Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [49]
The binary nature of monogamy-centrist thinking tends, we think, to cause problems: you’re either the love of my life, or you’re out of here. Both of us have found that opening our lives to other kinds of connections also opens our children’s lives. For example, a former lover of Janet’s has not been sexually involved with her for quite a while but has become a sort of surrogate uncle and best friend to one of her sons and is still a loved member of her household—as she writes this, he is asleep on a futon on her living room floor.
Still, many parents have a great deal of difficulty bridging the gap between responsible parenting and inclusive relationships. Questions about what and how much to tell your kids, how to prepare them for difficult questions in the outside world, and how to help them relate to the new people who arrive and depart in their lives can be challenging for any mom or dad.
Sex Education for Kids
As you’ve surmised, we think an abundance of relationships can be highly beneficial to family life and that children gain in role models, attention, and support in the polyamorous extended family. Clearly, children should not be included in adult sexual behavior, and many adults who have been wounded by sexual abuse as children can testify to the damages. Education, however, is not abuse, and children need enough information to make sense out of what the adults are doing, so they can grow up to their own healthy understanding of sexuality.
All parents must make their own decisions about what kind of sexual information their children should have at any given age. For the health and well-being of the child, a balance must be struck between offering too much information, which might seem scary or overwhelming, and too little, which might leave the child with the message that naked bodies and sexual arousal are so dangerous and embarrassing that it’s not allowed to even talk about them. We don’t want to terrify the kids, and we don’t want them to come into their own adult sexual lives with the belief that sex is dirty and shameful.
Remember, sex education is an issue for all parents, whatever their lifestyle. We want our kids to have good information and freedom of choice, and they are often living in neighborhoods and going to schools where many parents believe that kids should be denied all information about sex (or else they might turn out to be sluts like us).
To make matters more complicated, our culture currently is deeply divided about the entire subject of sex information and kids. Some people consider any form of sex education to be somehow dangerous. Some authorities feel that when children have “precocious” information about sex, it must mean that the child is being abused by an adult. We are, however, adamantly opposed to “abstinence-only” so-called sex education. How are we to teach our children to say “no” to an abusive adult if we are not frank about what it is that they should say “no” to? When we try to keep sex secret from our kids, they are aware that something is going on, but they don’t know what. And if we leave them to get their sex information in the playground or on the street, from equally ill-informed other kids, we consign them to the jungle. Our kids need and deserve adult support in learning about and negotiating sexuality, as they do in all other aspects of life.
What to Share, and Not
You’ll have to decide how much your kids should know about your sexual choices, such as multiple partners, same-sex partners, or alternative family structures. Our experience is that kids figure such things out quicker than you think they do but that they may not figure them out exactly right.
One word of warning: if you are living in a community that does not share your standards about sex education, your desire to educate needs