How to Have Honest Conversations with Your Kids About the Body, Sex, and Desire with Jay Stringer and Heather Stringer

by on August 16, 2024

Parents, this episode is for you! Join Rachael Clinton Chen as she sits down with Jay and Heather Stringer to explore how to talk to your kids about sensitive topics like the body, desire, sex, puberty, and even pornography in ways that are kind and attuned to their needs. 

Jay and Heather share the importance of parents first exploring their own stories around sexuality, as unresolved issues or patterns in our own upbringing can impact how we approach these conversations with our children. 

In this episode, you’ll find thoughtful discussions on attachment, body image, puberty, sex, and how to navigate challenging subjects like porn and sexting. Instead of having one big, awkward conversation, Jay and Heather suggest having ongoing, age-appropriate chats that feel natural and comfortable.

The aim is to empower your kids to feel confident and informed as they learn about their bodies and desires, all within the safety of a loving and supportive environment.

If you’re looking to change the narrative for your kids around sex and want to create intentional, meaningful conversations, this episode is a great place to start.

Please note that this episode contains discussions of sex and sexual development and may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

Listener Resources:

About our Guests:

Jay Stringer: Jay Stringer is a compassionate and experienced guide, dedicated to helping both men and women find freedom from sexual brokenness and pursue the life they truly desire. A licensed mental health counselor, an ordained minister, and an acclaimed international speaker, Jay provides a safe and supportive environment for individuals seeking to address unwanted sexual behavior. He is the author of Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing, which explores the underlying drivers of unwanted sexual behavior, offers valuable insights into why individuals may remain trapped in self-destructive patterns, and provides strategies to overcome the burden of shame. Jay’s academic background includes an MDiv and a master’s degree in counseling psychology from the renowned Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. Additionally, he has received specialized training under Dr. Dan Allender while serving as a Senior Fellow at the Allender Center. 

Heather Stringer: As a ritual maker, Heather Stringer curates spaces to mark significant moments in people’s lives. Rituals are powerful because they allow disruptions and change to be engaged with meaning and possibility. Rituals interrupt old behaviors, hold and name the breadth of the human experience, and allow for creativity to flow out of chaos.  Heather has cultivated a life of ritual, where creative acts of turning towards our life, break us open to who we are. She believes through the embrace of story and honor of the past we can transform and be set free.

Episode Transcript:

Rachael: Good people with good bodies. I’m so deeply grateful to have Heather and Jay Stringer here with me today to provide some generous, embodied and human-sized wisdom on how in the heck we can talk to our kids about desire and sex and pornography and these things that we are desperate to be able to provide generous and connective conversation around, but also feel often very ill-equipped and scared to do so. Let me just say welcome. So glad you guys are here.

Heather: It’s good to be with you.

Jay: Thank you for inviting us.

Rachael: Heather and Jay are friends and colleagues of mine and have both already been on the Allender Center Podcast before. Honestly, they are a powerhouse couple with distinct gifts and callings. So let me do a little bit of an introduction that will only cover the tip of the iceberg. Heather is an artist, a ritual maker, a therapist and a writer. She actually has a book coming out this spring that you should keep an eye out for. She stewards Life and Ritual, providing resourcing and information on trauma-informed rituals that can really help you heal and live a more full life. I can honestly say I have been a beneficiary of Heather’s ritual making in a part of my own healing journey, specifically around desire that radically shifted my life. So thank you, Heather. I always love an opportunity to hear from you and talk more with you. Jay is a therapist, minister, researcher, and writer who courageously tends to the intersection of story body, desire, sexual brokenness, and the liberation that we’re really meant for when we don’t neglect all the core parts of what make us human. He is the author of Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing. He, in collaboration with the Heart of Man, has created the Journey course. He offers trainings and resourcing, and he’s working on a book right now as well on desire that I am super excited about. So again, they live in New York with their two kids and pup and are just incredible people. So here’s the real talk. I’m desperate for more insight into how to have really good conversations with my own kids around their bodies, their sexuality, their arousal and their desire, and also a lot of the things they have to contend with that I did not. I didn’t have a cell phone when I was a kid. I didn’t have the internet. I didn’t have access to pornography in the same way that we know that they do and all the research shows. And I was kind of browsing through Instagram and I saw that you guys were hosting a conversation called Body Talks and a workshop to prep parents for great conversations, and I couldn’t make it. And I was like, how? I need to hear what they have to say about this. And also, I know so many of our listeners are in this same place of wrestling. And so I am truly grateful that you said yes to joining me today. And I just want to make space for our audience and for myself to hear from you more about your wisdom. So tell me a little bit, I mean obviously both of your work makes sense why you would want to have this conversation, but tell me a little bit more what compelled you to start crafting and curating this particular conversation?

