Inside: Find out how to turn the reading of sex education books, into a teachable moment with your child.
Sex education books can help to make sex education much easier. They provide you with child-friendly information in a format that kids enjoy.
Plus there is nothing like the joy of sitting down on the lounge and connecting with your child by reading aloud with them.
This teachable moment is about how use a book that you’ve already read with your child, into a teachable moment. (You can read this article to learn more about what a teachable moment is.)
Watch the video below to see how you can go back to books and use them as an opportunity to talk about something.
Read the transcription
Books! Books about sex, love, relationships, babies, pregnancy, gender; sex education books. How can you turn those into a teachable moment?
Hi, I’m Cath Hakanson from Sex Ed Rescue and this is one of those teachable moments. A teachable moment is an opportunity where you find something in everyday life and you turn it into an experience. So, what’s this channel about? This channel is about empowering you to be able to talk more comfortably with your kids about love, sex and relationships.
This week’s teachable moment is about sex education books. To the left of me I’ve got about 200 books and they’re just the tip of the iceberg if that. That’s because there are a lot of them, and they keep getting rewritten. There are still books like Peter Mayle’s ‘Where did I come from?’. That was out when I was a kid and it’s still a best seller in sex education. Not that a lot really changes when it comes to sex and making babies, but as more information and content is updated, more recent (or updated) books come out.
Books, so how do you turn them into a teachable moment? It could be a matter of sitting down with your child for bedtime stories, then saying, ‘Hey, let’s see what books we’ve got tonight.’ What I used to do with my kids was let them pick a book each and then I would always pick another for myself. I’d throw a book in and it might be about body safety, pornography, where babies come from, feelings, or anything. I would slip that book in the pile, we would read it, and I wouldn’t make a fuss. Sometimes we might have a conversation about the book I chose, sometimes we might not. That’s one way of bringing it in.
You might slowly introduce that book and then the next day or week, something might happen. You might say, ‘Hey, do you remember how we read that book about feelings the other day? Well, how are you feeling? What’s your feeling at the moment? What’s happening with you?’ So you can then refer back to that book.
Often, with my daughter, I’ll hear something on the radio about sexting, porn, or teenagers and I’ll go, ‘Ah do you think they talked about that in the puberty book we just read?’ Otherwise, you can also introduce them by saying, ‘Hey, I saw Tom’s Mum the other day and she said she bought this great book on puberty. So, I thought that maybe we could start reading it as well.’ Just the sheer act of giving them a sex ed book means that it’s an opportunity for future teachable moments or an opportunity to talk about sex.
The joy of these books is that there’s a lot of information. Like this book on, ‘Hang-ups, Hook-ups and Holding out,’ by Melissa Holmes and Patricia Hutchinson. It has lots of stories so you could go back and say, ‘Hey you know in that book how they talked about the girl who got pressured into having oral sex at the movies? Do your friends ever talk about that?’ You can use these as an opportunity to talk. Have you got any other ideas on how you could turn a book into a teachable moment?
Have a good one, cheers.
