108: BEST OF: The Sex Ed You Should Have Gotten with Rachel Coler Mulholland
🌟 Taking a Break! 🌟
Hey everyone! I am taking a short break for August to recharge and prepare exciting new content for you. I’ll be back in September with fresh episodes and engaging conversations. Thanks for your support and patience. Stay tuned for what’s coming next!
Today, we are covering an important topic today, but maybe not in the way you expect. I’m joined by Rachel Mulholland (aka Shug CM), a therapist whom I met on TikTok because of her incredible content around sex education for children. Today’s focus is on how our lives as adults are impacted if we don’t get comprehensive sex education as children. Join us for the conversation!
Show Highlights:
How KC’s story from her teenage years illustrates the gaps that most people have in their education about sex and the fact that sex ed is NOT a one-time conversation
How “purity culture” is impacting teenagers in certain places in the US in damaging ways
How even most comprehensive sex ed doesn’t address the pleasurable side of sex–and (for females) that the pleasure doesn’t have to come from another person
How sexual predators take advantage of the lack of information in sex ed from SAFE places
Why parents have real fear about talking to their kids about sex ed
The effects of NOT educating kids that sex and pleasure don’t always go together
Rachel’s Four Pillars of Safe Sex: confirmation, communication, lubrication, and enthusiastic participation
Why parents should be aware when their kids are ready to hear and learn–and begin at the most basic level appropriate for their age
How to answer those first little-kid questions around, “Where do babies come from?”
Why curiosity is a foundational part of body talk for kids–not just around sexuality
How parents can work through their own feelings around sex ed with their children
Why Rachel’s next project is a book about body talk
Resources:
Connect with Rachel: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Website (coming soon!)
Recommended by Rachel: How Do You Make A Baby by Anna Fiske
Connect with KC: TikTok, Instagram, and Website
Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning
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KC Davis 0:05
Hello. Sentient ball of stardust Welcome to Struggle care the podcast about mental health by me KC Davis, eventually I'll have a tagline that sticks also, by the way, I somebody told me, like way early on, that I don't pronounce sentient correctly. And I looked it up and they were correct. So apparently the American pronunciation is sentient. I guess the British still say sentient. But I just want, dear listener, you to know that I am totally 100% aware that I don't pronounce it at the correct us pronunciation, and I will not be. I think it sounds weird, and I will not I want to stick with sentient. My guest today is Rachel, who is a therapist. I met her on Tiktok because she makes really incredible content about sex education for children. And before you swipe away if you're not a parent, we're only going to talk about parenting stuff at the very end, because I want to talk more about what the effect is as adults when we don't get comprehensive sex education. So Rachel, say hello, introduce yourself.
Rachel 1:04
Hi everybody. I'm Rachel. You might also know me as Shug from Tiktok. So Rachel,
KC Davis 1:09
I want to start by telling you a story. Alright, let's hear it. So by the way, Mom and Dad, you may not want to hear the story, but whatever my I don't remember sex education in school at all. No recollection of it. I do remember my mother, which I thought she did a good job. She sat down when I was in early grade school and explained to me how babies were made, and she drew the ovaries and the uterus and, you know, the vaginal canal, and she talked about the sperm going up through the vet the vaginal canal and meeting the egg and it coming down, like she get, she drew it out the whole picture, and that's what I remember. And at the time, and for a long time, I thought, like, wow, like, my mom really, like, did so much more than school did. And then fast forward, I was 16 years old, and I lost my virginity in the backseat of a minivan at like, 3am it was very romantic. And the next day. So I'm talking like 29 hours later, I was with my friend, who, incidentally, was that person's younger sister, and I went to the bathroom, and I sat down on the toilet, and this gush of blood came out, and it was not period blood, right? Like it was watery. It was a gush, and I panicked, and I called a friend, obviously not their friend, whose house I was at, because I just slept with her brother. And I said to her, this is embarrassing to this day, I said I had sex and I think I got pregnant and just had a miscarriage, because at 16 years old, that was I didn't know anything else except for those mechanics of like the sperm meets the egg, and that's what happens. It's so funny to me to this day of poor little 16 year old thinking that 24 hours later I had gotten pregnant and then had a bloody miscarriage, because I had no idea what happened. I know today that I must have had a hymen that broke like hours later, and a little bit of blood came out. But I just wanted to share that with you and maybe use that as a jumping off point for how what we think is really comprehensive is not that comprehensive, well. And you touched
