A few nights ago, my seven-year old son crawled into my lap near bedtime. (He usually gravitates more toward my husband then.) And, happily, my youngest sought out his dad about the same time.

We're a two-rocking chair family, so I headed for the one in the boys' room and my husband to the one in the family room. We rocked for a few minutes quietly and then my son said, "Mom, what's sexy mean?" I thought, "Oh good, another teachable moment." I inhaled to formulate where I was going to start -- and in doing so, made a common mistake. I forgot to make sure that I really understood what his question was.

So, off I began with, "Well, it's a feeling that you get in your penis (if you're a boy) and in your brain. It's a good feeling to both places. That's what makes your penis get hard sometimes. Does that make sense?" At least I was following my own advice to stop every so often and make sure that your kid is tracking along with what is being said.

My son said, "Well, yeah Mom. But, what's sexy?" I realized at this point that I did not understand his question but, in knowing that, I was no closer to knowing what he was really asking. I said, "Sweetie, I would really like to answer your question, but I think that I'm not really figuring out what it is that you want to know."

He said, "Sexy, Mom. Like pregnant." Phew! Finally a clue I could work with. "Oh, you want to talk about how women get pregnant again? Sure, we can do that."

I described the usual way when a man put his penis in a woman's vagina and rubs it in and out -- and that eventually semen comes out inside the woman. And, since fertility treatments were an essential part of the story of conceiving both this son and his younger brother, I reminded him of the other way. We drifted off into masturbation and whether that could cause a woman to be pregnant. And, yes, it could if the man did it into a special container (and later the semen was put in the woman by a doctor), but that usually he would do it just because it felt good.

"Where would someone do it with his hand?" "Oh," I replied, "in bed, in the shower, into a toilet" -- naming some of the more common locations. "Does everyone have to do it with their hand?" "No, only if you want to." "Why would someone do it?" "Mainly because it feels good and it helps some boys relax."

And, that was it. The questions stopped. We had covered how the egg meets the sperm and masturbation -- not at all where I thought we were headed with my son's opening question.

Kids (even in sexually fluent households) don't always use sexual words in the way that adults typically tend to interpret them. So, I'll be heeding my own advice next time and making sure that I know what a question really means. And, I'll be leaving Robie Harris' book, It's Perfectly Normal, out in the boys' room again in case they want to revisit the topic with its wonderful cartoon-style illustrations.
(source:blogs.webmd.com)