How to Talk to Your Kids About Sex

with them. It was in hanging out with and teaching adolescents for a couple of years out of college, I noticed that whatever was going on at home that was concerning to them would affect their learning. It was like a white noise machine was getting turned on and it

got in the way. What I decided at that point, I was in my late twenties at the time, like I was going to go back to graduate school and study family therapy so that I had the opportunity to intervene at that life level of what what's going on here that's making it stressful and difficult, and because your kiddo's absorbing it, basically so did that got involved in being I became my licensed marriage and family therapist. I got hired to teach in the graduate program that I

had just finished graduating from. But the thing I was doing also was I was asked to teach the graduate level human sexuality course for therapist in our program because it was a required course for licensure. I didn't realize at this moment in my history that I was excited to do these things because I had grown up in

a very odd family. I thought my family was perfectly normal. Yeah, but I had grown up in a Swedish immigrant home and per all of our you know, bones in the closet, if you will, the one thing that had really going for it was Jenner like epigenetics of sex and body positivity. And so I talked to my grandparents, my great aunts and uncles, my parents about whatever, and they talked freely about things in front of me, and if I didn't understand or they wanted to explain it, they put it

in my language so I would understand. And I thought every family was like this, And so when I thought about teaching, I'm like, oh, sure, that just sounds really fun. We had a secret question box anybody could ask any question and we would sit and figure it out, and if we didn't know, we would go look for the answer for them, or you know whatever. So I jemped at this to start teaching this class in the graduate

Marriage of Family Therapy program. And this was in the early nineties, and one of the assignments I had my students do was write their sexual autobiography. Now, most people when they think about committing that to paper freak out right. But I would say to them, you're only ever as good a therapist as you know what your stories are, where you begin and end and your clients begin and end. Otherwise you're going to get them confused. So I started

teaching this in ninety two. Around the year two thousand, the tone of these papers began to really shift. They started describing themselves as perverted, feeling disgusted about themselves, feeling

really embarrassed about what they were writing down. And yet the stories in essence were falling in that same sort of range of common So I couldn't figure out why the tone was changing so much, And so literally I would read these and be crying because I would be so sad for these, you know, late twenty year olds early thirty year olds about how much they hated themselves or how badly they felt, or what they didn't do. And I was just like, this is a beautiful part

of you. I don't understand. And so I just started doing some digging, and I realized I was hitting the first wave of students that had been raised in abstinence only education, which started sweeping the United States in the eighties. It peaked around the early nineties, So these kiddos would have been fifteen around that time, right, they're now twenty five or so, twenty five to thirty somewhere in there.

And there were two things that began happening. We withdrew money for all research that was going on around sexuality in the United States. We started selling this idea that sex was dangerous and was going to kill you. Now, mind you, nineteen eighty aids hit the East coast, eighty five it hit the West coast. We also had an economic downturn around that time, and we had a reaction

to second wave feminism. So you have a scared public, and that is the perfect bait for people in power who are trying to push their agenda to create an agenda on the surface that supports their underground agenda that's all about we're going to take care of you. So that was the beginning of family values in the United States, right, And so it took me a bit to discover all

of this. And as I did, and I was looking at you know, I was hearing stories for the kids that were not just in public schools but maybe also were involved in youth groups telling me stories about, you know, sitting around while a pastor was talking about, you know, the dangers of sex and how you'll ruin your future, and they were asking them to glue contrasting pieces to paper together and at the end of the hour asking them to take them apart, or passing around a flower

and asking them to take the pedals off, or passing around a piece of foil and asking them to crumble it up and then open it up, and basically saying, this is what will be a value of you if you give away yourself emotionally, physically, spiritually, whatever that means, right, And so what I was seeing was sexual dysfunction issues I had not ever seen before in kids in their

twenties at all. And this just hyper fear around the dangers of their bodies and sexuality, and there's some really interesting messages that were getting supported different for those that were sis hat male right than those that were sis hat female. They were getting, you know, the sort of dominant messages were really different, like men were not to

be trusted, they could not control themselves. If they did something they shouldn't, it was gonna be her fault, you know, like And so then I just started speaking about it, writing about it, keeping actual research notes and realized as I wrote, I think two thousand and six, I was asked to write my first article that was covering a more broad market, and I said, all I'm going to do is I'm going to write what I have been seeing. I'm not coming from any expert place, but this is

what i'm seeing, and I'm seeing it a lot. The article was called Christian's Caught between the Sheets, how an abstinence only ideology hurts us? And I started hearing from people literally around the globe, and I realized, Okay, I'm tapping into something that is prevalent and we're just not talking about it yet. And that was the beginning, and so then I started. It took me eleven years to write the first book trying to just shape what was going on.