Rachel 3:11
on a really important theme. We've touched on several, actually, and the biggest one is that this is not a one time conversation, right? So many of us can point back to that one time we had the talk, right? I will never forget mine was sitting on the front step with my dad, because for some reason I was much more comfortable talking about that kind of stuff with my dad, and he was, you know, going to have the talk with me. And was like, Well, you know, when this, and I pretty sure, blacked out, because I don't remember a single thing he said. And then after that, it was like it was never talked about again, and there was never any discussion about the interpersonal part of it, which is another thing you're talking about, right? Like the fact that you felt like you had to hide the fact that you've had sex from this one friend. Like, we never discuss the consent piece, the interpersonal piece, the timeline. We put so much pressure, right? You made an off the cuff remark about how, you know, oh, how romantic. In the backseat of event, like, there's so much pressure on the first time, right? There's so many themes that you've touched on. But the biggest one here that we should probably discuss is this idea that, like, you have the talk about the mechanics, then you never discuss it again, and you'll just figure it out. And from an adult perspective, right? You're wanting to talk about how this impacts as adults, that's the piece, right? Because we spend so much of our early adulthood fumbling around and trying to find this information through trial and error and through misinformation of our friends, trial and errors, and that's one of the biggest negative impacts you can have about not getting comprehensive sex ed. And
KC Davis 4:37
I even think about fast forwarding to being in my late 20s, I was married, and we were trying to have a baby. We were trying to conceive, and we were having fertility issues, and so that drove me and my little ADHD brain into this, like hyper focus of learning about how conception really happens, and learning that you're only fertile, like four or five days. Days out of the month, and that it happens at this time, and it takes this many days for and I remember being like I was never taught any of this. I had to learn what fertility meant. And my husband and I kind of joked about how our whole, like teenage and early 20s years was spent really thinking that, like getting pregnant was so easy that, like we had to constantly be terrified about it, only to find that, like it's actually kind of hard for some people, and feeling very like no one prepared us for this, I can't believe we didn't know this. And it also makes me think about how, you know, I am someone who considers themselves sort of what we call an ex evangelical. So I still am in sort of a progressive Protestant Christian faith, but I talk a lot with friends about what the effect of purity culture has on us like so if listeners aren't familiar, like in the US church, particularly in the south, there's this real emphasis on sexual purity. It's particularly only for women, really. And there's a lot of conversations about how damaging that is, and that's sort of a conversation for another day. But what I think is so interesting is that even those of us who would not consider ourselves as growing up in purity culture, there's still this like, well, this is not something I can talk to my parents about. And the conversations that my mom had with me about sex were about mechanics. And I was sort of given this impression that it's okay to ask about mechanics, it's okay to learn about mechanics, but when it came to pleasure, that's not okay to know, like to learn about, that you just have to that's
Rachel 6:48
not even the thing we talk about, yeah, like ever even once you're sexually active, like it is a recent development that even adult people talk to each other about, not just Like, whether it was good or bad, but like, this was an enjoyable thing. I'm doing this because it's an enjoyable thing. I don't want to have children, you know, they're like, that's a recent development in the way that we talk about sex,
KC Davis 7:12
and I think it really does create even if you're not growing up in sort of a religious context that shame culture around your body and your pleasure and the way that your body works. And it's wild to me that we can know so much and learn so much about our bodies, and that somehow everything below the waist and above the knees, it has to be like mysterious.
