Parents' roundtable discussion: Kids and sex

Ada Calhoun (moderator) was the founding editor-in-chief of the online parenting magazine Babble.com. She has written for Time, The New York Times, Nerve.com and Salon.com. Her book Instinctive Parenting is due out this spring from Simon Spotlight. She’s now working on a second book, about why cities are a good place to raise kids.

Christen Clifford, a writer and performer in New York, is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Her solo play BabyLove, about maternal sexuality, ran for three months Off Broadway at 45 Bleecker. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her husband, McKenzie Wark, and their children, Felix, 6 years, and Vera, 11 months. She blogs for Babeland about being a sex-positive mom at christenclifford.com.

James Habacker is the founder and artistic director of the Slipper Room, a performance venue on the Lower East Side that has featured burlesque/variety shows for the past ten years. He is also a performer, and can be seen on stages around the world in a variety of comic guises. James has two children: Veronica, 7, and Lincoln, 3. He and his wife, Camille, are happily raising them in Greenwich Village.

Jefferson is the pseudonym of a dad of four and a writer living in New York City. An educator on sexuality and relationships, he writes a blog, One Life, Take Two, chronicling his experience as a bisexual single father. His work was recently included in Hot Dads: The DILF Anthology.

Maia Spotts, an attorney and actress by training, has dipped her toe in many a lake but currently wades in the warm waters of stay-at-home parenting. While her wife is off creating compelling reality television, Maia and her twin two-year-old boys, Calder and Rizzo, have grand adventures anywhere within walking distance of their Hell’s Kitchen apartment.

Samantha Moeller recently left publishing to stay at home with her two-and-a-half-year-old son, Fritz. When she found out she was pregnant with her second child, Moeller decided to cease publishing Missbehave, the magazine she’d founded in 2005. During naptime Samantha works on her blog, thehipstermom.com, which brings together a community of women who feel that they may not fit the stereotypical “mommy” mold.

Ada Let’s go around the room and get a general introduction from each of you as to what your kids are thinking about and what they’re doing.

Christen I’m Christen Clifford. I’m writing a comic memoir about motherhood and sexuality based on a stage show that I did about my experience as a parent. I have two kids: Felix is six and Vera is 11 months.

Felix definitely touches his penis a lot. A lot of times it means that he has to go to the bathroom, so the first question is always, “Do you have to pee?” I think at this point we’re just trying to introduce the concept of privacy.

But I try to do the sex-positive thing, which to me means asking him, “Does that feel good?” And he says, “Yes,” and I say, “Good, it’s supposed to.” I’m trying to reinforce that, and then I also add, “It’s great when you do it in private in your room! It’s cool! Do it in your room!” But I don’t always stop him. It’s like anything: You choose your battles. Do I want to call attention to it every time he’s doing it and make him go into his room? I don’t.

He’s naked a lot—we’re naked a lot. He asks questions. But he’s started to get private himself. He’ll say, “Don’t look at me, Mommy,” when he gets changed. And that seems really weird to me because I’m not sure where it came from; I feel like it didn’t come from us.

Maia I have twin sons. I’m one half of two moms raising two boys, and they’re two years old. And they are in a place right now where they want everybody to be nudie all the time. We went to a birthday party, and halfway through Calder took his shirt off and then everybody had to take their shirts off. But we’re starting to get into that “This is a really cool thing, and it’s super fun to be naked, love your body and it’s great, but maybe we do it at home, when it’s just us.”

They’re starting to figure out their penises. My son Rizzo was sitting in just his shirt, which is a popular look in our house, and made this pronouncement: “My penis is getting bigger! Bigger and bigger and bigger!” He was so excited about it. He has this friend who’s a girl named George, and he declared that he wanted to take it off and give it to George. So that’s one of those things, as a parent, it’s like, “That seems like a really nice idea, I’m sure it’d be great if you wanted to bring George a present. Your penis doesn’t come off.”

James I have a girl who’s seven and a boy who’s three. My wife, Camille, and the kids and I live in the West Village. We own a burlesque club, so the kids are exposed to nudity. They don’t seem to have any issues with it at all. Lincoln definitely likes to play with himself. Veronica plays with herself sometimes, too. We don’t make a big deal out of it; we kind of ignore it. We’ll be sitting there watching TV or something, and Veronica will be touching herself. It hasn’t really gotten to be an issue at all. Certainly they behave differently at home than they do in public. Lincoln’s perfectly comfortable running around naked in public, and Veronica just subtly stopped doing that.

Samantha I have one little boy, his name is Fritz, and he’s two and a half. I have a little girl on the way; she’s due in December. We just started potty training, so now we’re doing the no-diaper-in-the-house thing. It took us awhile to get that started. Fritz was with the nanny all day almost since he was six months old, then I took over. I haven’t really experienced that much sexual stuff yet.

We take baths together; he’s sort of curious. He’s not asking questions yet, he’s so little. But yesterday, when he was sitting on the couch with just a T-shirt on, he started playing with his penis. It got hard and he was interested in that. And he was sort of getting into it. Instinctually, I was like, Stop that! I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, if I’m supposed to stop him or let him keep going.

The other thing about our family is, I’m definitely the more open one about nudity and things like that. When [my husband] sees him running around, sometimes he’ll say, “Where’s your pants?” And I’ll say, “Don’t make him self-conscious. Let him be free. He’s a little baby.”

Jefferson I have four kids: The youngest is in elementary school, and the oldest is in college. I am divorced lo these past six years. We were monogamous in our marriage, but when we divorced I decided I no longer had to be monogamous, and I’m bisexual so I started dating men and women. I made the conscious decision not to introduce my children to the people I was dating, whether they’re male or female. Unless an adult’s going to be a part of their life for a while, I don’t see a reason to introduce the drama of “Dad’s girlfriend” or something into the family. There was never a reason to discuss my bisexuality with the children because it was not particularly relevant. Because there was no “Dad’s boyfriend” to introduce into the equation, I could live with the presumption of heterosexuality. So how they conceive of their father’s sexuality—it’s uncomfortable, because on the one hand it’s none of their business, and on the other hand it is their business: It’s their family, it’s their life.

Maia My parents were hippies, and there were people naked in the hot tub and stuff like that. But there was never a dialogue in our house about sex or sexuality or anything along those lines. It took me a really long time to come out to my parents because it felt like a conversation that I didn’t even know how to have with them. We were comfortable with our bodies, but my mom would always make these jokes, like, “God forbid you should have sex before you’re 30!”

And I think that as a parent now, what’s really important in our household is creating a dialogue with our kids from as early on as we can, in a very age-appropriate manner. The only thing is that often, the first time you talk about sex with your kids is when they ask you where they came from, and that’s not part of our equation, so it seems like that’s particular to—

James Well, they came from somewhere.

Maia They came from somewhere, but we can’t talk about “the boy and the girl had sex and then Mommy got pregnant.” There were a lot of other people involved in the process.

James My daughter, she’s seven, and she recently said to me, “Daddy, I’m gonna ask you this one time, I’m never gonna ask you again: What is sex?” So I said, “What do you think it is?” And she knew what it was but she had some pretty rough ideas. Her immediate reaction was, “It’s kind of gross,” which is a natural reaction at that age. But that was my fallback: “You do it to make babies.” And if you can make babies another way, it really opens things up, doesn’t it?

Maia It allows sex to be something pleasurable and not just for procreation.

James But I don’t feel bad about stressing that part of it for her at seven.

Maia You tell her what’s appropriate for seven.