Innocence

Whether you're controlling your kids' environment carefully or taking a laisser-faire approach to their social and cultural formation, sooner or later they're going to be exposed to influences you didn't choose for them. This can range from exposure to language or images to the most shocking betrayals of trust.

I was lucky. While I was exposed too early to pornography (my father didn't realize he needed to put the girlie mags on a higher shelf until he found me gazing at them in wonder one Saturday morning when I was four or so, nor did he realize that the higher shelf would cease to constitute much of a hiding place once I was nine), porn was not my primary source of information about human sexual behavior. My mother gave me a lovely book and a lecture when she announced that I would have a little sister (also when I was about four), and whenever I had a question she had an answer (except when I asked her, "So tell me more about this period thing" when I was six and we were waiting in line at the Jack-In-The-Box, at which point she suggested that polite people discussed these matters in private and that not everyone wanted to hear about personal bodily functions while waiting for lunch to be served). They allowed me to read anything I wanted, even when I was reading novels like Airport and The Bastard at 10, but they restricted my movie and TV viewing until I was 15. I got loads of inappropriate information and ideas, but my parents made their feelings clear about what I was seeing and hearing, and they didn't predicate their expectations for my behavior on what they were letting me read or see.

And me? Well, my oldest came home at the age of seven asking to know what a "dirty ho" was, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: Okay, this is going to take a minute to explain.

Boy: (stares)

Me: First of all, a hoe with an e at the end is an instrument for breaking soil. But a ho without an e is another way of saying whore. A whore is a prostitute. Do you know what that is?

Boy: No.

Me: Well, when God made mating for animals and people he made it feel good so people would do it and make babies and forget about how hard it is to take care of babies and how much having babies hurts. A person who gets paid to mate with, have sex with, someone else is called a prostitute.

Boy: Okay.

Me: And dirty would be like yucky.

Boy: Yeah.

Me: So it's not a nice thing to call someone and I don't want to hear you talking like that.

It would be very easy to talk about preserving children's innocence if this were the toughest thing a parent might encounter. Unfortunately, this is the easy stuff. What's hard is when a child is exposed to sexual situations and behavior before he or she has the tools to understand them. What does a parent do with that?