Rachel 7:35
What's really interesting, too, when you talk about the concept of pleasure, and the way that we introduce that idea is like, even if you have the comprehensive discussion like this is between two people who are really into each other, and it does feel good. We also leave out the idea that, like, the pleasure doesn't come from the other person. The pleasure is innate in you, and the pleasure is something that you can do for yourself, and we especially fail to do that for little for people who are born with uteruses and vulvas and vaginas, like we don't talk about that. It's like, ingrained in the culture to acknowledge that people with penises are just going to explore themselves. But we never, like, we don't touch on that subject for people who are born with vaginas ever and so like, even again, even if you have the conversation about pleasure, even if you were lucky enough to have a parent who was comprehensive enough to say, Well, yeah, you know, you can have sex without having babies, because it feels good. We don't like that gives the that gives children, and then again, young adults that the idea that the pleasure comes from the other person, it has to be initiated by the other person. It has to be created and serviced and maintained by the other person. It
KC Davis 8:41
totally reminds me of another funny thing, which is that I remember being young, and I'm talking like I must have been like a toddler, like I was sleeping with a stuffed animal, and I had just discovered masturbation, and I was in bed with my mother. I mean, that's how young I was right. And my mom was like, What do you wear on vacation or something? She's like, What are you doing? Why? Like, what are you moving around? And I was like, I'm touching myself here. And she just kind of rolled over and looked at me and went, Okay, well, that's something that you do in private. And then, like, rolled over and went to sleep. And so, like, my mom really did have, especially, think, for the when I was growing up, like a pretty open matter of fact, non shaming conversation or like attitude about it. And yet, fast forward, like around that time or a year later, I remember listening to that Christmas song where it's like, you better watch out. You better not cry. You better not pow. I'm telling you why. Listen, this is how young I was. I didn't know what the word pout meant, and for some reason, I decided in my head, I think that means what I'm doing when I touch myself. I think that must be what pouting is, and Santa doesn't want me to do that. And I remember getting really frightened. Yeah, so it's just so funny to me to like, have what I've always considered like a parent with kind of progressive, open ideas about that, and yet, culturally, still having these, like, formative memories about being like, wait, I shouldn't do that. And I think here's my question, really, is that I think when we talk about, Hey, kids need comprehensive sex ed, and we talk about like, they need to understand how sex works mechanically. I think a lot of people are totally down with that, like, yes, they need to understand. But even the most progressive people that I know, when you start talking about, talking about children, about pleasure, all of the sudden we are so uncomfortable, is that something that you've experienced,
Rachel 10:45
Oh, absolutely. One of the very first videos that I had kind of blow up really big was when I proposed that we should not only encourage our young people to explore their own bodies, but that we should encourage them to explore their own bodies as a way to keep them safe, because if you understand how your body works and what your body likes and what your body needs, and you know that that's okay, and you can focus on yourself, and you can say, I'm not really down to explore your body yet, because I'm really still learning about my own that's a safeguard for them. That's a way for them to say, you know, I know that I'm not really all the way sure about how my own body works, so like, let's not go there yet, right? A lot of the ways that predators leverage their power against children is by giving them information that they haven't gotten from somewhere safe. So they start with answering questions for them that the kids have been told they can't answer, you know, they can't ask, or they don't feel comfortable asking their caregivers. And, you know, it's pretty nonchalant. It's pretty non threatening. And then it escalates. And then it goes from answering questions to offering information, and that information is where we start to, you know, get into the dangerous stuff. And when they offer that information. Like, hey, if you do this, it feels good. And you know, I won't tell even you know it's okay to feel that. Like, can you hear like, how that becomes a way for this person to not only gain their trust and their confidence, but to then prepare them to move into things that is absolutely not okay. Whereas, if we take a kid and we say, You know what, you're absolutely allowed to explore your body, and you're going to find spots that feel really good to touch, and you can go in your bedroom, or you can go in the bathroom, and you can do those things with clean hands by yourself, that's totally okay. You're allowed to explore your body, and you should explore your body and find out the things that you like, and when you're older and when you're ready and you're done, exploring your body, and you understand it and you know it, then when you're bigger, you can start to explore it with other people who are safe,
KC Davis 12:50
yeah, because it really it deals in the the sort of like it is dealing in the trait of pleasure. Because we're told pleasure is sort of a taboo subject to talk about. And so when there's this person who's going to talk to you about pleasure, and it's the only person that will, and I mean, that's certainly how there's a reason why trust and credibility is so easily offered to teachers, because people that teach you things right, like, that's honestly even I have never thought of it that way. Because even though I agree, I still feel those feelings of, like, really, talk to my four year old about how it feels good, really, like, talk to my 678, year old. And I'm trying even to identify, like, what is my fear, right? And so that's kind of what I want to talk about next. And but I want to pause just for a second, and then we'll come right back. Okay? We're back with Rachel, who's a therapist that talks about, basically, BodyTalk sex ed. What is the effect that not getting sex ed has on us as adults? How should we talk to kids about sex? And so I wanted to come back to this point about how you said that not only talking about the mechanics, but about pleasure, and how that's actually a safeguard, because I think that something in me, My gut feeling feels the opposite. I feel like it's like, scary or dangerous, or like I might accidentally open something up that's like, not going to be good for my kids. Like, where does that come from? Well,
Rachel 14:13
I think that's, you know, touching back into the idea of purity culture, right? We're steeped in the US, in this idea that sex and pleasure are intricately interwoven. There we go, inextricably tied, right? They're stuck together. There is no separation. How
KC Davis 14:28
is that easier for you to say,
Rachel 14:32
Listen, my ADHD brain works one way. I can't explain it. It's just how it's gonna go.
