Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Talking to Your Kids about Sex

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

In this important episode, Dr. Berman gives tips to listeners on how they can raise sexually healthy kids. With so many teenagers having unlimited access to porn thanks to the Internet, Dr. Berman explains what parents should teach their kids about porn and why today’s porn can be so dangerous, especially for teenagers who are still forming their sexual desires. First, a woman writes in asking Dr. Berman for help after her 9-year-old accidentally walked in on her husband giving her oral sex. What can these parents do to help ensure their child isn’t ‘scarred’ by this embarrassing incident?  Next, Dr. Berman helps a parent who wants to know if it is okay to let her teenage daughter have her boyfriend stay the night. Is it okay to accept your teenager being sexually active or does that set a poor parenting standard? Dr. Laura Berman's website: https://drlauraberman.com/ The Language of Love Podcast: https://drlauraberman.com/pages/the-language-of-love *Please note: this episode was recorded before the heartbreaking death of Sammy Chapman, Dr. Berman’s son. For resources to help you talk to your kids about the dangers of prescription pills and synthetic drugs, click here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for more than two decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. And now I am so excited to introduce my new podcast, The Language of Love, a safe and inspiring space where I'm going to be answering all your calls and email questions from people just like you. My goal with the language of love, to give you all the wisdom you need to create more meaningful intimacy and lasting sexual pleasure. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Welcome to the language of love with Dr. Laura Berman.

The place to come to get all your questions answered about love, sex, relationships. There's no question off limits. We're all in this together, learning to love and be loved better, and that is what I'm here to help you do. This week, the theme is raising sexually healthy kids. Every single one of us was a kid, most of whom weren't well-raised sexually. We didn't really have models for how to talk about sex, how to protect kids while not creating inhibitions.

Most of us were raised with a lot of really dysfunctional attitudes towards sex or were either, like as in my case, exposed to way too much or in other cases exposed to way too little. And I do a lot of training of teachers and also teaching of kids around sex education. And I feel so passionately about it because when I'm sitting with adults in my office today, you know, who are struggling with inhibition, sexual dysfunction, difficulty getting their needs met, relationship conflicts, so often the issues go back to childhood when their hand was slapped away, when they were touching themselves or their parents, you know, slut shame them or things happened that could have been avoided. I've been collecting your questions and I get them all the time. I'm sure we won't get to them all today. I'm going to do my best

and we'll do more episodes on this if you want to. But whatever your questions are, just know that you can always get them to me and I will do my best to answer them on the show. You just go to drlauraberman.com and go to the podcast page, or you can even go to languageoflovepod.com, and the links are right there for both asking an email question as well as a voicemail question. So you can do both of those, and we'll be getting to both of those today. I'm actually wearing a sweatshirt in honor of today's podcast that is a part of Busy Phillips' line. She gives a lot of money to, you know, a lot of the proceeds to charity, but I love this. First of all, it's a very nice kind of soft sweatshirt, but the words on it up

in the corner say, we all have holes. You know, that to me is a fundamental educating of your kids kind of thing. It's certainly something that I would talk to my kids a lot about when they were growing up. And of course, they also like to talk about what comes out of those holes. They still do something about boys, but it's probably girls too. I just happen to have three sons who like talking about bodily functions. Maybe it's me because I like talking about them too. let's get to the questions. Maybe some of them will be about bodily functions. Who knows? Raising sexually healthy kids. Here's an email question from Erin. She says, Dr. Berman, I'm happily married with three kiddos. Here's the problem. My nine-year-old daughter walked

into the bedroom when me and my husband were, he was performing oral sex on me and we were totally caught up in the moment. So I can't even say how long she was standing there, but I'm guessing it was just a few seconds before she sort of screamed and ran away. We tried to talk to her about it, but she just got angry and embarrassed and told us to be quiet. My husband and I don't know what to do. I feel so guilty. How can we fix this? Well, first of all, Erin, don't feel guilty. Did we want your nine-year-old daughter to see you having sex of any kind, much less like kind of in that position? Probably not. But did you like damage her beyond repair? are absolutely not. And the truth is, and I feel so strongly about this, and it's so clear to me,

