Ask Lemmy

My parents raised me out in the wilderness in a literal compound and hour from the nearest convenience store with no phone or even a mailbox.

So yeah.... I had to learn everything about the world through a little black-and-white TV in my room that had big ol' rabbit ear antenna that if I moved just right, I could get PBS from another town that had a lot of educational programming. As long as it wasn't about "evolution" they were fine with me watching PBS.

If it wasn't for PBS I would probably be dead. Seriously, that life doesn't do a person well, both my parents and a sibling drank themselves to death, others are on the way. I however, learned science, and biology, and how to read and how to do math and a host of other topics that I am going to be an eternal sponsor of PBS for. There was one special that explained sex to some degree, but was still heavily censored. My parents were too busy being high and religious to dream of having an awkward talk with their son, so I was totally on my own.

Thankfully, I learned where to find the "relationship" books on my rare ventures into town to visit places like bookstores and managed to learn a lot about sex from pilfering a book from the sex and relationship section and reading it in the kid's books section.

I only know of one classmate who got the talk but personally I didn't get anything like the talk just my parents understanding that I knew.

Yes, even though they were religious they told me all about sex when I asked, including sex for pleasure and gay sex

Never did.

Parents never really talked about relationships or anything with my siblings or anything. But we had a whole course in middle school that taught us the ins and outs, I guess.

I never got "the talk". Dad considered it to be mom's job. Mom forgot she never had it with me; I'm one of over a half dozen kids and i believe her that she forgot me on top of her being very Catholic and very uncomfortable talking about sex.

I learned from reading on my own, picking up tidbits from friends (who barely knew more than me), and making mistakes. Having a bajillion younger siblings went a long way in teaching me to take safe sex seriously. I've changed diapers on enough younger siblings to last me three motherhoods. Hard pass.

My mom peaked in my room and left me with the American Girl book about hygiene and female anatomy. I don't think it said anything about sex. Just had to navigate that part of life armed with (mis)information from whispered conversations with friends over sleepovers.

I think back on how many experiences I had growing up that could have gone wrong. This was all happening just as AIM chatrooms and chat roullette were popular. And there were so many creeps that my friends and I talked to because we were curious. No normal adult was giving us the information, but plenty of adults online were happy to talk and ask for favors in return. Shivers down my fucking spine.

I am so thankful that I was too nervous to do anything and usually ended conversations quickly. But the risk of genuine harm was right there, and our parents had no idea. We laughed whenever we saw a penis appear on chat roullete and clicked away, but we were not mature enough to know how fucked up it was. It was our parents' job to guard us from that. Not by putting blinders on us. But by affording us the respect of an important conversation.

I am so passionate about people having this discussion with their kids. Kids are curious. The fact that the subject is taboo makes it even more exciting for kids. It is such a crucial moment in the transition to adulthood. Ignoring the conversation endangers them by making the subject seem exotic and inticing.

Have the conversation with your kids or someone else will. And you will have no control over how and when that happens.

Got the talk at ~17, about 5-7 years too late.

No. I'm first generation Indian in California so no. Thank god for schools in the early 2000s

I grew up in rural Ohio, USA. We had sex ed in 5th grade ('91, maybe?) that covered the very basic biological stuff. I think the following summer, we were supposed to go to a waterpark but had to cancel because my step-sister was on her period. Mom came in to talk about it, I showed her the pamphlet that school sent me home with, she read through it, then said to ask her if I had any questions. That was the first and last time any of that came up.

My parents were Catholic, so they never talked about sex per se. My "talk" was my dad saying, "I want you to remember to always respect women. And that means not doing anything inappropriate." Very informative.

my stepmother tried to explain how the hymen works to me, but described it as a "stopper" instead of the ring of tissue it actually is. so, I wound up mutilating myself in an attempt to "break" it. having one or more sexually repressed religious people as legal guardians can lead to some gnarly results.

surprisingly, middle school sex ed taught me a bit more than you'd think it would, including how a condom is put on.

Both constantly and never. I was born to teen parents, so as far back as I can remember, every other day, my Dad would constantly say "Whatever you do, don't get her pregnant." Even when I was far too young to understand what pregnant or sex was.

But the closest thing I got to "the talk" was when I was 17 and he randomly barges into the living, throws a pack of condoms at me, says "wrap your schlong" and then keeps walking to his bedroom.

Later that night I told him that A) I wasn't having sex B) didn't plan on it and C) that I wasn't even sure what to do with a condom or how throwing one at me was helpful. He shrugged "Sorry I don't have ace parenting skills or whatever" and that was the end of it.

I thought I learned how to have sex by watching porn, but... obviously that wasn't true so I had to be taught everything by partners. Including extremely basic things like what semen, periods or orgasms were.

Thanks Dad...

lolno. My parents didn't give a fuck about me.

no never had.

was about 30(M) when learned that the menstrual cycle in women is not the same as "heat" in dogs. was about last month when learned there is a time slice in the month where getting pregnant is almost impossible (right before / after cycle apparently ). shocked my mum when asked if humans are born with eyes open, or closed like puppies

but i never felt interested in that , just gross

Kinda embarassing, for my parents.

I was a precocious kid, read my way through libraries before we got online. By the time my parents got around to giving me the talk I had already started puberty, gave the talk to one of my friends who hit puberty early, and gone through a gender crisis to figure out I was enby.

