Salt-n-Pepa

Even though I've been gone eight years, I still scan the front page of The Irish Times online every day, just to get a sense of what's going on, and what the news looks like from Outside. (To be honest, sometimes it's the only place I look at the news.) And even though yesterday I swore off advice columns, I do sometimes find myself clicking through to read John Sharry's parenting wisdom, if only to see What People Are Doing At Home.

(Unrelated, but I have to say there's an awful lot of soccer, GAA, and golf news making it to the front page. Shouldn't that stuff be kept where it belongs, on the sports pages, for people who care. Why are you trying to make me care about hurling, even if it is the national sport?)

So this column caught my eye recently. To do away with the suspense and get to my point (get to my point? why would I do that?), in it the mother of a nine-year-old says that recently her daughter asked her where babies come from, and the mother uncomfortably changed the subject.

What? What? And again, I say, what? Where did they get this "reader"? She can't be that much older than me, and yet she sounds like someone of my mother's generation, not mine. Did they invent her, and stretch the realistic age of the questioning child as far out as they could for some unfathomable reason? Are there really, seriously, parents out there in 2011 who haven't said a word to their kid about sex in a life that has spanned almost a decade, and who still aren't sure whether they should?

(Sorry, Monkey would like you all to know that the Baby Bullet now comes with a steamer that doubles as a steam sterilizer. Isn't that amazing? Don't I need one? Isn't advertising great?)

I know not all children are as questioning as Monkey. I wasn't - I had a sixth sense for potentially cringe-inducing subjects, and steered clear as much as I could. But even I remember subtly prodding my parents, almost against my better judgement, for information I half-wished, half-dreaded hearing directly from them. It would have been better than ignorance, or vague inaccuracies gleaned in the playground. How can we expect our children to have morals, values, and the like, if we don't give them first the correct information, and then our own take on how to behave? By osmosis?

I suppose in the olden days, parents relied on Religion to promulgate this information, in its obfuscatory and guilt-fuelled way. And let's not dwell on how well that worked out in my home country, among others. I think/hope we all know now that it's up to us to teach our children about sex in a timely manner, as soon as they ask and (especially, maybe) even if they don't. And to make it not so much teaching as talking, explaining, chatting, and making it a topic of conversation that is definitely not taboo.