that your children need to know. They don't need to know the details. They don't need to see it. But they need to know that you have a fulfilling and connected sensual and sexual life. So many parents try to hide that. So like they won't even have sex if their kids are teenagers and not even coming near them for the night. They're just so self-conscious or feel like that will damage the kids if the kids somehow know their parents have a sexual life together. When in reality, it's the opposite because you are a model for what you want your children's own sex lives to be like. So when you are thinking about, and I will get to your question, Erin, but this is a really important point. When you are thinking about how to raise sexually healthy kids,

The first question I coach parents around is for you and your co-parent, whoever else is in the child's life, whatever other authority figure, get on the same page, not only about what your key messages are, but this is not an easy question for a lot of parents to answer who are so scared of this topic with their kids. when and under what circumstances do you hope that your child does have sex for the first time or ongoing? So we spend so much energy thinking about, oh, I don't want them to have sex before this point or before that point, or I don't want them to get pregnant or STDs or whatever. All of that is super important. But do you ever ask yourself, under what circumstances do I really want my child to have sex? Because none of us really want to think about that. But the truth is, I don't think there's a parent out there who loves their child and doesn't want them and hope that one day, maybe when they're grown up, maybe when they're married, when they're 50, you fill in the blank, but that one day they have a fulfilling, loving sex life. We all want that for our children.

We don't want them to do it too soon. We want to do everything we can to protect them from getting hurt, unplanned pregnancies, STDs, whatever. but we also want to teach them about the gift that sex is and give them a sense of what sexual intimacy abstractly looks like and feels like in their parents' relationships. Do you guys flirt with each other? Do you cuddle each other? Do you hold hands? Do you give each other pats on the bottom or kisses? Do you make illusions? Is your door locked sometimes? These are not bad things for your kids to know about. Now, your kid is nine, and my guess is part of the reason she was angry is because she kind of knows what this is by now. I would say that by age nine, you really

do want to have been talking to your child about the initial basics, not necessarily about oral sex, which is what she walked in on, but you'd be talking about how babies are made, about puberty and boys and girls and the changes that happen. I should say here, I wrote a book on this topic. one of the books I've written is called Aptly Named, Talking to Your Kids About Sex. It's a very creative title, I know. But it's descriptive, talking to your kids about sex, turning the talk into a conversation for life. And it shows you conversation starters and key things to cover at each stage of a child's development. So by nine, your daughter probably has a sense of all that, hopefully from you, but if not from the playground or from her friends. And she knew

she was seeing something that was bizarre and intimate and weird and upsetting. But believe me, this happens all the time, okay? So you're not bad parents, and she's not inextricably damaged. What I would say in a situation like this is, you know, if she were three, I would say, stop what you're doing and go and check on her, make sure she's okay. If she's nine, and she went running out of the room, I would have maybe checked on her and said, are you okay? I wouldn't have both gone in there. I would have sent whichever parent she tends to be more comfortable with and just been, honey, I'm so sorry you had to walk in on that. Are you okay? I do want to talk about this with you, but let's just talk about it later. And then give it some

time for the intensity to kind of calm down a little bit. I mean, you know your child, right? So maybe your child is someone whose intensity would increase if you bombarded them, if you didn't address it right away. My kids, I know I'm going to have a much better conversation with them about whatever it is if everybody's cooled off first and then we circle back to it. So you would do that if your kid is like every other tween and teenager out there and needs a little kind of calming down time before you talk about it. And then you go in there, even if she says be quiet or whatever, once again, only one of you, okay? Because two can feel like too reminiscent of what she just saw and also even more embarrassing. So one of you who she's more comfortable with just

