According to a UK professor, mums and dads should be talking to children about sex from the age of three to avoid them growing up thinking the top is off-limits, The Sunday Times reports.
Professor Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health in the UK, says parents should use questions from their children as an opportunity for biology lessons.
“Part of the problem is that parents avoid questions about, ‘why is he different from me?’ or ‘why is she different from me?’.”
“You have to put the building blocks in place for the serious conversations that young people need to have when they reach their teenage years,” he said.
“If you don’t try to answer your children’s questions factually, or you avoid them, they stop asking them and by the time you get to 13 and 14, that’s it, they don’t tell.”
He warns that if children don’t understand the biology of sex from a young age, they will not be well prepared to deal with complex matters in relationships when they are teenagers, such as consent and practising safe sex.
