The Tough Questions

Hollywood and the like are always making a big deal about the birds-and-the-bees talk you're supposed to have with your kids. Supposedly it's a big, scary and intimidating subject, but is it? You feed your children little bits of information throughout their childhood years, you answer their questions, keep the lines of communication open and when puberty comes along you fill in whatever blanks you have left. Again, I don't see why it's such a challenge. It seems to me that there are other life lessons that are MUCH more difficult to tell your child about. My son was four-years old when he first asked me (seemingly out of the blue) what a slave ship was. THAT was a hard conversation to have. Man's inhumanity to man will always be more difficult to explain than how babies get born or how to keep yourself both baby & STD free. Yesterday my son was flipping through the channels, paused for about thirty seconds on MSNBC and then asked me what a pedophile was. Again, not something I really relished explaining.

Sometimes the questions aren't quite so dark in nature but still prove to be a stumbling block. While looking for a current-events news article for his history class he asked me what a deficit was. When I told him he asked who it was that the US was borrowing money from. Reluctantly I confessed that lately we've been borrowing the lion's share from China. He looked at me like I was insane. "We borrow it from China?" he repeated. "The place where we get all the lead-tainted toys from? The country that doesn't allow its people free speech? How can that be a good idea?"

I actually don't have an answer to that one at all let alone an answer that a ten-year-old could understand.

As the years go on I know there are going to be more questions. On a whole I prepared for the ones that are about sexuality and drugs. But there are some questions that no amount of preparation are going to make less challenging. "How could anyone do something like that?" "How can we as a nation justify that?" "Why didn't anyone help him/her?" Those are the words I know I'll hear with increased frequency as my boy becomes more in tune with the world that exists outside our carefully maintained bubble. Those are the big, scary subjects. We'll tackle them as we always have but they make the why-do-I-feel-funny-when-I-see-girls-in-bikinis questions seem pretty easy.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
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