says, listen, that was not something you ever should have seen. We should have locked the door. But I want you to know that when two people, and this is where you as a parent get a chance, you'll have a million chances like this if you take them, you get a chance to insert your own sexual values here, right? Because I'm not here to tell you what your sexual values are. You want to figure that out for yourself. And then that becomes the context in which every conversation with your kids about sex happens. So here's an example. Let's say you and your husband, through these conversations about when you would like your daughter to have sex one day, decide that, like for me and my husband, we decided as we came to these conclusions when

our kids were young, that what we want, and this is how we preface when we were teaching them about sex, is that we would say, when you grow up and you really love someone, care about someone, and they care about you too, and you only want to be with each other, and then we would also add in, since there are three boys and they all seem heterosexual, at least at this point, and she wants to, and you ask and receive consent, I always put in the consent thing, then blah, blah, blah will happen. So you might say to your daughter, honey, I know that that was really uncomfortable and weird. And I just want you to know, first of all, if you have any questions, I'm an open book. I will answer whatever questions

you have. But I just want you to know that while you shouldn't have seen that, and you're too young to see that. And quite frankly, you should never have to see your parents doing that. The bottom line is that daddy and I really love each other. And when two people, insert your own values here, are married, are grown up, are in college, blah, blah, blah. But when two people love each other, this is one of the ways, the unique ways that they can show love to each other. In the case of me and daddy, we don't do with anyone else. It's only for us. it's part of the way we love each other and show each other our love. And that's all you need to know. And I'm sorry you saw that. If you have any questions, I'm here for you. And you just kind of

hang out and make sure. And please put a lock on your door. Everybody, put a lock on your door. There is nothing wrong with that. And if you have younger children who you're a little bit worried about, or you think may need you, or you think may start fighting or breaking furniture, put a one-way monitor so you can at least hear them. Make sure it's not two ways so they can hear you. You can hear them. But I think it's a really important standard to set in your house that when your door is locked, that's mommy and daddy alone time. It doesn't mean you're having sex every time, but that's your alone time. And that's an important model to set for them. Hopefully, that gives you a head start with her. Check out the book for sure.

And I would say that. I'll probably say that a million times with all of these questions. All right, let's see. Should we go to a voicemail? Let's go to a voicemail. Hi, Dr. Berman. I'm calling because I feel like I'm the worst mom in the world. I let my daughter, who's 17, have her boyfriend stay overnight. And of course, I know they are sexually active.

And my daughter is on birth control, so I know she's safe. And I also trust the guy. I think he's a very nice guy. but now she wants him to stay again and my ex-husband is really pissed and my friends think that I'm crazy and these teens are having sex anyway and I'd rather that they do it in my own house that who knows where in a car or a motel or I don't know where and I also remember when I was a teen and I used to have sex in the parking lot behind high school so I don't want my daughter doing something like that is it really bad to let her have him stay over like please

tell me that i'm not the worst mom in the world because i definitely feel this way oh no you are not the worst mom in the world for 50 years canadians have wondered what the names of ikea furniture mean like natopa the guardrail for children's beds natopa means giving your favorite person room to grow it means their safety and your piece of no in swedish not oppa means night monkey mom he's back ikea 50 years of swedishness at home look he's wearing little pajamas so cute but there are a couple of things happening here first of all you and your ex-husband feel differently you're not on the same page i don't know if this comes up in other areas of your co-parenting, but certainly around this, you know, you're in conflict. And so, look, if she's a later

teenager, it's not like you're going to lose custody because most courts would take her concerns and desires into, you know, it's not like she's five, right? And the court can take custody away if your husband throws a fit or he could take you back to court for custody or whatever. So if you're not worried about that, like having some legal implications, then it's not about you being a bad mother. It's about your values around sex. And I think, frankly, to some extent, you're right. That's not to say that everyone should let their kid have partner sleepover and have sex in their house. I'm not saying that by any means. But I think you're absolutely right. The latest statistics are one in four teens,

