom paid someone to inseminate her, or a child chosen for her good genes to be the sole survivor out of all her embryonic siblings. Later on our teenager may have a pregnant friend who struggles with the decision to abort, adopt, or to raise a child; face it, our own child may make such a decision.
Our answers have to leave us room to explain these situations, to provide a context for understanding them. Above all, we must get across the point that every child is good, every child is worthy of love, whatever the circumstances that brought him into life. And we must get across the simultaneous point that (precisely because a child is worthy of love!) deliberately choosing, or choosing to risk, certain circumstances for a child is wrong. That the reason for sexual restraint, and now sometimes for technological restraint, is love.
The answers we give a six-year-old lay the foundation for the answers we can give a ten-, a twelve-, a sixteen-year-old.
It is so helpful to remember that we do not have to answer everything at once. The conventional wisdom about sex education when I was a child attending public school was, "Give them all the biological details good and early so that they don’t learn the wrong things on the playground." Said biological details included lots of information about birth control and some outright falsehoods (I distinctly remember being taught that girls could get pregnant at any time and there was no way to know a time when you would be safe from getting pregnant; I also remember in a sex-ed session that our Girl Scout troop attended, a girl asking, "Does sexual intercourse hurt?" and the instructor answering that it would certainly hurt if you did it in the back of a car. There went her credibility. We were eleven, not stupid.)
I digress. We have time to let the story unfold. I’m not going to start my kids’ physics education with the Schrodinger equation; Newtonian physics is a fine place to start. And I’m not going to start my kids’ sex education either with intense explanation of the details of sexual intercourse or with an intricate description of the moral theology of contraception. This conversation will recur and recur over a period of years.
But we still have to be vigilant — some things may have to be explained sooner than we’d like, because of particular situations we come up against. It’s a little bit easier when we homeschool, because then there’s not the problem of the school deciding to introduce a subject before our particular child is mature enough to handle it (a problem that Catholic schools aren’t exempt from).
Anyway, if your child hasn’t asked The Big Question yet — or if there’s any question at all you expect to have to answer with confidence and delicacy — do yourself a favor and write out your answer ahead of time, so you can be ready when the time comes.
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