10 minute read

Never did I imagine when becoming a parent that I would have so many tricky conversations ahead of me that I would have to navigate with my kids.

When I reflect on my childhood I only remember one conversation my mother had with me that lasted for about 2 minutes while hanging out washing about how I could now get pregnant and that was about it.  This didn’t bother me so much as a teenager as the last thing I wanted was to have conversations with my parents about private or tricky stuff so I never asked and just looked for answers elsewhere. 

The internet wasn’t really a thing back then so it was mostly my friends who I would speak to or my older sister when I was curious about something I didn’t know.

How times have changed over the past 20 years.  We now live in a world of information overload where we can find 20,000 different answers to any question at the click of a button any time of day and night.  And this goes for our kids too.  

Part of being young is being curious but it’s an entirely different world out there than what we as this generation of parents grew up in and we are having to navigate conversations and situations no generation in the past has had to.

One of the difficult things about this for many parents (including myself) is that we don’t have a roadmap for how to have these conversations because for many of us we didn’t have them with our parents as children.  It’s risky business to leave it up to the internet to teach our kids about this stuff as what they are finding when they go looking is causing a lot of harm to a generation of kids who can’t quite process what they are seeing and experiencing.

What’s critical as parents in the lives of our children is that we all get comfortable with being uncomfortable having hard and tricky conversations around things such as abuse, sexuality, consent, suicide and self harm.

The thing you really have to get your head around is your own personal feelings of being uncomfortable having these conversations but doing it anyway.  We teach our kids so much by being brave and pushing through our own uncomfortable feelings by doing hard but important things.  Talking to our kids about topics that make us feel uncomfortable knowing that our kids are also feeling uncomfortable gives them a lived experience of sitting in uncomfortable and important conversations and knowing what that feels like.

This is so critical as part of teaching our children how to speak up when it’s hard.  For many of us it’s shame and discomfort that we feel which stops us from speaking up and getting the help we need.  Giving our kids a chance to participate in uncomfortable conversations gives them practice to be able to have them again in the future because they have done it before and survived.

Holly Ann Martin is one of the ParentTV experts we work with who specialises in protective education and teaching parents and educators some easy and simple strategies they can use to talk to their kids about body safety and consent.

We have recently worked with Holly to put together 2 online courses for parents making it super easy for you to know how to have these tricky conversations with your kids.

The first course is a 5 minute short course for parents about Teaching Consent to Children that you can check out here. 

The second course is a larger 20 minute course focussed on Teaching Body Safety and Consent to our Children going into a bit more depth for parents.  You can check it out here.

I highly recommend checking them out if you are looking for resources to help you know where to start when it comes to talking to your kids about things like abuse, consent and body safety.