probably more because they're not admitting it, but at least one in four teens are having sex by the time they're 15 and the majority of their parents don't even know about it. So those kids are not necessarily getting birth control or getting sex education that they need or prepared with condoms because so many people mistakenly think, schools, administrations, parents, mistakenly, mistakenly think that information means permission and it doesn't. So you have done the right thing so far by creating a relationship with your daughter where she can talk to you about what's going on and not lie and hide things from you, where she feels like you're a responsible ally. And you know she's having sex. You got her on the pill, which is

really important so that she doesn't get pregnant. I can tell you as a mother of three boys, all I have to say is, what do I always tell you? And they say back, belt and suspenders. That's the phrase, which means anyone they have sex with should be on some form of birth control of their own, like the pill, you know, hormonal contraceptive, or in some cases, IUD or whatever, and condom, because condoms can break. And you're counting on the girl, in their case, to be regularly and correctly taking the pill or other hormonal contraceptive. And if she doesn't take it well, or she forgets, which lots of teenagers do, it's not effective. So you're kind of at her, the effect of her ability to remember and to take it well. So make sure you

use condoms as well. All that said, you know, my 16-year-old came to me just the other day and wanted to have a girl who's not his girlfriend, but a girl sleepover. He kind of admitted that they have fooled around before and that they're starting to connect. And I said, look, because he's already told me that he's had sex. We talk a lot about consent and respect. And so far, I don't love the fact that he's having sex at 16, but like, I think he's handling it in a respectful way. And no one's ever slept over it. I mean, I have never even known about it. He just tells me about it afterwards. But this time I said, OK, I am not opposed to this, but I am not going to have a girl come over to our house and sleep over with my son without knowing it's OK

with her parents. That's just the parent code. So you need to let me know, have her mother text me or whatever and just tell me it's okay. And if there are any parameters that I should, are you guys supposed to sleep in opposite different rooms? So, you know, are we going to do that charade? Like, is this okay? I just don't want to take a girl into my house to have sex with my son behind her parents' back if she's not being honest with them. Of course, he dropped the whole thing after that because clearly she wasn't. But the point is that you shouldn't feel guilty and you shouldn't feel like you're a bad parent because you have these kinds of communications with your daughter. And if you feel like she really cares about this guy,

he really cares about her, you trust him, you said, you feel like they're handling things carefully and maturely and protecting themselves. I agree with you personally, but I can only agree with you personally. That's for every single one of us. This has to be a personal decision. I agree with you. I would rather my kid have sex in the house than in a parking lot somewhere or in some stranger's house or whatever. Like I would rather them be safer and have access to condoms and feel like they could talk to me.

But not every parent feels that way. So you and your ex need to find a way to get on the same page, even if it means ignorance is bliss. Like if your daughter is 17 years old, does she really have to tell her father that her boyfriend slept over? I mean, how much do you really communicate?

You know, there are ways to get around this. I think what's holding you back is that you're questioning your decision. And so what I want you to really get clear on is forget all the noise from outside you and don't make this decision from fear. Make it from what in my gut feels right for my daughter, for her sense of empowerment, for her protection, and for her sense of ability to love and be loved to the best that she can. What do I believe as her mother is going to most support her in that and support, to some extent, our relationship? But your fun, loving relationship with her is not nearly as important as those other things are, right? That's where we get lost in the parenting role. And we're more interested

in them liking us than doing the right thing. So really ask yourself what the right thing is for you as a mother. And do that. Don't worry about your ex-husband at this point. That's what I say. All right, let's go to another email. Here is one that says, Dr. Berman, I'm reaching out because I heard you say on another television show that parents should think about buying their teen daughters vibrators. WTF? Are you for real? I'm a mom of teen girls, and I would never buy them a vibrator. Is that seriously something you're suggesting? Yeah. I think you're talking about, and this has come up many times through the years.

This was years ago. I was doing the Oprah show. I used to be, when she still had her show last few seasons, I was her sex, love, and relationship person. And we were doing a show on kids, raising sexually healthy kids. And there was this little girl, I remember, her name was Jordan. She was like nine years old or 10 years old. And she wanted to know about sex and her mother wouldn't talk to her about it.

