You are listening to the place we find ourselves podcast. I am Adam Young and I am joined today by my friend Bethany Robbins. Bethany, welcome back to the podcast.

Thank you so much. It's good to be here.

So you were here before. You shared one of your stories in episode 78 and if folks want to go back and listen to that, they can find out a lot more about you from episode 78.

And you're going to share a story today. We both are. We're both going to share a short story today.

The story you're going to share is when your mom broached the subject of sex with you as a sixth grader.

And then we're going to transition to talking about how your story, my story, people's stories as a parent, how your story as a parent is playing out in the way you talk to your children.

About sex or don't talk to your children about sex.

So the main theme that we want to kind of emphasize right from the beginning is that your story is profoundly influencing how you are talking to your children about sex, particularly your story around your sexuality and sexual shame.

And we all have sexual shame.

So before we dive in Bethany, you just mentioned that there might be a little background noise because you are currently living where.

Yeah, so we have just relocated to Malawi, which is in Southeast Africa. Yes, so there might be some background noise.

And that background noise might be which two animals monkeys and hyenas we get hyenas around this time of day. It's evening for me.

Okay, so just an FYI to the listeners. If you hear background noise, we can't do anything about the monkeys and the hyenas. That's right.

All right, let's talk about how this episode came to be. You emailed me a couple weeks back. And why do you email me and what'd you say in the past I've had many parents approach me for help with sex education.

I think it often the requests come because they've maybe overheard me using correct terminology or maybe they've heard me having small side conversations with my kids about sex or reproduction or menstruation.

It's not uncommon for for me to talk about these things with my kids in public.

And so maybe some parents have have overheard me talking and maybe they've seen that my kids weren't horrified as I'm talking to my kids about sex.

And so they've come to me for advice like how are you able to have these conversations so easily what is happening how when do you educate your kids on this.

So that's one reason, but as well in my work at the Alender Center, there are many adults to share with me. They've never had a sex talk with their parents.

Or if they did, it was much too late and much too awkward.

So what I've been finding as I talked to parents about their fears, they've told me that they're afraid that they might introduce their children to too much too soon.

So they're unsure of when to have these talks. They're also worried about talking about pornography or abuse because they say that they feel like they are introducing harmful topics and ideas to their kids before their children might even know about these things.

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