Christine Strandt and her husband thought they had it down pat. They wanted to tell their oldest son about sex before anyone else did, had discussed how they were going to present it and felt confident that they had time. He was 9.
“We were thinking, Oh, nine years or so for a little boy would be plenty, plenty early to start talking about sex,” said Strandt, a mother of three from Elmhurst whose husband teaches voice at Moody Bible Institute.
And it might have been, if not for a sleepover their son attended where he first heard about sex from the last place the Strandts would have expected it: his friends from the family’s Wheaton church.
“He came home and he had all these questions,” Strandt said. “We were looking at him like, Where in the world did this come from? And he said, `The guys were all talking about sex last night.’ And we thought, Wait a minute, how did we miss the boat on this one?”
It is a boat whose arrival many parents await with, if not dread, then certainly trepidation. Sooner or later, they are going to have to make a judgment call: How old should their children be when they start talking with them about sex, drugs and other subjects it might be tempting to avoid?
An initiative by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Children Now is advising parents to do it sooner.
In a national advertising campaign created by the Advertising Council, they are encouraging parents to start conversations about sex, drugs, AIDS and violence when children are between 8 and 12 years old.
“That’s earlier than many parents feel comfortable talking about these issues, particularly to . . . really go into the tough issues of relationships, peer pressure, the hard decisions of when to know when you are ready for a sexual relationship,” said Lois Salisbury, president of Children Now, a child-advocacy organization based in Sacramento.
And the organizations are suggesting that parents not just answer questions, but start conversations.
“There is a gap where the kids are uncomfortable asking and the parents are uncomfortable initiating,” Salisbury said. “This is intended to bridge that gap.”
Supporters of the initiative, including Boys and Girls Clubs across the country, say that in a world where children hear about violence, drugs and sex at younger ages than earlier generations, time is of the essence.
“Some studies suggest that children, if they know the information beforehand, not when they get older, may be able to get some defenses beforehand,” said Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who serves on the campaign’s honorary committee.
The idea strikes a chord with many parents.
“You can’t imagine what the kids are into up here,” said Frankie Kulp, a mother of three from Deerfield who knows of a 7th grader who is drinking regularly.
“I do not believe, on certain topics, that you can be too early,” said Kulp, who is also a board member of Pediatric AIDS Chicago. “You will lose out.”
Preteenagers are at an ideal age for such conversations, said Matt James, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-policy philanthropy based in Menlo Park, Calif.
“There is a window of opportunity between 8 and 12 when kids are able to process a lot of this information, and they still really do look toward their parents as the most important source of information and the one they trust most,” he said. “That changes later in the teenage years; the media and friends become more important sources.”
Younger children are not contending with the coolness factor, agreed Dr. Miriam Gutmann, a psychiatrist with the Chicago Center for Family Health.
“I don’t want to write off adolescence; there are wonderful opportunities there” for communication, she said. “But to some degree there may be a little less baggage when you’re dealing with a younger child. It’s not uncool then to be with your parents.”
Talking to children early increases the odds that they will turn to you for advice later, said Lynne Dumas, author of the initiative’s 60-page booklet for parents and of a book, “Talking with Your Child About a Troubled World.”
“It gives you the opportunity to put things in perspective, to give your home rules, your moral beliefs,” she said. “Why leave this stuff up to chance when you have the opportunity to take control?”
But whether talking with your children will keep them from taking drugs or becoming sexually active is another question.
Some studies have shown that teenagers who talk to their parents about sex, for example, are less likely to become sexually active or more likely to use contraception or try to prevent AIDS. But other studies have shown that parental communication makes no difference at all.
The idea seems to appeal to parents. In a survey conducted for the “Talking with Kids about Tough Issues” campaign, 56 percent of parents of 8- to 12-year-olds agreed that most parents wait too long to talk with their children about difficult issues.
On the other hand, Beth Keister, a mother of three from Lake Zurich, found little agreement when she attended the parent-education meeting in preparation for her 10-year-old daughter’s 5th grade sex-education unit.
“A lot of parents didn’t want this brought up to their kids at all. They said, `Why does this have to be brought up so soon?’ ” she said. “And other people, when they got to explaining conception and fertilization of the egg, were saying, `Well, my son already knows that.’ “
Not all experts are sold on the notion that earlier is better. In “The Hurried Child,” David Elkind, professor of child development at Tufts University, wrote that parents sometimes confuse their own needs with their children’s.
“I believe that many of those who would teach young children about AIDS, nuclear war, and child abuse are really dealing with their own anxieties and fears by projecting them upon children,” he wrote.
And Dr. Mark Walker, a psychiatrist affiliated with Northwestern Memorial Hospital who treats adolescents and their families, thinks that, except for children growing up in neighborhoods with high rates of early sexual activity, explaining sex at the age of 8 or 9 is too soon.
“A child is not having sexual feelings at the age of 8,” he said. To explain the mechanics of sex “is scary to children who have no experience of puberty.
“One of the roles of parents is to protect children. Even if society is pressuring them, I think it could be a very valuable role of parents, at least of 8-year-olds, to give them a little longer before confronting them with extremely adult subjects, especially (about activities) they don’t want them engaging in for another 8 or 10 years.
“There are some children for whom this would be a premature ending of childhood.”
The stealing of innocence “is a very legitimate concern that a number of parents have expressed,” said Lois Salisbury of Children Now. “But in fact it’s not grounded in what we know about what children are exposed to.”
A poll conducted for the campaign found that 73 percent of children between 10 and 12 wanted to know more about AIDS protection; 66 percent wanted to know more about sexually transmitted diseases, and 58 percent wanted to know more about peer pressure to have sex.
“Most kids are exposed to AIDS, to sexuality, to violence, to drugs, through the media, through the playground, in their neighborhood, at very high degrees, at rates quite unimaginable for those of us who grew up at a different time,” Salisbury said.
“You as a parent have to ask, `Where do I want them to hear about it first? From me, TV or the schoolyard?’ “
A recent study suggested that girls may be reaching puberty earlier than was believed. It found that 50 percent of black girls, and 15 percent of white girls, were beginning to develop sexually by age 8.
The figures may be skewed, however, because the survey was of girls visiting pediatricians, and some were presumably seeking medical advice because they were developing early.
Clare Robbins, 12, who lives on the North Side, is glad her mother explained sex to her when she was 7 and her mother was pregnant with her younger sister.
“It does sound strange” when first explained, she said, but not scary. “I was kind of relieved,” she said. “I knew more what it was about.”
And she likes the fact that her parents have been frank with her. “It kind of makes you feel like you’re trusted by your parents, and they don’t have to hide anything from you,” she said.
“I always talk to my mom about something I don’t feel right with or something I don’t understand. I could ask my parents anything.”
Elias Cepeda, 13, who lives in the city’s Pilsen neighborhood, said that his parents’ openness with him from an early age has made him feel he can still talk to them, something few friends at his North Side private school do.
“I think the problem is when out of nowhere, parents start talking to kids and they haven’t done it before,” he said. “Then the kids . . . feel the parents don’t really want to talk with them, but are forced into it.”
Some parents are already following the path suggested by the new initiative. Lesley Meeks, a Flossmoor mother of three, told her two older children about sex when they were 8.
She chose that age, she said, because children then are intensely curious about the natural sciences, but young enough that they are not yet “in the heat of the storm” of the hormones being discussed.
“It’s academic,” she said. “It’s information about the world.”
But she and her husband made sure they gave their children more than information.
“We talked about how you fall in love with someone and you want to spend your life with this person, and God has given us a way to show our love in a really unique way that you don’t share with anyone else,” she said.
The “Talking With Kids About Tough Issues” campaign advises exactly that sort of conversation: parental values along with information. Other suggestions: Create an open environment where children feel free to ask you anything. If you don’t know something, admit it. Get a sense of your child’s level of understanding before you answer questions. And know when your child has heard enough, and back off.
“There wasn’t `A Talk,’ ” Christine Strandt said of her family’s explanations of sex. “We had multiple talks. They only take in what they can handle at the time.”
She also regularly uses TV news reports as conversation starters. When gunfire recently forced an elementary school in the Cabrini-Green public housing complex to suspend classes, she brought the subject up.
“(I asked), `What do you think it would be like to be going to school where you heard gunshots on a regular basis and you had to go in the hall and lie down?’ I really want to get them talking about things,” she said.
For families living these things, the conversations take on a keen urgency. Maleesa Ruby Lewis, has been raising two children in the Robert Taylor homes, where she grew up. She has been talking to them about drugs and violence for years.
Judging by her 10-year-old son’s disgust at television kisses, she thinks he is still too young to hear about sex. She began telling her daughter about sex in 6th grade and considers it not a moment too soon. When she graduated from 8th grade, three of her friends had already had babies.
“I talk to my daughter to prevent her from making the same mistakes I made,” said Lewis, who got pregnant at 15. “I have talked to her about birth control. I have told her that you can always have a kid, but you can never get your life together once you have a kid early in life.”
Even parents committed to talking early to their children constantly wrestle with questions of how early is appropriate for each child.
“There is no generic 8-year-old sex lecture,” Gutmann said. “Each kid is different.”
Whatever parents choose to answer, they should anticipate the questions, said Linda Woods-Smith, director of community education in the Chicago area for Planned Parenthood, which produced a video and activity book last year to help parents talk with children about sex aimed at 10- to 14-year-olds.
“Most kids want to talk to their parents, particularly about sex. It’s home; it’s where we learn our values, where we’ve grown up. If you can trust anybody, it’s mom and dad.”
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Copies of “Talking With Kids About Tough Issues” are available free by calling 800-244-5344.