KC Davis 14:37
That's amazing. Okay, so it's tied in an untieable way,
Rachel 14:40
exactly. You can't take them apart from each other, which is, of course, not true, like I said before, to what I miss the to what sex and pleasure? Yes, okay, they have to come together, right? There's that idea that sex is the only way to be pleasurable, and because sex is an adult thing, that means pleasure is an adult thing. It's. Not for young children. It's not for people growing up, even though it's literally your biology.
KC Davis 15:05
And I'm having like such an epiphany moment right now, because when I think about my first sexual experiences, they were not pleasurable, and I thought that was normal. I thought that was fine, like the effect of no one talking to me about sex and pleasure being inextricably linked meant that my first sexual experience as a, I guess, a preschooler, where the little boy wanted me to go under the table and say, I'll show me yours if you show me mine. And nothing about that was enjoyable. In fact, I was uncomfortable, but I just kind of let him do it, and it was a peer, right? And then moving forward, right? Like when the first time that I gave oral sex, and it was sort of this, like, I'll do you if you do me, and it was not pleasurable at all for me. But yet, when I thought about like experimenting, no part of me expected that it was supposed to be pleasurable. And yet, when I think about every male on the other side, they actually were experiencing pleasure. Right. Fast forward to losing my virginity was not pleasurable
Rachel 16:05
because had they been given the opportunity to explore their own bodies, to figure out what their bodies liked? It's again, it's a cultural norm that we just expect that.
KC Davis 16:14
So we're literally setting our girls up for not believing that their sexual encounters should be pleasurable, and that's like a big reason why so many of us and so many of our daughters would grow up to be like to partake in this culture where, like, my pleasure doesn't matter, and it really just matters about the man. And I'm just doing it so that he like, oh my god, this is such a light bulb moment.
Rachel 16:43
Yeah, we never label it. We don't name that. We don't talk about the idea that we're not talking about pleasure because we don't want to talk about sex like we have never that doesn't come up. And then so, like, you know, you feel uncomfortable talking to little kids about it. You don't want to say, This feels good, it's and then the next step of that is it feels good when you do it to yourself and it should feel good when you get to a partner. And that's where, like the next video, one of the next ones that I had blow up was my four pillars discussion, the four pillars of safe sex, because safe sex isn't just about protection. So what are the four pillars? So the four pillars are confirmation, making sure that both partners are really excited to be doing this. You need to confirm explicitly that both of you are jazzed about this happening. Then you have to have communication checking in beforehand. What do you want to try? What are you excited about checking out, like checking in during? Hey, is this good? Are you liking this? Do we want to try something different and then checking in after? How do you feel? Do you want to cuddle? Do you need a glass of water? Do you want to go for a walk? How was it? And then the third pillar is lubrication. Nobody talks about that. It's a whole, I mean, that's a whole nother podcast. But like making sure that you are able to do this in a way that doesn't hurt, right? There's a very low percentage of people that can have sex without additional lubrication and actually enjoy it. Weirdly enough, I keep smacking there.
