These days, mums are urged to talk to their girls about puberty, sex and other such ‘awkward’ subjects.
But this mum is bucking the trend.
Jamie Harrington refuses to give her daughter ‘the talk’, no matter what age she is. Instead, she chose to talk to her about things right from the very beginning.
“I’ve been talking to her about her body, puberty, sex and all things blush-worthy since she was very little,” Jamie wrote on Totally The Bomb.
“Age appropriately, of course, but I made sure it was never a mystery to her.”
And that’s why she did it: so that it wouldn’t be a big, scary, weird, awkward mystery. So that her little girl would grow up feeling that her body and all of the things that she naturally goes through are, well, natural.
And so that, for that reason, she won’t feel uncomfortable talking to her mum about it, the way Jamie did when she was a teen.
The talk her own mum gave her “did nothing.”
“I stared at my legs the entire time, nodded, did my best not to think about the fact that people actually do that to each other, and promised her I had no questions when she was done,” she said.
“That was that. No more talk, no more anything. A one time deal and I’d survived. Barely.”
As soon as her hormones kicked in, Jamie began exploring things in secret, feeling the whole time that she was doing something wrong.
“I went to the library to read the books I wasn’t supposed to read, and watched Emmanuel on Cinemax late at night while no one else was around,” she wrote.
“I read just the sex scenes in my mom’s romance novels and truly thought that’s what sex was really like until I was old enough to know how very, very ill-informed I actually was.”
Remembering how secretive the whole thing was to her growing up, and how unnatural it all felt as a result, Jamie decided she was “going to do things differently” with her own kids.
And she has no regrets! “My daughter is now ten and has never shied away from asking me questions,” she wrote. “More than that, she’s not having to hide her curiosity from me."
"It’s not like I let her watch naughty movies or anything, but when she told me she wanted to be in the room when her baby cousin was born (water birth, midwife delivery), I said go for it!”
Importantly, Jamie has no doubt that her little girl knows all about having sex the safe way.
“She knows what condoms are. She knows about birth control. We’ve talked about orgasms and how sex feels really great when you’re with the right person, and how it can be really awful when the person is wrong.”
“We’ve talked about how she might someday masturbate (gasp) and that it’s perfectly okay and private.”
“At her age, I thought I was pregnant twice: once for kissing a boy, and once because a boy told me he peed in the pool I was swimming in.”
“My daughter won’t go through any of that nonsense because she knows. More than that, as she gets older I feel as if she’ll be able to make more confident, well-informed decisions regarding her own body and who touches it and when.”
What a positive, forward-thinking approach to raising kids. As with most things, the more informed we are, the better our choices - and it all starts in childhood.