you know. And I thought, okay, I'm getting that because I want to read how they decided to talk about this, because it is true. You can take somebody. And then we've got all these people that listen to fear based stuff and they believe that it's true. And like, you know, you have to understand that this is about how many viewers can they get so they make more money for their stockholders. Doesn't have to do with giving you the news anymore.

problem is today. It goes You've got to take it way back to how were these men raised, what were they taking in, what was their visual stimulation? And you know, and I think that's to me, that's where we need to be teaching our young boys.

Absolutely yeah. There's a two documentaries actually done by the Representation Project and one was done called Misrepresentation on Women the Effective Media on Women, and you know, I would say American media except for that America has this wide influence on so many other countries, right, And then about five years later they came out with one called the Mask You Live in on media's effect on boys, sort of the boy club that will get started right as

boys get into their teens and they're trying to belong they're belonging in a way in which they're joining around violence against women. Women are objects for our pleasure, however we wish to get it, and we aren't responsible. We

can't help ourselves, right, And this is supportive. That thinking is supported by quote unquote evangelical Christianity in the United States as well and many of our political leaders, because the church and the state crawled into bed together with Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty And that may be like a lot of people go, oh my gosh, how can you say that? Do you know that no president prior to Ronald Reagan had ever used God language in the

United States, never said not bless America. Never And this has been studied with that, We have books on this where political speeches by presidents have been studied, and not any until then. That was a ploy. It was the beginning of how he was a puppet for the religious rite and the moral majority at that time to pursue and punctuate the capitalistic agenda in the United States.

didn't have one until twenty seventeen. Oh my gosh, Spring of twenty seventeen, and someone who had been following my work and wanted to study religious sexual shame realized when she got into the literature that there was no operational definition of sexual shame yet, And I said, you're going to have to start there and people will build upon it. So it's a real definition that came out of her interviews was so stunning to me. I can remember I

was returning home from a speaking engagement. I was on a plane and I'm sitting and reading her dissertation and I've just like had to hold myself together because it was like, there in black and white was everything I had been seeing that I had never put in such a sect way. Sexual shame is a visceral feeling, so in your body, visceral feeling of humiliation and disgust toward one's own body and identity as a sexual being, and a belief that you are abnormal, inferior, and unworthy. And

that's what I was seeing. This feeling can be internalized, so it often is internalized, but also manifests in interpersonal relationships, having a negative impact on trust, communication, and physical and emotional intimacy. So I often say, I don't know how you hurt someone more than hurting them there, because now you've affected their ability to give and receive love. I worked in oncology for a decade, and I can tell you what people care about when they think they're going

to die. They care about the quality of their relationships, nothing else, right. Sexual shame develops across the lifespan in interactions with interpersonal relationships. That's where it starts. Okay, a child finds their vulva or their penis and they're eleven months old, pre verbal, right, But they now can control

their hand and they're with somebody where that freaks them out. Yeah, and that person that loved one gets angry, slaps their hand away, raises their voice, gets a scowl on their face, something that scares this little one. But their brain development isn't such that the child stops. They will do it over and over and over and over again until they're about five and they get in trouble for playing doctor, which is developmentally on task. Right. Then they'll remember that story.

They'll often say that was their first story, and I'm always like, that wasn't your first? That was your one thousand and ones? Probably time, you just don't remember the ones before. So we have to remember this is preverbal. It goes like this, right, So, life span and interactions with interpersonal relationships, then one's culture and society. In America, we drive our economy on helping you feel badly about yourself, right,

because that's how you'll spend money. Yes, right, do you feel bad enough about it?

So then it goes on to say there is also a fear and uncertainty related to one's power or right to make decisions, including safety decisions related to sexual encounters, along with an internalized judgment toward one's own sexual desire. So Peggy Ornstein, who's a New York Times reporter and writer and brilliant, wrote a book called Girls and Sex. About five years later, she wrote a book called Boys and Sex. And similar to those documentaries, they really talked.

