Martha Solomon will host a workshop on how parents can talk to their kids about sex, gender, and body autonomy on April 4, 2019.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Martha Solomon

KAMLOOPS -  We all go through it as kids, and then as parents we have the inevitable and often uncomfortable talk about how babies get made.

Martha Solomon is hosting a workshop in Kamloops on Thursday, April 4, called Navigating The Talk, which she says should be thought of as more of an ongoing conversation.

"The truth is it’s not OK just to have one talk," Solomon says. "We have a series of talks all throughout our children's lives. We have to think of it as an open conversation rather than having them think of it as 'a talk.'”

Though we tend to boil it down to a talk about sex, Solomon says it encompasses relationships, feelings, body autonomy and gender.

"Most of us did not have open conversations with our parents," Solomon explains. "So we don’t have that model to know what it looks like to have a comfortable conversation about sexuality, or about relationships, or about bodies."

Gender is an example of a conversation parents have always had with their kids, but in recent years the conversation has shifted.

"Now we talk about gender less as a binary — so less as a boy or girl — and more as a spectrum; and that’s what people are uncomfortable about," Solomon says. "It’s not that we’re all of the sudden talking about gender, it’s that we’re talking about it in a new way and I think it’s that new part that parents feel they’re not prepared for."

Solomon gets asked the question of when parents should start talking to their kids about sex, and for her the answer is always the same.

"Just start today. If they’re really little just talk to them about their bodies and that their bodies belong to them," she says. "Make sure they know the accurate, scientific names for their body parts, that’s really important, and as they get older they can build on that."

And if parents feel they have messed up a conversation, Solomon suggests taking the opportunity to model how you deal with a mistake.

"I think that’s important for kids to see that (their parents) don’t know everything," she says.

Her free interactive workshop will take place this Thursday, April 4, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Henry Grube Education Centre, 245 Kitchener Crescent, in Room 1A.

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