Should you tell your kids about your skeletons?
Should you admit to your child what you’ve done? If you do, how will it affect your ability to keep your son or daughter from doing the same list of things we want children to avoid?
Drugs, drinking, drinking and driving, drugging and driving, driving too fast, texting while driving, downloading porn from the Internet, chatting online with strangers, too-early sex, oral sex, unprotected sex, drug-or-alcohol-induced sex, sex with jerks, sex with a girl who aspires to have a baby.
If you cop to something, anything, will this give your children tacit permission to try it all?
Remarkably few — if any — researchers have explored this topic.
May 5th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Interesting topic. I would have really appreciated my parents talking to me about their experiences with sex, drugs, or whatever instead of avoiding topics that are too heavy or even embarrasing. I think when my kids get to the age where they are faced with all of the things you have listed that I might have some advice on, I won’t hesitate to share my experiences with them. After all….isn’t it my job as a parent to prepare my children for the world as it is and hope that they can take something away from the lessons that I learned and make the world what it should be. I don’t think my experiences give them permission or even an excuse to do the same things, I think it gives them a more intimate view of reality.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:36 am
My parents and I are cool on all this stuff. My mom was two months pregnant for me when they got married; they had to move up the wedding. I am one of those bad kids though that throws that back in her face every now and then when she tells me to stop having sex with my fiance. I think I would be honest with my kids when ever I do have them. I think it’s a trust and honesty factor. If I want my kids to be honest with me I should be honest with them.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Have you?? Would you Scott?? Single dad that might come up… Limited information maybe but I wouldn’t go into any details. But thats me…
May 13th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Hmmm is this a trick question? I guess only the future will tell…. when your son is 15 and you’re 34- well, i guess that cats out of the bag. Seriously though i hate the idea of parents not communicating with their kids. kids have so much to say and the problem is no one is listening to them. take your child and their friends out for a few hours somewheres fun like dinner and a concert or midnight bowling or camping at darien lake, before you know it, they will all be dying to tell you whats going on in their life and all the pressure they are under….they are telling us all the time but their are those of us that chose to not listen. I can’t tell you how many parents i meet that are clueless that their child is having sex, clueless that their child is smoking pot at home, clueless that the “friends house sleepover” is actually a party where they are drinking all night long. i don’t understand why people think their kid is going to be any different then the way they were when they were a kid. open your eyes and ears, give your kid your time….thats the best lesson you can give someone. i personally share alot of my experiences with my 15 year old but i don’t brag about them, i use them as teaching tools to show him—hey look, i did this when i was your age and guess what….i wasnt as smart as i thought i was….(if there isn’t a lesson to be learned from it then it probably should be kept in the closet), after all your child doesnt want to know EVERYTHING about your past. they have a certain image of you much like you have of them…no reason to cloud or distort those images with uncontrollable memory vomit , i stay heavily involved in his life, when he meets a new friend i go out of my way to learn about this new person without being obvious of course…..will i stop my son from traveling the road i did long ago? probably not but i hope to sure as hell know when he’s traveling!!! when that time comes, i’ll give everything i have in my heart to help him get through it…but still I’ll give him the room to learn from his own experiences the same way i did and the same way you did too. I believe this is where our parents would step in and say “Payback is a bitch!” Gotta go my 7 year old is singing all the versus of 9 in the afternoon to me………:)