and early sex ed I had several "encyclopedia for kids" books - like, seriously for kids, for pre-schoolers, with little text and a lot of pictures - aimed at pre-schoolers who can read relatively small letters without problem, which I was. Well, maybe the books were meant for school-age kids already, I don't know, but I had read them all way before. And one of those books had a two-page spread on pregnancy. It went into detail of how a child developed inside an uterus, about placenta and a child being connected to mother and I think what developed at what age... It was exteremely interesting for me, and I don't remember ever hearing from my parents anything about "buying kids at the shop" or "found in cabbage". It started with "upon intercourse, male sperm meets female egg" or something like that (not an exact translation but just believe me there wasn't a word "sex" or any derivative mentioned at any point). I skimmed past that point barely registering it. I wasn't really curious about what that meant when I had all information about fetuses - with pictures! - before me on display. I was surprised to discover in my early teenage years that it was sex that led to pregnancy - but I knew enough stuff about pregnancy that it only took this one little bit of information to give me a full picture of what happened and which hole was which and what could and could not cause pregnancy. One bit of connection about how exactly male sperm got into female body - before that I kind of theorized on my own and I remember my mom laughing at my ideas but she never told me, I think she kind of assumed at some point that I already knew and yeah she was right, there's no way I wouldn't. It's weird to read about people who never got that little bit of information, never knew what penetrative sex was and did - but it's horrifying to read about people who know that specific part, surrounding them everywhere in our sex-positivity in non-educational media, but apparently have no idea about anatomy and physiology surrounding the process. You don't have to tell the kid about genital ramming to explain where kids come from in a non-ridiculous way. Kids don't have dirty minds, the word "intercourse" isn't automatically the most interesting part, they won't connect it immediately with bad words they might hear in the street. They will, in time, but meanwhile they can still KNOW things, and it's better that they do. I hear the term "kid-appropriate" so often and so insistent that it starts sounding like kids are an entirely separate species that at some point magically transforms into full-grown adults. No they are not! I don't remember a single piece of media from my childhood that "traumatized" me in any way by giving me excess information. By withholding information, yes - there was another spread in one of those books on volcanoes, it detailed in pictures how volcanoes form from just a hole in the ground into a tall mountain of former lava, but made no mention of geological processes and where and why those "holes" appeared, making me think that they could appear anywhere at any moment. But children's books - no, and let me tell you there were some that would be considered EXTREMELY kid-inappropriate in discourse I see around. A good bit of them, for example, were stories from WWII, both about actual battles and about civillian lives - Jewish families hiding from Nazis in neighbours' basements, children starving, burning books and eating pets - let me tell you, these two details were truly horrifying for child!me and helped convey the real seriousness of situation. Bombs falling from the sky, parents never returning from war, children going to war and becoming heroes by sacrificing their lives. Kids are not affected by this in the same way adults are, much less in a way adults assume kids would be. They don't have the same frame of reference. And they need that "traumatizing" knowledge to build this frame of reference that would later in life allow them to determine for themselves which things are and are not horrifying and shocking. I flinch at racist rethoric because as a kid I read those books from perspective of Jews during Holocaust - and just Ukrainians, too, Germans treated Slavics as "a slave race", labor camps and all. People cry "oh, the kids these days are so ignorant! they don't know who Hitler was! they don't believe Holocaust was real!" - well where do you think those ignorant kids should have learned these things? Imbued by magical rays from outer space? Or do you really think public school is sufficient for teaching history? It is absolutely not, it can teach specific facts and dates, but the emotional component, the carcass, the frame of reference on which to apply these facts, has to come from daily life, from parents' stories and books and TV. Don't seat your kids in front of "educational programmes" about animals; read them fairy-tales where the evil stepmother ends up burned alive for her crimes. Teach the kids about right and wrong, give them emotional frame of reference, expose them to horrors, don't leave them navigating this alone - then they will get scared, when they can't talk to mom about something that worries them because mom will only say "you are too young for that".