Heather: Thank you for that really kind intro. It’s so good to be with you. I was trying to think about it, Jay, how did we come to this other than being at our kids’ school? And we had moved to New York City and I think our kids were five and seven at the time. And so there was something about volunteer hours that were needed for the school and being like, I don’t want to work at the library. I don’t want to do certain other things, so maybe we should craft the talk about how do we talk about body image, sex and pornography given that we are at a small Christian school and under the assumption that these conversations aren’t probably happening. And so I think that was more or less the catalyst. Selfishly, it was so good to just really be intentional with this content because if I’m not intentional things, I just kind let things go and it’s probably a human tendency. So there was something about being intentional. How do we actually go about this in a way that is holistically helpful?

Jay: Yeah, I think that’s part of the origin story of how This Body Talks event came to be. But I think also just as, I mean as a therapist and just someone who has grown up in the church purity culture, the example I always use is learning about sex education in the church is a little bit like going to culinary school, but the only thing that they teach you about is salmonella and food poisoning. And then they expect this masterpiece out of you, and that’s the dynamic is maybe we had one long way too overdrawn out conversation with our mom or our dad or our youth pastor about this. And it was way too late. It really wasn’t adequate information. And so most of us come into this conversation completely under-resourced ourselves, and we never received the education that we desired and deserved. And so I think that was part of where we were coming from is how do we develop a holistic event where people are invited to understand their own story, how they relate to sex and sexuality, and then what are some very concrete, practical steps that parents need to have some of the best conversations with their kids? And all the research says that if you really engage these conversations well with your kids, your kids will have, they report attachment scores as so much higher with their parents. They get involved in sex much later. They have lower rates of STIs and teen pregnancy. So the more proactive and the more responsible we can be as parents, the whole family system really flourishes as a result. But then we also give our kids the education that they really need to live healthy flourishing lives. So yes, as parents, we needed to do it for ourselves, but also just seeing so many of our clients and a lot of the churches that we work with, people just kind of look a little bit dazed and confused and are exceedingly nervous about the topic of desire. So this was our attempt to move the needle a little bit in our niche of the world.

Rachael: I love it because the reality is I know for myself, desire was not a part of the conversation at all. Lust was a part of the conversation. If desire was a part of the conversation, it was only dangerous. But someday I was supposed to magically wake up and just be overflowing with desire that for most of my life, I had been told was the most dangerous thing about me. And full disclosure, just for those of you listening, going, I’m already too late, I feel that a little bit myself. I’ve got a 12 and a 14-year-old, and I think we’ve done the best we can and I still find myself feeling paralyzed to enter this conversation, both I don’t want to do the same harm to them that I felt like I experienced around this, but I also don’t want to bring it up too soon or embarrass them or over give permission. And I just, man, it’s like I have a lot of trauma-informed resourcing. I have done a lot of work to heal and I still find my own self, exactly how you said, Heather, if I don’t have an intentional path that feels like clear kind of grasping for straws because the reality is in some ways they’re so far ahead of us in what they have access to. But I still live in this delusional land that like, well, when’s the appropriate time to talk about it? So maybe you guys can help us. How do you even begin to think about entering this conversation?