She interviewed a ton of kids, like eighty girls fifteen to twenty two, I think one hundred and five boys fifteen to twenty two. But basically you saw the same stuff that was showing up in those documentaries showing up

in her writing. And one of the things that came out when she was in the Girl's Book was she said she was talking to these girls who seemed confident and confident in every area of their life until they got ready to go out, and then they were putting down three, four and five shots of hard liquor because they didn't know if they had the right to keep themselves safe or if they could keep themselves safe. So

this is doctor Noel Clark's work. So as in her work, as in Peggy Ornstein's work, the bulk of the people they interviewed were not did not describe self describe themselves as coming from religious background. So this is the effect of a country that has had abstinence education, which we now know is religious and eighty percent medically inaccurate. Right, it was religious education that went out or cost everyone while we were increasing violence against women and holding men

less accountable. So these things were happening if those people who were involved with the church just got a whole nother layer on top of it, if that makes sense. So sexual shame affects you at where you do bonding, an attachment, the place where our happiness comes from. So this is why I get so passionate because I'm like,

we are affecting people's ability to live, truly live. They're one miraculous, beautiful, incredible life and they're going to figure it out the last ten years of their life, and the regret will be so great because they could have loved so much more, but they didn't know how to read the signs in the culture of what the culture was doing to manipulate them for their for its own benefit.

It's frame, name, claim, and aim. And frame is start by getting yourself a scaffolding or a framework of sex education so that you can start to say, oh, that was BS that I learned. Oh wow, I didn't know that. I thought this, I learned this from porn or whatever, and I thought that I didn't know that. You know, like, get yourself that education right that we've failed to give you. And then second name, tell your story to someone who

can be loving and compassionate and empathic. If that's a therapist, if that's a good friend, whatever, tell your story, because you're going to find out you're not alone. I ask people all the time, and when I'm speaking or whatever, like how many people here grew up in homes that they felt free to talk about anything that they were given the education? Hands rarely go up. So I'm like, ninety ninety to ninety five percent of people in the US grew up in homes that are silent or silent

and shaming. Right then I'm like, okay, So after that claim is claim your body is good, you know, no matter how it is. If it's a good body, if you get up in the morning and you are not in horrible pain, if it's a good body, then you get to often say your body is the pen that you write the poetry of your life. Without our bodies, we can't hug, we can't talk, we can't do this that we're doing right now, Like we can't share ourselves

with the world and take in the world. You know, so our bodies no matter what, and you know, we drive our economy on something that you can't most people can't be anyway. And I was like, no matter how you are, your heredity is determining how your body is right now more than anything else. I'm a Swede. I look like my relatives. I go to Sweden, I look like everybody that's around. And I'm like, okay, you know,

this is really the way it is. Learn to see this as good, you know, learn to see it as good. And then when you're doing those things over and over again, because it is something that you're working, really it's a practice that you're working. What you'll do is you'll begin to aim for a whole new sexual health legacy for yourself, and then anybody that you get close to and you're talking to, you're like, wait, I'm starting to question this. Oh how was this? You know, you just start to

rewrite it, and that's really you know. The second book I wrote, Shameless Parenting, came about because I had people saying to me, I don't want to do to my kids what was done to me. Help me know what to do? And I was like, I got to you. I've been teaching this to doctors and stuff forever. I will write you a book. It'll be birth to two,

two to four, four, six, up to eighteen. It's gonna say, here are the natural behavioral curiosities that kids have, emotional things that are going on on the inside that's developing. We're gonna then shape as to helping you understand what is typical for that age. All you have to do is be two years ahead of your kid. You don't have to have it all figured out. Know that anytime you have a reaction on your inside that's like I don't know, just know that that was because someone shamed

you when you were that age. That's just your normal body response. So put your I always say, put your hand on your heart and tell yourself you're good. You are good, and you are fine. And whoever this little person is in front of you, take a deep breath, and even if it doesn't match your insides, put on a happy face. Just be curious, Just be like, huh, oh, can you tell me more? Oh? You know, I mean, just anything to just pass the first sixty seconds, one

hundred and twenty seconds. Let your heart calm down. You're good, They're good, Yeah, they just they need something different than somebody jumping down their throat.

