“Mommy, where do babies come from?" “Well, sweetheart, have you heard the story about the stork?"
We're all familiar with this dialogue, whether this was our experience or not, about a child's curiosity about life. It makes sense, this question, for it is something so vital and important to our world. Traditionally, sex has been viewed as “provocative" or “inappropriate" to discuss so publicly, and is 'NSFW', or children, talk. Nowadays, it seems that sex is everywhere. It is not just a private, intimate conversation anymore, and I'm not exactly sure why. While it is obvious that our availability and use of technology are attributes of why this shift occurred, it seems that this new generation is the generation of no secrets or mysteries to unfold or investigate through life experience.
Any question, anything we've been wondering, we can simply type into Google and find an answer. Instead of asking your parents, now you can simply type into any search bar, “where do babies come from?" and be bombarded with images, articles, diagrams, even videos, which is the scary part. They might even know more than many adults do after a little of this “research" since no one would have thought to look up what sex was in previous generations.
It has to be hard as a parent to regulate what your kids can and cannot see, search, and hear, etc. because information on nearly everything is so widely available. If you use parental controls in your home on your computers and televisions, it doesn't mean that your children are automatically censored from the cruel, the crude and all the like of the world. Just because your household may impose these rules and regulations doesn't mean that other households will, and we all know what an impact our friends have on us, especially when we're growing up so naïve and vulnerable to new information.
Are there any secrets anymore? Are there no more mysteries to be discovered? Surely there must be, but it seems that the more technology advances and the more available it becomes, people of all ages can virtually know, or at the very least, look up anything. I wouldn't go as far as to say it's caused a loss of innocence in our society's youth, but it certainly has made us more desensitized to content that our society used to view as inappropriate or private, and has left little to our imaginations.
While I do understand the opposing side's argument, that topics like sex are very natural and pure and imperative for the survival of our Earth, and since it is a part of nature it is beautiful, it deserves to be something we can openly talk about. This, I wholeheartedly agree with, but I think there is something to be said for the innocence and naivety that children once possessed on such a topic, giving them the freedom to discover things on their own time and through their own experiences, and then make their own judgments about them.
There is no right or wrong way to go about it, but I often find myself very shocked to see how little censorship there is for children now. I will hear stories from friends of mine about them babysitting and hearing the “darndest" things, and I wonder if it's funny or if it is sad. Is the innocence of our future generations doomed to a life of “knowing too much"? Or is learning about sex and intimacy early in one's life something that could have a positive outcome in the future?
