Itâs a challenge every parent has to face and itâs not an easy one! How do you raise your kids to have a positive and healthy attitude sex? Tune in to The Tantric Lounge to find outâ¦
Hereâs a post from my own Tantric Lounge Blog , which will give you some insight into what we discuss on the show:
I remember when my eldest son came home from school one day when he was five, giggling and snickering and asking us if we had (giggle giggle, cover mouth, snicker): âSâ¦!?â He was absolutely stunned when we replied: âYes, thatâs Mummy and Daddyâs Cuddle Time.â
You see, weâd brought him up to know that Mummy and Daddy have Cuddle Time, and when we have Cuddle Time we make lots of love for each other and for the whole family. He loved cuddles, so that made sense, and he was quite happy to watch Thomas the Tank Engine or build really big space stations out of Lego on a Sunday morning while Mummy and Daddy had cuddle time. So he had a lot of trouble reconciling the good, positive Cuddle Time he knew about, with the tawdry, naughty âSâ his classmates were snickering about. I was so pleased that his first understanding of sex was the positive Cuddle Time, and not the negative âSâ.
My younger two children have been brought up the same way, and now that they range in age from 10 to 18 I like to think they have a positive attitude towards sex and their own sexuality.
I bring this up because I got some flack on the net recently for comments I made during an interview with a journalist from a teenage girlsâ magazine. In the published article I talked about orgasms, and also said that when sex is good itâs very, very good and when itâs bad itâs horrid.
I believe that now, more than ever, children and adolescents need to be better educated about sex. In the old days we didnât get a lot of information – at best we got reproduction education, not sex education, it was all about how to have babies and not have babies, nothing about pleasure, love, eroticism – so we had to figure it out for ourselves.
These days, if the kids arenât getting good information from school or parents, they look on the net, at porn, and they think that this is sex. No one is telling our young people that porn is only supposed to be visually titillating – itâs all about what looks good, not what feels good. So young people are behaving in ways that replicate what they see porn stars doing. Believe me, I see clients like this all the time. Itâs worrying.
So, if theyâre not getting information on how to have good quality, life-enhancing, positive sex from their educators and parents, where are they going to get it? If their only choice is the sterile information about reproduction and disease they get from educators or (in their eyes) the far more interesting and acceptable information they get from porn, well, it seems that a lot of them are going for the latter.
We need to bring up our young people to have a positive attitude to sex, to feel good about their bodies, and understand that our bodies and our sexuality can bring us great pleasure and enhance our health and well-being. They need to understand so that they make correct decisions for themselves about when they start to be sexually active, why they choose to be sexually active, and with whom.
I fully believe that if young people are well informed, they will feel empowered to wait until the time is right for them. They will know that their sexuality is a good and powerful thing, and they will use it in a positive way to enhance their lives, however that may manifest for them as individuals with their own unique sexuality.
Given the current âporn star VS prudeâ approach to sex in our society – where youâre either supposed to be out there having crazy sex or youâre the prude who thinks sex is somehow âwrongâ – this is a big ask. Itâs particularly big given that so many adults have issues around their own sexuality.
As I often say, itâs very hard to have a positive sexuality in this society. I believe we owe it to ourselves and we owe it our children to work on our own attitudes to our own sexuality, as individuals and as parents, so that we can pass this on to our children, through modeling a positive attitude and through giving them good positive helpful information.
Because in this porn-filled society, God knows, our young people need it.