And I kind of took the mother through the process of talking to her daughter. And as part of that conversation, not with the nine-year-old, but later, we started talking about different ways and keys to raising sexually healthy daughters in particular, but boys and girls. And so I mentioned, in fact, Oprah agreed with me. She agreed with me completely. It was Gail who flipped out because Gail was on the show that day too. But basically, I said, look, when your daughter gets to 14, 15, 16, her hormones are going crazy, right?

And girls usually discover self-stimulation much later than boys because, you know, their stuff is just hanging out there in the bathtub. They touch it or yank it one day and say, oh, this feels good. Like girls, our stuff is more tucked in. There's less discussion of it. There's less understanding of our genitals. And so girls tend to start exploring that later. So what typically starts happening and what we now know is that only 30% of women report that their first sexual experience felt completely consensual. Of those women who didn't feel like it was consensual, the majority of them said it wasn't that they were raped or assaulted.

it was that it just felt so good. They got carried away and they didn't really understand what was happening. And the next thing they knew, they had had sex. Half the time, they didn't even know what sex was necessarily or what led to it or whatever. It felt so good and they'd never had feelings like that before. And in many cases, they mistakenly think, oh, it's this boy who I'm just hooking up with at this party that is giving me... They just automatically think it's about the boy. Of course, it is to an extent about your partner, but it's really about yourself and your own body. And if women could come of age in connection with their own sexuality and their sexual

response and feeling empowered around that for themselves, I truly believe and in fact have found in my own experiences training and working with so many families that girls will be more selective. They'll understand their bodies more. if they understand self-stimulation and they can give themselves pleasure and orgasms and that it's not like all up to the boy to find that magic button and need to be with him to find it, then she goes on a great date or goes hangs out or she feels horny because of all the massive hormones that are flushing through her system and she self-stimulates,

right? And so, you know, you can normalize that, Vern, tell her about manually stimulating, but in this show and in general, I talked about the possibility of giving your daughter an external stimulator. So I'm not talking about something she even inserts into her vagina. I mean, she could do this and still keep her hymen intact, although most girls don't even have a hymen by the time they have sex because we're not sitting around crocheting. We're horseback riding and doing gymnastics and all kinds of things. So the majority of girls today don't even have a hymen. But if you're worried about that, it doesn't get affected by an external

vibrator. And if you're worried that understanding her body and her sexual pleasure will somehow make her want to do it with a boy, I have found the opposite, or anyone else for that matter, I have found the opposite to be true, that in fact, it gives her more of a sense of her own autonomy and her own sexual power and more of a relationship with her own body, all of which lead to better decision making in my experience. So yes, it's not mandatory. If it makes you uncomfortable, certainly don't do it. But you could get her a little external clitoral vibrator when she's 16 as a way of learning more about her sexual response and body. I think it's a great idea. Not mandatory, but a great idea. All right, let's go to a voicemail question.

hi so i was looking on my kid's computer because it was freezing up on him and he wanted help fixing it i was shocked when i found a bunch of porn tabs in the history i mean i know porn is everywhere on the internet but i thought he was too young to be looking for that kind of stuff i mean he's only 13 i have no idea how to bring this up to him because i don't want him to feel humiliated or like I was snooping. I'm scared that watching porn is going to warp his idea of what sex is really like and make him too eager to have sex when he's still so young. I want to block the sites on his computer, but I don't think that this will fix the problem. Help. How do I fix this? Yeah. Well, you're certainly not alone. And unfortunately, or fortunately,

you know, 13 year old boys, that's definitely the age. What we are finding now that porn is so available, not just, you know, it used to be that as a parent, if you kept your family computer or the kid's computer, like in a centralized location, you could really kind of control the exploration of porn. And there also wasn't as much available as there is today. But now with smartphones and Wi-Fi and everything else, unless you're living in a bubble on a mountaintop, your kid, I can pretty much guarantee you by age nine or 10 is being exposed to either through friends or other ways, pornographic images, they are everywhere. So, you know, it's interesting, like for me as a parent with my 23 year old, I was like, no, no porn, computer in centralized

location, yada, yada. He didn't even get a cell phone until he was in high school. And it wasn't even smartphones then. With my now 15 and 16-year-old, it was very different. They had smartphones. There was Pornhub. There's Wi-Fi. There's all of this stuff happening all the time. In both cases, I had a real conversation with them about a couple of things. One, I said, look, it's natural to be curious. And there's all this stuff out there. But the bottom line is porn is not a reflection of what real men, what men actually look like, what their genitals look like, what women's bodies really look like. It is a horrible sex education about what turns a woman on because, you know, it's geared toward men. So all he has to do is like touch her on the

shoulder and she, you know, screeches an orgasm or something. So it's not a good reflection of how to please a woman. And the majority of women who are engaging in porn are not doing so from a very empowered place. So you're kind of perpetuating that by watching it. But I also know that as a teenager, that's not enough of a deterrent. And I don't expect you never to look at it. I just want you to understand that it's not real. And I also, and this was the big clincher that I think has helped, because it's true. I said to them, there are new and growing studies that boys like you being exposed to porn as your primary sexual stimulus so early in your sexual development and so consistently is turning out to affect men's ability, young men's ability to get

aroused with an actual partner. And I know that you want to be able to do that. And so the only thing I can say to you, I know it's not realistic to tell you never to look at porn. The only thing I can say to you is that it's really important to keep your fantasy muscle alive, to not just look and let the images be fed to you, but to fantasize. And I remember the first time I said this to them, I think they were like 12, 13. They looked at me like I had two heads, like fantasize. They didn't even know what that was. And so I explained to them, use your imagination. Maybe it was something you saw on porn. Maybe it was a hot girl you saw on the bus. Whatever it was, you imagine it and you self-stimulate using your imagination, which is a totally different

neurocognitive process and something that will alleviate that tendency to not be able to get aroused without porn. And so those are the conversations we've been having. That's me and my kids. You may be someone who feels that porn is against your religion or against your morals or whatever, you know, but there's no place for porn. And that if you want to try to keep your kids in a box and keep them from watching, you can. But I think at the very least, you have to have this conversation with your son. And if he wanted you to fix the computer, he knew you were on it. So go to him and say, listen, I have to have an awkward conversation with you. It's great to have conversations with your kids, especially boys who have a harder time talking in general

about difficult stuff or real stuff face to face. If you have this conversation when you are in the car, that's a great place because they're trapped with you and you're both looking forward. Boys like to have deep conversations, not looking straight at you. So he's 13. So playing a mindless video game together, washing dishes side by side, building something side by side, driving in the car side by side, fishing side by side, whatever it is, start talking to him. Say, I went to fix your computer and I saw these sites. And I want you to know, it's normal to be curious. First, I want to know if you have any questions you want to talk about it. And if he's mortified, he'll probably say no. You say, but I also just want you to listen

for a minute and here are my thoughts. And you can share with him some of what I told you or other things. Just don't shame him because that doesn't stop. Shame is like the world's worst motivator. And all it does is hang us up. And then he's still going to look at it and mix his sexual response up with guilt and shame. And then that creates a whole other brand of problems. Don't do that. But I think it is important to talk about. I hope that helps. I think we're going to have to do a part due of raising sexually healthy kids because I have so many more questions and I'm running out of time all right here's what we'll do i want you to keep sending in your questions go to drlauraberman.com and click on the podcast page or you can go to the languageoflovepod.com

and on those pages you will find the link to leave a voicemail question or an email question and anything you have to ask or to comment on about love sex relationships on any topic it's fine but definitely send me messages and questions on raising sexually healthy kids because clearly there's a lot of need out there I have a lot more questions here I can answer but I think it's not yet enough like I have too many to do today but not enough to do tomorrow so send me some more and I'll make a whole new episode part two of raising sexually healthy kids and until then Keep the calls and questions coming and I will meet you back here next week for the language of love.