KC Davis 18:05
I recently saw a Tiktok that was like nobody had ever put it this way. And he showed a picture, a D model of a clitoris, and where it showed that, like it's not just that little nub, like it's this big kind of organ that goes, you know, all sorts of ways. And he specifically talked about the part of it that comes around the outside of the vaginal canal. And he was like, here's the thing, there are no nerves like on the inside, like in much of your vaginal canal. And so what makes penetration pleasurable is when you get aroused, blood flows into this part of the clitoris, and that changes what's and it pushes in on the walls and creates sensation. And so he was like, when we talk about lubrication, we're not just talking about so that it goes in easy. We're talking about so that it's actually pleasurable for you, not just the absence of pain and irritation and friction, but that foreplay, getting those areas ready, right? It's as integral to a woman as like getting an erection is for a man, like it won't work. There will be no pleasure otherwise. Yep,
Rachel 19:16
you're absolutely right. Like that is, it is essentially, when you think about it, a female erection, getting that part of the clitoris warmed up is vital. You said it beautifully.
KC Davis 19:27
And he also, by the way, for any men listening, he said that is typically best done by not touching the clitoris. He was like, you can't just like, go in. It's like, this is the mood setting, right? So that's fascinating. So it's confirmation, communication, lubrication, what's the fourth one? And
Rachel 19:42
now my brain just turned off. So this is I'm all like, God, I
KC Davis 19:45
love that so much.
Rachel 19:47
My favorite part about being ADHD, I talk about this literally all the time. This
KC Davis 19:52
is such a safe space to do that. Just blank. It's fine. We'll come back to it. Yeah,
Rachel 19:56
yeah. It's just gone. It's not there. I made them up. Made a Tiktok. Can't think of it.
KC Davis 20:03
So I think that what I find myself as a parent being afraid of is like, what if I teach my kid things about her body that her brain is not ready to contextualize or make decisions about?
Rachel 20:20
So that's where my the kind of foundations of BodyTalk come from. That's where you have that requirement. I call it consent for knowledge, touching base and making sure that your kids are driving this bus, that they're letting you know when they're ready to hear this information. Touch is saying, you know, hey, this answer to this question or this topic that I'm going to bring up might make you feel some things. Might make you feel a little weird, or make you have some more questions. Are you ready to hear this? Do you want to know the answer? Because sometimes they're going to say, No. They'll be like, actually, I don't really want to know that. And then you say, Okay, I'll table this, and we can talk about it later. And what that does is it allows you to know like, Okay, this is something that they've been thinking about, or they've been hearing from someone, or they heard a joke in a movie, or whatever. And I need to come back to this, because it's clearly something that is brewing, right? But it also gives them the ability to say, I'm not ready for this yet, right? If I'm going to feel some things, I need to be in a different place.
KC Davis 21:23
So what would you say to a parent that says I don't want to talk to my young child? They're asking me where babies come from. They're asking me how babies get into the tummy. But I'm really afraid that if I tell my kid about penises going into vaginas, they're going to go to school and ask some kid to put their penis into the vagina because they don't have they don't understand cognitively that, like they need to not do that well,
Rachel 21:48
and that's where. So if your kid is asking the question, you start with the minimum answer possible, right? You always start with the most base level. So where do babies come from? Oh, babies come from uteruses. Oh, okay, okay,
KC Davis 22:02
so let's, let me ask you this in real life, because this has happened to me. The first time that my kid asked, Where do babies come from? I said, mommy's tummy. Yeah. I said, Okay, all right. The next time she asked, and I had actually already been watching your tech talk, so I was, like, trying really hard to and then the next time she said, this was like, you know, I can't remember if it was like, months or a year later or a year later or something? And she kind of stopped doing, how did the babies get into the mommy's tummy? And so I said, well, the daddy's put them there. This may not have been the right answer, but I was, I was trying to go with, like, I'm gonna be honest, but, and then she was like, oh, okay, like, whatever. Then the next question, and when I say they were, like, months, if not years, in between these questions, right? She goes, how did the daddies put a baby into mommy's tummy? And that's when I realized I'm not ready to have this conversation. And I was like, I'll tell you later. So like, and I mean, she was four when she asked that. So how do you first of all, how should I have done that differently? And then how would I answer that question of, how does the daddy put the like? So you
Rachel 23:05
