So, I don’t really know WHEN I thought the start of conversations about the birds & the bees was going to be… I think I was imagining that it would be somewhere around age 12. But Spiderman forced my hand.
During the late spring of 2020, when my kids had to be home from school due to Covid fear slamming into America, my son asked to watch the Marvel movies. I hadn’t really seen any, because I was sort of waiting to do so with my kids. The opportunity presented itself, and we started to go through them chronologically. He was 7. It was awesome father-son bonding, and we had a blast. They weren’t too scary for him, and he generally understood what was going on.
But now that he is 9, I recently realized that 7 was a better age to start, because some things just were enough over his head that he didn’t catch them.
We were just on a vacation with some friends, and one late night he and their daughter (12 years old) asked if they could watch Spiderman. I thought, why of course, it was fine when he was 7, I figured he’d like it even more now. I was reading a book in the same hotel room, sort of half-listening to the movie, and there’s a scene in the movie where one of Peter Parker’s friends is helping him hunt some bad guys by use of a computer, and he is doing so during some sort of party or school event… and an adult walks in asking why the kid isn’t at the party. Not being able to say he is helping Spiderman, the first thing that comes to mind is that he is on the computer watching porn. The adult sort of stammers and walks out. At age 7, this went right over my son’s head. At age 9, he asks, “What’s porn?”
Thankfully our friend’s daughter didn’t have the need to show off how smart she is, and simply said, “You’ll learn about that some day.”
Which, at the time, was enough for my son because he wanted to keep watching the movie. However, knowing how inquisitive my son is, I realized I was going to need to answer his question in a non-sensational way so that he wouldn’t feel the need to Google it and learn way more than he’s ready for.
The opportunity presented itself when he and I were doing some chores and joking around, and he asked me a question about something… I can’t really remember what it was, but it might have been asking the meaning of a bad word he had heard. I answered his question and in the spirit of “you can ask me anything”, I said, “Hey, by the way, the other day when you were watching Spiderman I heard you ask…”
It was the perfect segue into a conversation, that, most importantly, continued the message that if he ever has questions about things, he can come to me for honest (and age-appropriate) answers.
(I think I told him it was nothing more than adults getting naked and playing around. His response was, “Oh… ok.”)