Heather: I mean, I think we begin with, this is not going to be surprising to the audience, but you begin with doing your own story work around sexuality. So I’ll share a brief example, a personal example that reveals when things get awkward or when you feel paralyzed, oftentimes it’s because it’s provoking something in your past that you have not necessarily fully dealt with. So when Jay and I were doing the webinar a few weeks ago, it was such a lovely time because it felt like, oh, there was such a desire to be communally engaging these topics and how often we’re siloed. So there were just so many questions at every juncture. And one of the questions that came in right before Jay and I took a break was this mom was saying that her daughter, when she’s giving her daughter a massage, her daughter just expresses so much pleasure and delight in it. And so when Jay and I went on break, I was like, how are we going to engage? Is this daughter, it sounds like what’s going on with her? And Jay’s like Heather, she is free to express her pleasure in that massage and the people around her because the mom was worried about her getting made fun of, or her brother is mocking her and he’s like, that is either envy at play or a kind of mockery of how much freedom she has with her body. And it was this moment of, oh my goodness, I have because of my own story, I have treated pleasure with so much anxiety, with so much nervousness around like, is this okay or this not okay. And so it was just a really beautiful here and now moment of if I’m not actively engaging, what have I done with pleasure? What have I done with my own sexuality? What was the sexuality atmosphere in my own home? Then you’re going to play out things with your kids. I’m going to play out things with my daughter when she’s expressing pleasure in something. I’m not going to be able to join her in a moment that I think is meant to be joined and celebrated. So I think that’s where we begin. It’s a part of the whole.

Jay: Two stories that come to mind for me are, I think I’ve told this story in other contexts, but my grandmother, Dorothy, was just such a character growing up. She was just, I kind of described her as this cold steel door of emotion. A lot of my friends have great with their grandmothers, and I just never did, at least with Dorothy. And long story short, I tried to get to know her story and I took her out to a cafe and asked her just questions that any inquiring grandson might want to know. And one of the things that she said to me is she said, Jay, there are some stories you just don’t tell. There are some doors you just don’t open. And so that went through that experience in grad school when I was trying to learn about my story and I realized that has been something of the opposition that I have been up against my entire life. There are some dynamics within my sexuality. There are some dynamics within my expression that I’m just not supposed to look at. And after we did a little bit of digging, we found out that my grandmother had probably been through a sexual assault probably around the age of 13 or 14. And so just even from an epigenetic generational standpoint, there are forces at play that really lead to that level of restriction, that level of like, I should not be talking about this or this is not comfortable. So that would be the first thing is just like there are many generations at work in our hearts and in our bodies as we come to this conversation. And I think every age of parenting is difficult. I found there were parts about zero to two that were really sweet and enjoyable but also maddening. And then I loved when my son turned two years old because he was running around and had language. But then when my son turned 10, I started feeling a lot of resistance towards him, particularly around the areas of his body and his freedom with food and expression. And so I have just had disordered eating throughout my life, a lot of body dysmorphia on my own part. And so when he turned 10, that was kind of the beginning of the crap show in my life where a lot of things around food and body image and then you read the statistics and body dysmorphia is equal for adolescent boys and girls and the levels of just body contempt are rising pretty rapidly among boys. And so I think we all come into these conversations around body image and porn and sexuality and desire completely underdeveloped ourselves. And that’s part of the gift and the madness of parenting is that they are going to corner you very quickly with where you’re underdeveloped and where you’re not comfortable. And that’s the invitation is not to ignore that, not to abdicate responsibility, but to really say what is being stirred within me and what do I need to address? 

Rachael: I love how you’re making that connection, that all those things are really connected and pretty integral. And I’ve seen that play out with my own kids in their experience of a racialized world in a very different way than my experience has been and what it means to be short. And also dealing with racial stereotypes that go along with that. It’s like the body and it is like, okay, so maybe I just need to hear this for myself. You’re not saying that in order to have this conversation, we have to come to complete healing in our past stories. It’s just that we have to be aware that they’re there and know the places where we’re going to need some different resourcing to stay present with our kids and be aware when we get taken out by shame. I mean, that’s the thing. I feel like you’re so right. Why do I feel so much shame right now and why do I want to fiercely protect this little person when they feel free? So what’s happening, what’s at play where is there still an innocence they have that maybe I never had? And I think it’s so encouraging to hear it’s not about completely healing before you enter the conversation because none of us would ever enter the conversation that it’s okay if these things are ongoing work for us, but it’s not an excuse to avoid or abandon or neglect a kind of intimacy that’s really necessary for their development