didn't, I mean, to make you feel better. You didn't handle it poorly, right? You didn't shut her down and say, You can't know that you're that's too much of a grown up question. Like, you didn't shut her down. You said, Oh, I'll answer that a little bit later, right? We're all. We all have moments where we're busy or where we need to gather our like our thoughts, it is better to say in the moment, can we talk about this? Can we table this? Can we put a pin in it and I'll come back to it and then do that? Right? Obviously, you've got to make good than to freak out and be like, you can't talk about that, right? We don't want to add shame to the conversation. We just want to say, we'll talk about that in a minute, right? We'll give that a second. But that's the perfect time for you to throw in that consent for knowledge piece. So I'm going to tell you how the baby gets in there, but it might make you feel some big things and make you have a lot of questions. Are you sure you want to know? Because it's very possible that she's like, Yeah. And then what you do is you start again, minimal information. So you know that babies grow in my tummy, but there's a special organ called a uterus. That's where they grow. It's like a room that's only made for babies to grow. And what happens is there's these things called ovaries, and the egg comes out of the ovaries, and then the sperm meets the egg in the fallopian tube, and that's where the cells combine, and the DNA zips together and starts the process of making a baby. And the cells divide and divide and divide, and like, when you get to that again, that very mechanical explanation, the sperm and the egg, that's enough information, if you really don't want to talk about the penis and the vagina and that whole thing yet, start with the biology of where the baby actually forms, because that's so much, wait a minute, there's two. They have to Whoa. And it's entirely possible that's enough for her to chew on that, how the sperm gets in there? Not even there, not even thinking about it
KC Davis 24:44
yet, sure. Okay, well, is there like, a minimum age, or is it like different for all kids? Like, when you start,
Rachel 24:51
it's different for all kids. So, like, my oldest was probably seven. He probably took the longest to be like, how does. Get in there, which, incidentally, was really comfortable, because it was right after we told him that he was having a baby sister. He was like, Wait, how did she get in there? And I was like, Cool. All right, well, I guess I'll tell you. And then my middle was probably three and a half, because she was getting a baby sister. And she was like, how did she get in there? I was like, Do you want to know? And she's like, Yeah. And again, to them, it's like, putting Legos together, right? It's not some sort of big, scary, puritanical, you know, oh, I'm gonna go try this. Right? It's like, oh, that's a cool thing that you could do. Interesting. And then what you were saying, like, I'm scared that my kid's gonna go to school and be like, let's try this. You at the end of this conversation, or even peppered throughout you, throw in this is a thing that grown ups do when they're feeling like they want to have a baby, because when they're little, like that pleasure is not about you're not talking about two people having pleasure, yet you can, you can say that it feels good, I guess, but like, I've never bothered because I don't want them thinking about like, it's pleasure and it's baby. Because for them, they're just thinking about the baby. They're like, Where do babies come from? Where is human life springing forth from? And then the pleasure part is a separate conversation, just for themselves, in my experience, anyway. So
KC Davis 26:13
when would it behoove a parent to have this conversation with a kid that maybe is not bringing it up? So
Rachel 26:20
I that's another one where another foundation is encouraging curiosity. So curiosity is a foundational part of BodyTalk, and not just curiosity about sex, but curiosity about your body in general. So if you want to pepper scientific facts through their whole lives about their body, did you know that scabs, they fall off? Guaranteed within two weeks, because your skin, your whole outside of your skin, replaces itself every 28 days. Did you know that isn't that cool? Did you know that your body has a mail carrier like the mailman outside your body has that they're called hormones, and peppering those kind of facts throughout your day to make curiosity and information sharing a standard so that if you notice that your child hasn't asked the question, you can say, Isn't it interesting that babies are the result of two cells from two different people coming together to make a human? Did you know that? Isn't that cool? And you can spark that curiosity just by sharing non scary facts that are interesting about the human because we're miraculous, right? The way the human body works is fascinating, and there are things about us that we still don't understand. We've been wandering this earth for 1000s of years, and there are processes we don't get, but we're like, we're still figuring it out, and so making the knowledge of the human body commonplace but still fascinating, is a huge part of making BodyTalk non threatening.
