By Rachael Quinn Egan

Waiting at the school bus stop one recent Spring morning, another mother asked me, “When should we as parents tell our kids about the birds and the bees?”

My answer was, it’s never too soon. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way.

I have taught my kids to feel confident that I can handle any question they might throw at me. Despite my Irish Catholic upbringing, I have taught myself to answer questions about penises, vaginas, vulvas, nipples and where babies come from, without twitching. I use real language and I look my kids in the eye when we talk.

I believed I had prepared my children well for the “birds and the bees” phase of their development. We had enjoyed many “talks”. Then, one afternoon I found my daughter who had just turned seven, shivering on her bed, looking guilty and scared. I sat down on her puppy dog print sheets and asked her, what was the matter?

She looked at me with huge frightened eyes and asked, “Why do people do sex when it’s not for making babies?”

I arranged my face optimistically and said, “When you are an adult and care about someone special, it feels nice to hug and kiss and cuddle really close together.”

Tears sprang from my daughters eyes and she leaned in for a hug.

I held her tightly.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I’m scared!”

“What happened?”

“You’re going to be mad at me!”

“Never, never. I promise. Please tell me what happened so I can help you.” I imagined all manner of horrors.

“I went on your old computer and I saw something scary about sex…”

This moment hit me like a rotten egg in the face — monumental parental failure and guilt.

I dried my daughter’s tears, and found my old laptop. I had put in my closet months ago and forgotten about it. My daughter had not. One day my little one figured she needed more information to fully understand the one burning question that her mother had not adequately answered because she had not articulated her simple question: Sex?

That was what she typed into her search of YouTube — a web service she loved for its funny pet videos and bloopers.

She had learned how to use YouTube from the times we had spent searching for fun videos about beaver attacks. Yes, our tradition, especially when home sick, is to watch beaver attack videos together in the kitchen. (I do voices for the beavers, in various Irish accents. My kids fall off their chairs laughing. No one gets hurt!)

Now I sat with my trembling daughter looking at the list of YouTube offerings on “sex”. It occurred to me, that kids need images to quench their curiosity. Parents can answer questions verbally, but seeing is believing, and you’d better be the one to find the appropriate imagery first, and at a much younger age than you might have imagined. Clearly I had left it too late.

My daughter’s first visualization of “sex” was to see Super Mario and another cartoon man, having sex in a shower. The part my daughter found scary was that Mario did not appear to be a willing participant. Rather than learning about sex and love, my daughter had been introduced to the concept of rape.

I imagined many sessions spent in a therapist’s chair one day, as she tries to come to terms with her Mario nightmares. (This particular video is now gone from YouTube but others like it remain there for anyone’s viewing. Mario has sex with unhappy princesses too.)

I had a lot of explaining to do. I did my best to put the video she had seen into its correct context and then I explained why a child must never use a computer when Mama and Dada are not around. (And berated myself for not hiding my laptop in a better place.)

Then we went straight to our local bookstore.

We came home with two beautiful books, “It’s Not The Stork” for her younger sister (age five), and the next one “It’s So Amazing” for her. These books tell kids everything they need to know and feature all kinds of families. There are multi-racial families and mono racial families. Families with two mom’s, or two dads, or single parents, or families raised by grandparents. There are families who came together through adoption, or through IVF, and there are plain old mom and dad families with biological babies born through classic sexual reproduction…. It’s all there in gorgeous color.

My children and I love these books. They are always at hand and often asked for at bedtime for reading together.

I encourage all my friends who are parents to buy “It’s Not The Stork” before their child turns four, and then move onto the next two books in the series — “It’s So Amazing”, and “It’s Perfectly Normal” (all written by Robie H. Harris, and illustrated delightfully by Michael Emberley).

Your child is never too young to know her human story, and her curiosity is going to lead her to find answers, with or without you.

Don’t let a friend, or anyone at school, or even a cartoon Mario, get there before you do!