A: I am not a pediatric specialist, but I do know that children are much smarter than most people realize. They will figure out pretty quickly if you lie to them about the origin of babies, especially if you happen to get pregnant again. The usual rubbish won’t work for long, for example: the stork brings them; we found you under a cabbage leaf; or, as my father would tell my sister, “I found you floating by when I was working in the sewers. I thought, ‘That is the cutest little turd I have ever seen.’ So I brought you home!” And once your children know you have lied about where babies come from they will start to question all of your answers, especially Santa Claus.
So, we have established that you should tell the truth, but does it need to be the entire truth? Absolutely not! Children are inquisitive and experimental. If they know that making a baby can be fun, or even occasionally pleasurable, they are bound to try it. The trick is to tell them enough of the truth to not get easily caught in a lie, but to also embellish it with enough horror to insure the tots do not want to practice it for themselves.
You know your children better than I do so you will have to use your imagination when it comes to scaring your child. A couple of general examples would be:
- When people join sexually they must suffer through intense amounts of pain to plant the seed from which a baby grows (this will be reinforced if your darling angel ever stumbles across pictures of people’s faces during orgasm while surfing the internet)
- When people have sex it leaves a substance that attracts a horrible spiny creature to crawl inside mommy’s belly where it explodes into one or more babies.
The latter will make little boys want to try it to see what happens, but most girls will be inspired to keep boys at a distance!
They will soon learn the whole truth about where babies come from, but by then they will hopefully be old enough to understand you were just trying to protect them from their own nature. Once they reach that point you can introduce them to books that give a clear scientific view of where babies come from and some other things — books like my soon to be released, Science Has Some Answers. Until then have fun instilling nightmares in your child’s head to protect them from the probable psychological scarring of sexual relations.
