When to Have the Sex Talk

When a 5-year-old asks where babies come from, most parents would like to think they can cover the basics with wit, wisdom, and just a little squirming. But when a 9-year-old starts asking for more specifics, wit and wisdom evaporate while the squirm factor starts to go way up.

Despite that inherent embarrassment, most parents generally try to do the right thing, says Dr. Robert Blum, a professor of pediatrics and director of the Center for Adolescent Health and Development at the University of Minnesota. But they aren't always articulating the message as well as they might think.

In a study done for the California Wellness Foundation, for instance, 65 percent of the adults said they had talked about sex or birth control with their children; only 41 percent of kids agreed that any kind of discussion about sex had actually taken place. And while 90 percent of parents said they believed their teens could come to them with questions, only 66 percent of the teens described their parents as being that approachable.

Americans pay a shocking price for this miscommunication. For one thing, the United States continues to have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world. And according to "14 and Younger," a new report from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a nonpartisan nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., a staggering one in five kids aged 14 and under have had sex, says Sarah Brown, the campaign's director.

"When parents wait until their kid is a freshman in high school to start talking, it's way too late," says Jenny Eddington, a 17-year-old high school senior in Slidell, Louisiana. "Parents need to realize sex happens much younger than it used to." The daughter of two obstetricians, Eddington works part-time in her parents' office, where a parade of pregnant teens reminds her constantly about what happens when kids don't get guidance. "A lot of my friends go to each other for advice, because they feel they can't talk to their parents about how they feel. Kids don't want parents to sit down and bombard them with information -- they don't want to hear a 'talk.' They want to have a discussion."