KC Davis 27:48
Okay, so when we come back, I have two questions for you. Okay, so here are my two questions. I want to talk about how hard these conversations can be for us as parents when we maybe didn't get those types of conversations as kids, like, how do we address and I love earlier when you said, like, it's okay to punt the question. But what was interesting to me is that punting the question was about me not being ready, not about them not being ready. I mean, how do you help someone get over maybe some of those fears. Oh yeah, what if they're corrupted, or, what if they, you know, go say this to some other kid. What if they, you know, start experimenting, and it's, you know, how do we work through our own feelings of those sort of things? So
Rachel 28:34
that's the kind of, the reason why I started my platform, right? Is this idea that working through your own feelings, just like when you're doing gentle parenting, just like when you're trying to get into a healthy adult relationship. So much of this comes from doing your own internal work, and the easiest way is to start or to think about them ahead of time, right? Don't wait to think about this until your kid is asked the question, right? Start thinking about, how am I going to talk about this? What do I want to say? What are some scripts that I can use, right? And then, like you were saying, Where does this come from in me? Why am I uncomfortable about this? What about this conversation gives me the ick and thinking about, Okay, is there a time when I was little that I asked a question and got shut down. Was there a moment where I realized that if I had known this, I would have been a safer person and thinking about those things like that's so much of this is forethought. It requires thinking ahead. And kids don't often let us do that. They love to blindside us with things that we never thought about.
KC Davis 29:40
That was such a powerful thing you said, when you said, If I had known this, I would have been safer. And I think that even if you don't have kids, there's something really powerful about the permission to grieve. I mean, the title of this episode is the sex ed you should have had. And I. There should have been someone that could talk to you about this, and maybe it was no one's fault. A lot of people are, you know, we're all products of our time and our culture and the way we were raised, and I think most people are doing the best we can, but it's okay to grieve that like that might have hit some people like a ton of bricks, like you had you had this information, had you had an adult that could have taught you the way you deserve to be taught you might have been safer. You might
Rachel 30:26
have been able to avoid you know, I look back on my own youth and again, very much like you. I had parents who were way more open than any of my peers. Parents, right? Like I very distinctly remember, like my book opens with me flipping through the vellum pages of the World Book, encyclopedia, anatomy section, and looking at the systems, and being hyper focused on the reproductive systems, and being like, this is fascinating. And my parents were just like, yeah, if you've got questions, you can ask them. But my parents were married for 31 years. They met my mom's freshman year of college, my dad had been engaged before, when he was in Vietnam, and my mom had dated a couple of people, but, like, there was no there was never a discussion about what healthy dating looks like and what it looks like to, you know, try people on for size, etc, etc. It was just kind of this expectation that when you get old enough, you'll meet somebody that you want to partner up with, and then, you know, that'll be the thing. And so I think about my early 20s, where I dated some really great guys, and I went on some really dangerous dates, like where I had I had my own self interest in mind, even in the slightest, I would never would have gone. And I'm really lucky that being who I am, I was able to get out of those dates without being hurt. But, you know, I think about if those conversations had been more commonplace, how I might have been able to avoid that? And you're absolutely right, grieving and recognizing, like it's okay to be sad that I had to experience those things, and then remembering the reason I'm having these conversations is to help my kids avoid the really dangerous stuff. You're not going to help them avoid heartache. Everybody has heartache. Everybody has those moments where they're like, shoot. That did not go to plan, but hopefully avoiding those situations where they come home and they're like, I'm I'm hurt
KC Davis 32:17
well. And the thing that I think's ironic about my sort of gut reaction, fears of like, what if they go do this? What if they go do this? Are all things that like kids are doing when they don't have the right information. Like, those things are happening anyways.
Rachel 32:33
I will never forget Samantha s at the base of the curly slide on the elementary playground being like, I saw some sperm. You could see him swimming around in the hand. And I was like, Whoa, no, you can't they're microscopic. Like, that's not a thing. She's literally talking about tadpoles or minnows or something, and just calling them sperm. But like, it is in just seared into my brain, and that is another one of those driving forces, like, I will be sharing the information with my child that you can't see them, and if a grownup is showing you sperm, you need to tell mom. Well, listen,
KC Davis 33:03
that was my first thought was, like, if you had the kind of relationship with your parents where you that kind of thing was an open topic, and you were sort of taught about happening between adults. And some one did say to you on the playground, I had sperm in my hand, then that would be something that I immediately would be like, I'm gonna say that. I'm gonna tell my mom about that, because that kind of sounds weird, right?