My mother was very conservative and never talked about sex. She discovered I had discovered boobs on the internet though and freaked out, and I found out about sex with a Christian book left on my bed. It explained how I was being possessed if I masturbated

No, nothing ever from my parents. School had one session at some point. I can't say I remember anything from it.

I learned everything from the internet, my parents never told me a thing! Luckily, I had stumbled onto a very sex positive forum, and that’s where I got all my info—not pr0n. I asked a lot of questions (I wasn’t even 13 yet) and the folks there were very helpful. I learned how to not let anyone disrespect me, how to respect others, how to actually do… sex… anything at all—I had NO knowledge before going into the forum.

I had sex ed but it consisted of “this is your body changing, babby happens when sperm goes to egg”, I didn’t even know that for sperm to get to egg, penis goes into vagina! Or what an orgasm was! It was quite the journey.

The first time I heard about sex from a friend, I was around 5 or 6 and went to my mom if that's true. My mom went to the library, got some sex-ed books for kids and talked me through it. It ended up being not one single talk, but multiple, age appropriate ones spread over the years.

She didn't do a perfect job, I'd say. There were many things left unknown and she was awkward with the topic (not an issue as a kid, certain issue as a teen).Though, considering that she got all her sex ed from magazines back in the day, definite progress on a generational scale.

I'm confident that I could do a better job than her, because she did a better job than her parents. That's how it all works, no?

Eh, the school handled it, so my parents didn't need to x3

My mother made sure I knew what condoms were, and that I had attended health class when I had a serious girlfriend in high school.

Yes - I felt like I was getting in trouble, and it was somewhat traumatizing. Kind of hilarious in retrospect

Mom's side of the family is Catholic and my dad's side is super reserved, so I got nothing. Anything I know comes from school health classes (which were actually really informative) and the internet.

My mom also believes that this sort of thing shouldn't be taught in schools (at all) because it should be up to the parents to decide what their kids should know about the subject. She also says that her parents never taught her anything.

My mom was (and still is) very sex positive. She would answer any questions I had growing up. By the time school got around to teaching me sex Ed in 5th grade I already knew everything and then some.

My father basically never touched the subject until one day when I was ~17 almost 18 he came into my room and sat on my bed before he awkwardly tried to start talking about the topic and all I said was "I've been having sex for years dad" and then he slapped his knee, gave me a hug and walked out of my room.

I don't remember a talk about the mechanics of sex, pregnancy, STDs, etc. Clearly my parents were talking to me about that stuff without scarring me because I also knew it all long before sex ed (or really even before I gave any real thought to sex).

What I remember is the awkward talk with my mom after I got my first serious girlfriend about how "horny doesn't last nearly as long as fatherhood," the costs of hasty decisions, and "emotional responsibilities." To be fair, there were a lot of strollers at my HS graduation and I was glad to not be pushing any of them.

No.

I was lucky to have an elementary and middle school that still did sex ed talks. My dad wasn't in a talking mood after roofing all day every day and my mom was a puritanical prude who would much rather I figure it out than actually tell me how to exercise caution in order to avoid pregnancy.

My mother decided my father would explain to me. I was dreading it. He turned up looking pretty uncomfortable / fearful himself. It was excruciating before it even started. He opened with “they teach this at school don’t they?” and I saw my exit. “Yes”, I replied. And that was it.

We spent a few hours on it in school.

I was told the truth when I asked where babies come from. I remember seeing a stork deliver a baby in some cartoon when I was a kid, and I just assumed it was the animator's fever dream. I only found out maybe in the last 5 years or so (I'm 34) that some parents tell their children that it works that way.

Yep, the morning after I lost my virginity.

My father once mumbled something about “keeping it in the cage” that was about it.

After a tear through multiple foreign women I figured it out myself.

Hell no. My mother was a repressed prude and my dad never had a adult conversation with me in his life.

When I was a pre-teen I asked my mom about it because I'd been playing The Sims 2 and figured out that your sims can woohoo or they can try for baby, and both look like the same thing. And of course 1 sim day after the lullaby jingle plays upon woohooing the female sim enters the first trimester, and 3 sim days later you have a new baby sim in the family. She was very factual about it all, but didn't bother to talk at all about anything other than explaining vaginal sex. I had to piece the rest together from what I learned at school.

Fortunately I had fairly decent sex ed, except it was painfully boring and felt no different talking about human reproduction than when in highschool biology we talked about how plants reproduce (complete with extremely vague heavily photocopier-burned diagrams of anatomy that look almost entirely unlike what it's depicting which we had to label) but they at least discussed condoms and birth control pills, and even demonstrated a condom on a wooden phalis when I was in high school so that's a lot more than I'm sure some kids get

For my own kids, my oldest is 5 and has already asked. I've left it extremely scientific because she's way too young for a proper talk in just explaining that a male secretes sperm that fertilizes an egg which eventually forms a baby. She wanted more detail but I had to leave that at "when you're older". I'll probably have to give an updated talk when she's 7 or 8 to make sure she knows about periods and maybe I'll then go into more detail so she can be armed with knowledge should any boys take an interest in her (and statistically many boys have watched porn by age 10 which is terrifying)