I don’t know. My main point was why are we even beginning to discuss sex with 6 and 8 year old children?
If they actually referred to the characters as being “human” in-universe, this seems like something of a conceptual failure. There are lots of vaguely humanoid organisms in science fiction, probably just because they are easier to depict, more than for any deliberate reason. But only Homo Sapiens, from planet Earth, are by definition “human”. Without a connection to Earth in the past, present, or future, I think they cannot be assumed to be human simply because they have less make-up on than other humanoids.
A lot of writing just doesn’t handle details like this well. For instance, how can aliens talk about an “earthquake” when they’ve never heard of Earth before? If the writers thought about it, they could have said something else, such as “tremors”, or “tectonic activity”. Likewise, they would not refer to “humanoids” if they didn’t know what humans are in the first place. Obviously, some of this is simply a matter of the limits of using existing language in farfetched scenarios.
My point, which I’m sure you understand fully, is this: we’re not teaching 6 & 8 year olds about sex, we are teaching them the proper names for their own bodies.
Because “bird” is a weird euphemism and kids need to know how to communicate.
I do not understand why this is controversial. /sigh
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Telling kids the name of body parts is not “discussing sex.”
Furthermore, some girls start puberty as early as 8. It’s a good idea to give a kid some idea of what’s happening before she has inexplicable bleeding from a body part she’s not sure of the name of.
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I realize that.
At this point I’m not even sure you’re reading your own links. Or even posts! YOU shared that site and asked why we were discussing sex. I point out that the link YOU SHARED doesn’t even say that and you act baffled. Come back when you can actually discuss what you post.
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That’s a reasonable point. As far as I can remember we don’t hear the main characters like Han, Leia, Luke, and the Emperor formally referred to as humans in the movies. Indeed, if there was any term used to refer to anyone it would be something referring to the planet on which they were born and/or raised, like Corellian (Han) or Alderaanian (Leia.) But it seems reasonable to me that all the “characters played by actors with less makeup” are intended to be the same species regardless of the planet on which they were born and/or raised, since canonically (Anakin from Tatooine and Padme from Naboo as parents of Luke and Leia in the movies) and Legendarily (Han and Leia’s children Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin from the books) they can interbreed.
While we could invent a new term for the species to which Han, Leia, Luke, Anakin, Padme, Lando, Palpatine, Obi-Wan, etc. belong rather than using the term human, if it looks like a duck to movie viewers, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck … let’s avoid confusion by calling it a duck. Regardless, of what we call that race, in the Thrawn trilogy books if I remember correctly Grand Admiral Thrawn explicitly stated that Palpatine feared and/or hated beings from races other than his own – hence Thrawn’s de facto exile despite his military genius.
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Although there’s that really weird thing where the Extended Universe (before it got nuked) had humans and other species fetishing Twi’lek women for their “beauty and grace”. Jabba’s first dancer is a Twi’lek.
This what makes me wonder what kind of preconceptions you are working from. It was explained to you precisely why people explain about sex to children. To help educate them about it. Being educated tends to enable people to make much better decisions than those who remain ignorant. It can help people to assess and manage risks better. Just like you wouldn’t actually HIDE the potential dangers of crossing the street, on the basis that they should not be doing it on their own. Understanding how it works from a young age gives them time to make sense of the concepts instead of only explaining it at some arbitrary older age. If you miss a developmental window for teaching something, it can become much more difficult. Such as learning a language when you are 1-3 years old, versus trying to learn it when you’re 50.
So, when it has been explained why, and you are still asking why in this troubled way, what it suggests is that you more specifically have a reason in mind why they shouldn’t. You might have a well-thought out rationale for why not, or maybe you were simply conditioned yourself at a young age to not discuss sex, and that same conditioning affects how you approach (or don’t) such topics with children now.
What boggles me about sex education is how indirect and weird it has always been. People often dance around the subject as if it were tricky to understand. They are often discouraged or even outright forbidden from teaching it in a straightforward way. Can you imagine if you were interested on working on cars, but the schools were not allowed to show you pictures of actual cars, or let you touch them? If they had to teach them with awkward allegories and symbols with a minimum of directness. Because they were afraid that you might possibly get hurt working on a car if somebody actually showed you how. Or that they were superstitious that most people were not supposed to know how cars work. That there was something bad-wrong with you if you wanted to know how they work, or teach others? I think a lot of what passes for sex education is this crazy.
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The family has traditionally allowed children to be innocent sexually, financially and so on until a certain level of cognitive maturity is attained.