Rachel 33:27
Exactly like I think back on that, and I'm like, because I didn't tell my parents. It like I knew how babies were made. But the concept, like, why would you it never went there for me that like, why are you as a fourth grader talking about, this, is this a flex? And what's really ironic is, my dad was a social worker, so if I had told him, it would have been an immediate like, oh, boy, we gotta check in on this. And it never even occurred to me, because the like, I knew that it was a grown up thing, but I never like and we're not supposed to know and we're not supposed
KC Davis 33:59
so do you have any, like, favorite books that parents could use or that you like?
Rachel 34:07
So I don't, I know there's
KC Davis 34:11
one I should have asked that. I didn't even ask that ahead of time. It's okay. There is
Rachel 34:15
one, I think there's one that's called How to make a baby, that's very cut and dry, right? It's very explicit. It's very there's diagrams. It's very clinical with how it comes together, and it's pretty straightforward. And it's a picture book. It's meant for small children that you can and you can show them the pages you want to show them, and you can show them, you know, the pages you don't want to show them. But as far as like, handbooks and guides, I'm working on one,
KC Davis 34:38
oh, cool. Is the one you mentioned how to make a baby, is that the one that's really inclusive? Yeah, about, like, the different ways that it doesn't just talk about penetrative sex between a man and a woman.
Rachel 34:50
Yes, yep. And that's part of the reason I like it. So I like that it discusses IVF. I like that it discusses, you know, the fact that sex doesn't just happen to be about a baby. Baby, but it, you know, we're focusing on babies again, because this is the question you're asking me. But yeah, that's that it is very inclusive, if I recall,
KC Davis 35:07
because I think I might get that one. Because, you know, when we were talking about, like, how do you bring that up to a kid that maybe is getting to the age where you should know, but they haven't asked, like, maybe that's a good way of being like, we're just gonna read
Rachel 35:19
this book. You totally good with the idea of, like, if you get uncomfy, this book has lots of really good information, but if you get uncomfy, please tell me and we'll stop.
KC Davis 35:27
Okay, well, I can't wait for your book. What do you have a title yet? It's
Rachel 35:32
only got my working title, which is BodyTalk, but it's a collection of stories that are then attached to, kind of the foundational pieces of the sex ed that we should have had, right? Like the how this could look different for people if we give them the information
KC Davis 35:46
well, so tell us where people can find you now if they want to follow you. So I'm
Rachel 35:51
primarily on Tiktok. My handle is lack of impulse control, which is a callback to my ADHD self. I'm also on Instagram, same handle, lack of impulse control. I'll be launching a YouTube channel here and a Facebook page in the next two weeks,
KC Davis 36:04
which by the time this episode comes out, that will be out. Yes, okay, cool.
Rachel 36:08
And then I'm actually working with a developer to get my website launched with the URL of which will be safe kidsno stuff.com.
KC Davis 36:14
Safe Kids, no stuff. No stuff. Oh, no. Like, K N, O, W, K N, O, W, yep, because Safe Kids know stuff. Okay, we'll link all that in the show notes. This has been really great, and I want to thank you so much. I feel like this is such a gap in parenting content when it comes to helping us know how to raise our kids, and especially because when we want to do something different than what was done to us, and that's no judgment, it's just you decide, you know, but it's like when you don't have a model for the way that you want to do it, or even the way you don't want to do it, because it's not like, well, I don't want to do what my parents did. I mean, they did fine, but I don't know how to do anything different without a model. And that's why I think that what you talk about is so vital, and the way that you do your videos is vital. So I want to thank you.
Rachel 37:09
Thank you. I remember the fourth pillar, by the way. What is it? It's enthusiastic participation. Nice if your partner or yourself is not in it enthusiastically, you should probably touch base. There's that communication piece again and stop enthusiastic participation. Sorry. ADHD, woo. The
KC Davis 37:28
amount of times I've been on a podcast and people have been like, what are your seven pillars? And I've like, said them. By the way, there's not seven, they're six. They already did it. And I'll, like, forget them say the wrong number of times there are. It's amazing. I have just really learned to embrace that about myself like that's fine. All right, cool. Well, thank you dear listeners for joining us. I hope that you guys have a really soft and compassionate day. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai