My daughter will be 11 this month; she is the oldest of my three children, my boys are 7 and 8 years old. So, she is the first child to have ‘the talk’ with me, but I only covered menstruation and bra shopping…Sex talk? UGH, I don’t wanna! Nevertheless, I know I have to, I can’t rely on the school, so I turned to the Internet, to try to get some idea of maybe how to approach the subject. I found myself in some off-the-wall parenting forum and submerged in a thread relating to this very topic.
Now what I’m about to tell you may or may not shock you, because it’s ‘old news’ – but I found an article from Aug. 26, 2011, about a school in Basel, Switzerland that was introducing kindergarteners to fabric models of human genitalia in a “sex box” to teach them that “contacting body parts can be pleasurable.” Have you heard of this? Obviously I hadn’t, until now, and my jaw is still wide open… And, if that were not bad enough, the sex box allegedly uses models and recommends children massage each other or rub themselves with warm sand bags, accompanied by soft music. See what’s in the box.
Okay, now you just think about THAT for a moment, think with me because I’m still thinking…First of all, the name of the ‘box’ is so wrong, on so many levels, and Christoph Eymann, Basel education minister and member of the liberal democrat party (LDP), admitted this faus pax. Gee, thank goodness for that, huh?
I didn’t dig any further to see whatever came of the sex box, feel free to dig around if you like. However, it did open my eyes to the fact that waiting until my kids are almost 11 years old is apparently too old to start talking to them about sex. I do talk to them about their bodies, what is normal, what to expect, etc…the developmental stuff, but not actual sex or masturbation, which is what some schools around the world are apparently teaching kindergartners. I’m even more curious now about what the general consensus is when it comes to sex education and children. Oh, and hey, does it matter if the teacher is male or female? Hmmm….
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