Jay: Precisely. So I think it’s just paying attention to your energy of maybe you are a nurse and you love anatomy, and that’s where you should start is start with the things that you are excited about to be like, aren’t our bodies completely amazing? But we have certain themes that we are going to be more naturally predisposed to be comfortable talking about. But then there also might be things around our bodies or sexuality or pornography that we might have some level of resistance or shame, and those are the subjects to begin to lean into. And just a lot of times people will seek out therapy for past abuse, for past family dynamics when their child reaches a particular age that they were when everything was unfolding in their life. So it’s got to be both a sense of what are you excited to engage, but also how do you have integrity with some of the anxiety or the just controlling tendencies? And if you pay attention to those, they’re going to show you some themes in your life that you probably have not quite addressed.

Rachael: I’m assuming that this is not something you can just, I mean obviously if you’re not having other conversations with your kids or there’s not a channel that’s open, what else is needed to really lean into these conversations with our kids?

Jay: Yeah, we would always say that you can’t have these conversations in a generative way if you don’t have a good attachment with your kids. And so we always talk about Dan Siegel’s four S’s, which are Seen, Safe, Soothed, and Secure. And so just to go over those very quickly seen is this experience of you have a mom or a dad that sees your physical needs, that sees the runway ahead of you and knows what you need, but they also are able to see into some of your emotional needs and some of the heartache and delight in your life and they enjoy seeing you there. Safe is the experience of a mother or a father are giving you the knowledge that you need to be able to feel safe in your body. It’s not a home full of contempt or shaming, but it’s really a home that allows a particular freedom to fail from time to time so that they know that if they make a mistake, that they are able to move towards relationship instead of needing to hide. So that’s really important as you get older that a lot of us, if we don’t feel safe in our relationships, we are going to develop more secrecy or suppression. And then soothed is the experience of knowing that the caregivers in your life are going to be places of soothing and affect regulation for you rather than a place of dysregulation. So we have a lot of parents, and I do this myself, that if I ask my kids to regulate themselves and I’m not regulated, which is beyond hypocrisy, but it’s that sense of how do we offer a realm of soothing for them? And again, we’re building some of the initial scaffolding of when they go through really intense emotional disruption, do they know that they can pursue relationship instead of something in the digital world, a screen pornography, something that might not be healthy for them, so are they experiencing relational soothing with you? And that if you have those three things, then you begin to feel secure in your body. If you have all the information that you need about how your bodies work, how desire works, what’s out there in the world, threats that are out there, delights that are out there, then you are going to feel much more secure in your own body. And so I think that’s where the conversation has to begin is what’s the quality of the attachment that you have with your kid? Because if that attachment is not there when you come in with tips and techniques and some level of good discipline for your kids, but you don’t have that attachment, then they’re really not going to take in what it is that you’re saying.

Rachael: Yeah.

Heather: I would say too, a good gauge is how do you play with your kids? The realm of play is so essential, and I think it can reveal so much of the health of the relationships is how well do you play? And that’s always a factor for me where it’s like, oh, I am leading towards more control and more needing things to be in a particular way. I can tell I’m not giving myself over to the relationship because it’s best expressed in play and kids respond the best in play. And those are the moments where I know Amos is harder to connect with and emotionally, but when we’re playing, there’s something of all the questions that come up, all the different observations he has that is so much more accessible. So I do think ask yourself, how am I playing with my kids or not? And how do I play? There’s something really important and maybe a helpful window into the levels of connection you have with your children.

Rachael: Oh gosh, it just had me, I have a toddler who’s almost two, and she, just thinking about her experience of her body is so innocent right now, and of course because she’s two, but I’m worked really hard for that because I have a lot of moments where she’s pointing out things on my body or she’s showing me things on her body and she has no problem delighting and touch and physical affection, but she has pushed up against my control freak. So I’m like, wow, I feel really exposed. I thought I had done so much more work the other day. Literally someone was like, what did mama say? All I had said was Be careful. And she went, no, no, no. And I was like… and I think that’s something in approaching body, I know so much of my story, I still am so fiercely protective out of trauma, and I am like Michael and I laugh a lot. He’s like, are you a yes person or a no person? I’m, I think we know the answer to this, and he’s more of a yes person, and I think we have a good balance there. But I’m so aware, even in my play and my attachment style is still so fiercely protective that it can feel more restrictive or the world is dangerous. And I think particularly around bodies and desire and sexuality and pornography, it’s like it can get, I can get, so I’m much more leaning toward the I want to protect you, so I’m going to tell you all that’s bad so you can make good choices and really neglect the, I want to celebrate what’s so good and what you’re meant for. And when I was in youth, I worked in youth ministry for a while and I would get so mad at parents because of the purity culture, the way that I would be having these really honest conversations with their kids, and they needed so much more insight on their bodies, on their sexuality, on what’s actually happening, how they could make wise choices, that they are actually making choices even if things are just happening, that they need to have more volition and just feeling like parents forgot what it was like when they were teenagers. And it’s just back to that what were their stories, that it was just a lot easier to pretend if they had their kids in the right environment with the right information, then they were going to drastically have different options of behavior. And so I think that reminder that you do have to work toward, you have to know your story, but you also have to work toward building a kind of attachment that is safe enough and big enough and can hold enough complexity. What it’s to be human and what it’s to be humans full of desire in a body who are sexual beings, whether we are or not.

Jay: And that’s where I think the neurobiology of desire comes in because I mean, if you were to think about a manual transmission car, you have a accelerator, a brake, and a clutch. When we are kids, it’s helpful to remember this, but we are all accelerator. We are all go into the world, say everything, explore everything, touch everything. We are all accelerator. And so that’s the sympathetic nervous system. But we also have a part of our autonomic nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is essentially the braking system. But the dilemma is that kids don’t have much of a very developed break. They do rely on a parent’s “no” to be able to not get in trouble, not stay up too late, to brush their teeth, but the root word of discipline is actually to teach. So it’s disciple. And so that’s kind of the real litmus test of your no is this no, is this discipline really helping them to understand their motivations, their desires, their drives, or is it just trying to shut them down? And what the neuroscientists talk about with regard to shame, and that’s where the clutch comes in, is the clutch is essentially a parent’s kindness. And so a lot of us, when we grew up, we had parents or a faith system that when we were exploring curious about something, pursuing something that was interesting or sexual or pleasurable, we had someone slam on the brake without the clutch of kindness and neurobiologically that’s what we experience with shame. And so that’s good parenting in this realm is just to remember your 2-year-old wants to explore anything and everything. They want to say everything. They don’t have this governor on them, and it’s so delightful. But that’s also true when they are adolescents is they want to know about their bodies and what’s out there. And so how do we engage and honor their accelerator and then also be able to have a clutch of kindness as we engage certain braking systems that they probably need some as well.

Rachael: Alright, so we know we got to grow a more awareness of our story. We have to actually develop some more secure attachment with our kids and with ourselves. Let’s get to the conversations. Let’s talk a little bit about I myself like, okay, okay, I can do that. I can know my story. I feel like we’re working on some good attachment. That whole COVID season where we just lived in a house together forever, we really built some really good attachment. What are the kinds of conversations we’re having?

Heather: Yeah. So there’s two different kinds of conversations. One is proactive and the other is responsive. So the proactive is it’s implied that you are actively engaging. We say 100, 1 minute conversations with your kids. So not these long-winded at 13. I mean, I remember I had two separate conversations with my parents. One was at a restaurant in Chicago, it was like a spinning restaurant. It was at the top. It was spinning around. My dad is telling me about purity and giving me the ring and just squirming throughout the whole time. But what we’re seeing is that it’s just to have these one minute, nothing, nothing too elaborate, nothing forceful, but just a simple like, oh, we just saw that on the tv. Well, I guess that’s more responsive. So it is like at six to eight years old, we’re going to have the conversation around sex, curious if you have any thoughts about it. And then giving them a very straightforward, not using, it’s really important that as parents, we don’t nickname body parts that we don’t nickname even processes, because that actually is really for someone who is a predator. When a child doesn’t have the correct anatomical names, they’re more likely to get duped. They’re more likely to get manipulated because the names aren’t correct. And so it’s just important. It’s not to say that don’t be playful with body parts or naming them, but also giving them the correct anatomical names. And so you’re going to have to do the work of saying that out loud by yourself. Jay and I joke, we’re like when we’re giving the talk to our kids’ school, we told the parents, go on a date and just say, penis, vulva, vagina, clitoris. Just say it to each other as the date. No, get comfortable, but do it before you go into conversation with your kid because they’re going to know it, they’re going to read it, and then they’re going to say, okay, maybe mom and dad aren’t as comfortable as I would need them to be in order to broach another conversation. Six to eight it’s good for them to know about intercourse. From two to four, I’m going out of order, but two to four, it’s really good to have proactive conversation around consent. Who gets to touch your body? And if you’re at the doctor’s office or you’re with a doctor, can the doctor touch your body when mom or dad aren’t there? No, no, it’s holy. You get to say no when you feel uncomfortable. If grandpa wants to give you a kiss and you don’t want it, you can say no. If you don’t want to give a hug to grandma, you can say no. So it’s early on giving them this notion of your no is so good and you don’t have to force your body into things that you don’t want to be a part of. And most likely they are so innocent at that point. They’re picking up on cues that maybe we’ve even grown blind to or we haven’t done the work in our story to notice. Oh, when grandpa does that, it actually is pretty intrusive. But because we’ve looked away from that and we haven’t done that work, we’re not as open to seeing it and our kids do see it. So those are, I mean that’s a little bit about proactive. You want to say more about that, Jay?

Jay: Yeah, if you’re looking at proactive conversations, you want to think about it just, I mean, as Heather was saying, what’s developmentally appropriate? So if we know that the average age of initial exposure to porn is about nine for boys and 11 for girls, you want to be a couple years ahead of that. So you want to be able to have a proactive conversation with your kids to be able to say, do you know what porn is? And being able to describe, it could be naked images of someone that you might run into or that you might run into when you’re online or maybe on the bus or at a friend’s house. And so just being able to give them language for what they are about to experience in the world is super important. But then to be able to kind of say, there might be a kid that will say, tell me more about that, or you might have a kid that won’t say anything. And that’s where it’s important to run them through a couple options with regard to what they might feel when they first experience it. You could feel disgusted, you could feel intrigued. A lot of times pornography is introduced to people relationally. And so being able to get a sense of just a tricky situation where someone’s saying, do you want to see something cool? Or This is what all the other girls or boys are doing. And then you feel, I want be included, but I also don’t want to say no or I’m intrigued. It’s just so important to give them language for what it is that they’re about to encounter. Or I think about just something like puberty. When I was 14, 15 years old, I was at a Southern Baptist high school going through puberty, which is just not an experience that I would wish on many people, but there were so many unspoken prayer requests around the age of 15. And an unspoken prayer request, at least in my high school, was essentially kids were masturbating and felt immense shame over it. And so one of the proactive conversations that we need to have, especially with our boys and Heather can talk more about conversations that we need to have with our girls, but between the ages of 13 and 15, a boy will essentially go from about 200 parts per million testosterone in their system to like 1400 parts per million. So it’s like going from a balanced bike, a pedal bike to an electric scooter all the way to a motorcycle if not a rocket ship. And if you are a 13, 14-year-old that has no experience and no language to be able to say, this is what is about to happen in your body. And so you’re going to have a lot of sexual desire, you’re going to want more experiences, you’re going to have way more of a search for novelty, for intrigue, for pleasure. And the only thing that they have is that premarital sex or premarital sexual desire is wrong or awful. That is going to be such a setup for so much shame and judgment for them. And so we want to be able to say, what are the developmental milestones that they’re about to go through? And that could be erections, that could be wet dreams, that could be testosterone, hair, any dimension of puberty. You really want to have those conversations long before they ever arrive at them so that when they do arrive at them, they have a sense of what’s going on in their bodies. And then they can ask clarifying conversations because a lot of us, if we’ve only had one conversation around this, we are going to forget it. And so there are conversations that I’ve had with both of my kids about dimensions of puberty and their bodies that I’ve had to have five or six times because I may have told them some version of it at three, and then I had to tell them another version at six. And then it becomes a different version now that they’re 11. So get used to the repetition, and just because you’ve covered the proactive conversation once doesn’t mean that you’re done. To Heather’s point, we don’t just need 1, 100 minute conversation. We need 100, 1 minute conversations about these dynamics that we’re going to go through.

Heather: Yeah. And as far as with girls in puberty, I mean so many clients of mine have come into my office saying when they were getting their period, they thought they were dying or they thought there was something severely wrong with their bodies because no one prepared them, or it was like this really embarrassing instance at school and they weren’t prepared for what could be happening. And so there’s statistics that show 55% of women are more likely to have below average sexual satisfaction when they weren’t given resources and education around what’s happening with their body as it begins to change. And for girls especially, change begins at nine. My daughter is already being like, I think I smell myself. I think I need deodorant. And it’s just beginning to feel the shift. And yet with girls, there’s such a wide range of changes that happen at a variety of times. So I go into the fifth grade class at my kids’ school to talk to the girls about all the different changes that their body is going to be happening and just tell them, diversity is where beauty exists. So you might be 16 and going through your period, you might have a very different body than what has been communicated on the billboards and on your screens. And to have them all put their hands in the middle and say, look at all the different hands, yes, they’re hands, but there’s different skin colors, there’s different wrinkles, there’s different… some fingers are straight, some are not. But this is what makes our world beautiful, is the diversity. And so giving them this more expansive understanding of what their body is going to be undergoing and the differences between their body and another person’s body. But that will, I mean, statistically, it helps them with their future sex life, their future marriage. I think even it helps them from being in abusive relationships when they have more knowledge and given, I think, reverence towards their body and what is shifting and changing. So just how important it’s to have those right of passages for our kids, especially at that critical age.

Rachael: This is so helpful, even just thinking through, because I think a lot of us go, okay, you have the sex talk when they’re getting close to puberty. And it’s like, what I love hearing you guys say is no, from two to four, this is a really important proactive conversation around bodies and consent that yeah, you’re going to revisit developmentally. You’re going to talk about sex, you’re going to introduce pornography. And then that gets more complex and more sophisticated, and hopefully setting the stage of these are okay conversations to have. You need a safe place to have hard conversations even when there’s been failure. So I wanted to say thank you. Just even giving some of those developmental frames is just so incredibly helpful in imagining a way to have proactive conversations. And I’m trying to hold on to, even if you’re a little late in the game, what we know about attachment is repair is always possible. You may not be able to make up for lost time, but it doesn’t mean, well, I didn’t have those conversations, so I guess we just missed our opportunity. Right?

Heather: And I think there’s something valuable about being honest with our kids too, even when we’re feeling uncomfortable about something that’s coming up. I think it’s actually more humanizing and more trust building when we say, Hey, listen, I’m actually feeling a lot that has to do with me. I want to come back to this conversation later because I need to do some work around what’s coming up. I think that builds security. It’s not that we have to know everything. It’s not that we have to have all the answers and to do it right. It’s more of like, can you be attuned to yourself and attuned to your kid? And can you give yourself permission to be really human in this?

Jay: Yeah. And the final category would just be responsive conversations. And that could be, Rachael, what you just mentioned. Maybe you feel like you miss something as a parent, but have no fear. There will be another opportunity to be able to revisit it. And this is what I personally love. I like the proactive conversations, but I love what it means to respond to things that are happening in culture. So a couple examples of this would be Peggy Orenstein, I think that’s her name, has done some really great book on for adolescent boys and girls. And one of the things that she talks about is that oftentimes people talk about having sex with their boyfriends or girlfriends as if you do it, you want to make sure that you don’t catch feelings as if catching feelings would be something similar to chlamydia. So I think that would be a really great conversation to have with your adolescents around, I was reading this book and they were talking about hookup culture, and there’s this notion of not wanting to catch feelings with someone, and then to be able to have a conversation around oxytocin and sex and how just maddening that can be to be connected with someone, but also not want to catch feelings and have a conversation about how sexuality is talked about among friends or at the school. Another responsive conversation would just be, I think it’s somewhere in the range of 30 to 40% of adolescents will receive a sext. And so I remember reading a New York Times article where they were going into that, and that would be a really great conversation to have when you’re in the car or at a red light, is just to be able to say, Hey, I was reading this article about sexting, and they said that 40% of teens have received one. Is that a dynamic at your school? Have you ever received that? But just being able to respond to what we are seeing in culture is so, so important. And then the last one that I would mention would just be, this kind of came out of some client work that I did, but essentially one of my client’s sons was at a sleepover where they were basically introduced to porn, and there was a couple parents that were kind of made privy to it. The host parents let all the other parents know that porn had been seen. One parent basically just kind of overreacted and unleashed on their kid for being so irresponsible and basically just shame them for the struggle that they’re going to experience for the rest of their life. They were not in their window of tolerance. They were highly reactive. But the parent that I was seeing, we basically did some work around how does she first regulate her own anxiety around this theme? And then what ended up happening is that she had a really great conversation, not just about the peer pressure involved for her son being introduced to porn, but they also started having a conversation about what type of pornography they were introduced to. And the version of porn was hentai, which was basically a Japanese anime porn that basically makes children, look like adults. It kind of adult defies innocent childlike faces. And so she went on to have a responsive conversation around hentai porn and the themes of racism embedded within it, the themes of objectification, the themes of, and so it became this initially really difficult conversation around her son being introduced to porn. But then as her husband and her and her son started having really remarkable conversations around themes that are embedded within porn. And so that would just be a great example of how to have a responsive conversation is your kids are going to be exposed to so much stuff out there. And if you can first regulate your own anxiety center yourself, and then think about what are the themes embedded with what they were exposed to or what they’re hearing about. And then go on to have really great conversations with them. And that’s the goal, is that you want to become the Google for your kids. So instead of them going to their middle school or high school peers or going to Google or Yahoo, they really, through this whole process, understand that my parent is one of the best sources for information. And so I’m going to go to them when I have questions. That’s the goal. That’s where, that’s what we’re hoping for.

Rachael: Well, as we move toward a close of this conversation, any final words you’d want to speak to our audience?

Heather: Well, I think the last thing that I’ll say is just how are you casting a vision for sexuality in your family? What are wanting to bring your kids into hoping for them to experience? I feel like I liken it to a really good meal that’s part of, instead of it being all prohibitive, it’s something that we get to experience and enjoy and the various dimensions of it. And that there is boundaries that are necessary. You don’t just want to eat, eat, eat, eat until you’re sick. There’s something of having some really clear boundaries, but that comes after the vision is cast. So just what do you hope for your children, for your family, as you think about sexuality and an expression of it?

Jay: Yes, I would say parents can do this. I know that there is some difficulty. There’s going to be some anxiety. There’s also going to be some excitement. And I might just end with a couple statistics that I think are just so good to be mindful of. So this is from the author Sheila Gregoires’s research and work. But this is what she found, that when children have a solid sex ed, they have a 45% increase in the likelihood to have high self-esteem in high school. They’re 33% less likely to report sexual pain disorders later in life. They’re 22% more likely to bring up difficult conversations with their parents about other themes. And then they are 13% more likely to have above average marriage satisfaction years later. So that’s why we’re doing this work, is that we are setting up our children not just to feel secure through some of the awkward, maddening times of adolescence, but really this is something that the return on investment of these types of conversations reduces sexual pain disorders, it increases marital satisfaction. So all those things that we hope and pray for our kids can really be accomplished through having intentional and kind conversations in this realm.

Rachael: Well, I want to say thank you, and I hope part of what you’re hearing and feeling is that you can have these conversations and you don’t have to come up with the plan or you can have resources. And so it’s my hope, Jay and Heather, that you keep creating more resources in this realm because I think it’s definitely a place that I am deeply benefiting from, and I’m sure others are too. So may there be more conversations, may there be more resourcing in this realm. And hopefully you’re feeling a little more empowered today to imagine and set intentions for how you want to approach these conversations with your kids. But thank you so much for being here with me.

Heather: Thanks for having us, Rachael. So good to be with you.

Jay: Such an honor to be with you.