a beautiful ways. Has the car left the garage for me in terms of parenting children or being their lighter you know, in their life.

do it over, this is what I did. We'd read this book together, or we would you know, do this thing? And I say, do it? You know, like, just what do you think? How do you think it would have been different for you if we could have read this when you were four or six or eight or ten? You know, how do you think things would have been different? And just be brave enough to hear what they're going to say, because these conversations will help them have different

conversations in the future. That's right with any child that might be in their life, and that's valuable.

always for me, it's really interesting. Our youngest is so it has so much less of the shame and the freedom the ability to love her body and because she is that way, and we just love that she's been encouraged more and more because we've just looked at her and.

think that's brilliant modeling for them. You know, it says you're I'm not expecting me to have it all together at any particular point, and I'm not expecting you to either whatever that means. Or people will use the word like, well, I'm not perfect, and I'm like, yeah, you wouldn't be able to be human if you were perfect, because humans can't be perfect.

really want that experience of loving many people. Whether that's some of those relationships are sexual or some of them are not, it doesn't really matter, but that they that's how they want to live their life. There are other people, and I'm going to make this really bifurcated, although I think people can change over you know, the course of a life. Who are like you know, it takes a lot to do polyamorous relationships. Well, a lot of communication, a lot of being upfront, a lot of staying on

top of things. I really don't have the desire or energy to do more than one person. It just feels too hard to me. I think I like, for whatever reason, I like doing just one person at a time or whatever.

That's what they like do. Okay, that's fine. But when you've got two people that agreed on monogamy, now they're in a monogamous relationship, and one is saying, you know, I think I'm learning I'm not monogamous, the other person has to decide, am I okay with being I want to just be with that one person, but I'm okay with them being with other people? And if they can't be okay in a real true sense, then they might be better off to find somebody who can match them a little bit more.

be somehow an affront to your soul. Let's try to just look at individually, look at yourselves, because ultimately you're going to be responsible for crafting the life that works for you, is right for you. And I'm often I'm often saying to people, and I want to invite you into the idea that your most attached relationships, whether they're love relationships, family of origin relationships, children, your most attached

relationships are going to push you to grow. They're meant to hold a mirror up to you and say, girlfriend, you are stubborn. You are a stubborn sweet you know no I'm not. Actually I am, and I need to look at that right like, that's what we do. That's what happens in love, in love relationships, whether again, no matter how that attachment is, they in time are going to invite you to grow. So I'm when I say those things crafting the life that's right for you. I'm

not thinking it's an easy life. I'm believing that it's a life worth living. It's crafting your evolution and development so that when you go to your grave, you've been doing good work in the world and in you and in your relationships as well.

In the book, I think the seventh chapter of the Sex God and Conservative Church Book, I talk about the anatomy of intimacy and that anatomy has grown on seven different domains. And when we want to grow intimacy over time, we have to look at those different domains and ask, how are we cultivating it in ourselves and with our partnership so that I'm free to move when we are sexual, my soul and my body feel open. Can't I feel

safe enough and trusting enough. We've been cultivating sort of goodness and sensuality and stuff enough like desire, and so that I can now see and be reminded of the beauty in you, the beauty that I get to see because I know you, I know these crevices, I know you, And so there's a beauty that's deeper, an esthetic beauty that's deeper than the beauty that we sell, right, and that that opens up space for ecstatic experiences to occur where I just feel like the ineffable just happened, Like

I don't have words for this. This just felt bigger, and I'm just grateful that it's you, that you're my person, right and so we move along those continuums, but it is predicated on us doing our own work, our emotional work.

you can DM me. I'm at doctor Tina Shameless on Insta and then I have a website that is my name, Tina shechrimersellers dot com a lot of free stuff that you can download. You could download a thing called the Sexual Reclamation Project. Where I give a lot of those questions that I used to ask my students. So if you want to take a look at what does your arc of your story look like? Yeah, you can follow that, download it for free, and yeah, just stuff, I've got

stuff there. I that's so generous. Thank you.

And so to hear her put that in perspective with everything else, the fear mongering, all that other stuff and the economy of the two thousand and eight, or just make that connection to all that was really incredible, incredible work she's done.

you think about that discussion. You know, you can find me on Instagram at Ali.