Obviously by puberty it may be too late, but I think this Liberal approach borders on sexual abuse and certainly the stealing of innocence, and this is what the clamour was about.
Shh, you’re harshing his superiority complex buzz.
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It’s actually kind of frightening how many children have already been sexually abused or even assaulted by that age.
BTW, one of the risk factors for sexual abuse seems to be growing up in a heavily religious household.
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I am sure that some have. But are all family structures the same? It might sound natural enough to declare something as “traditional”, but traditions are relative rather than absolute. They can depend upon time, place, ethnicity, class, religion, as well as surely other factors. This is always a useful first step in education - the realization that people have many ways of doing things. If reality conformed to your expectations, you’d never learn anything! But learning about how other people are does not ultimately need to change how you choose to live.
Also, I think you can appreciate that being “allowed” to live a certain way is vastly different than being required to.
It’s like the concept of “behavior”. Whatever you are doing can be summed up as being a behavior. Good, bad or indifferent. Not unlike mood, communication, and other factors, there is a sexual component to human behavior. But having a sexuality does not mean that one needs to be engaging in sexual intercourse with someone to express it. Although the aspects of the self underlying this are present in people just the same. People typically start expressing their sexuality with their own body, and eventually, as they become comfortable with this, with other people. Even babies masturbate long before they are even ready to go to any sort of school. Well in advance of 8-9 years old. Somebody who was eager to explain it away might insist that “they don’t really know what they are doing”, or some such thing. But even young children sometimes need some help with this. Since nobody typically teaches kids to do it, it is not unusual for kids to hurt their genitals by masturbating in certain ways. Even just helping the kid to not hurt themselves and be hygienic instead of making a mess can be an age-appropriate form of sex education. It addresses the needs of their sexual behaviors at the time.
Many of the problems happen because it is the parents who choose to be “innocent” of their kid’s sexuality. So they either try to prohibit it (forcing a person to not express part of their personality does not go well), or else pretend it doesn’t happen. Just blindly insisting that “MY KID doesn’t have those sorts of feelings! They’re GOOD!”, but in reality they are distancing themselves from an area central to their kid’s life which they could use some help with. Most families who don’t want their kids to be educated about sex by schools don’t educate the kid themselves either! Like a couple of years ago when parents in Spain were complaining about teaching about masturbation in schools. People violently protested that such subjects are the responsibility of the parents, and belong in the home. But research suggests that only a tiny percentage of those outraged parents were actually willing to undertake the responsibility themselves. Without the parents teaching it (and saying “Ask me when you’re 18” doesn’t count), or the schools teaching it, who does that leave? Usually, it means learning about sex from the other kids, which is precisely what most nervous parents are afraid of.
I can certainly understand why parents desire to protect their kids from pregnancy, disease, and predators. Those tend to involve teaching about boundaries and ethics which require consideration and have lasting consequences. But with younger kids - and quite a few older ones also - those things are not the main factors. It tends to be more about accepting their bodies as they change and knowing how to care for themselves.
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Besides the I don’t even response I got for that… Should this be taken to a new thread?
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From a developmental standpoint, this is more sensual than sexual. It’s a small difference of semantics, maybe. But as someone who taught small kids for years, a lot of kids engage in this behavior just like some suck their thumbs or twirl and tug their hair. It’s a comfort behavior or a nervous habit and they’re not always even totally aware they’re doing it. I remember a little girl who knew that masturbating was “private”, and could even define what “private” meant if you asked her. She’d still sometimes do it in the middle of the classroom. And, like some thumb-suckers, she outgrew it by the end of kindergarten.
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You called it grooming. “Merely” doesn’t enter into it.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
The stupid is strong with this one.
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I love this idea that little kids are innocent. LOL
Little kids are sponges that see and hear everything around them. It’s our job that at least some of what they suck up be good for them and factual.
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It’s better than the psychological torture about gender identity that I had 30 years ago.
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I mean, good luck raising your kids in a bubble of “innocence”, right? It’s possible, maybe, if you’re like the Duggars but without the cameras in your home. And, uh, without the child-molesting older sibling. No TV, no radio, limited literature … I could read by 2, so I ended up reading a lot of stuff that was intended for an older audience by the time I was 8.
This idea of kids being innocent of any knowledge of sexuality in the “good old days” makes me think of the “Little House on the Prairie” books. You know, when people lived in 2-room clapboard houses and yet somehow managed to have 6 or 7 children. Those kids had no idea what was happening on the other side of mom and dad’s curtain divider, right?
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