Kathleen Hema: How to Talk to Your Kids About Sex

Today’s guest is Kathleen Hema, MPH. She is a sex education expert giving parents tips to have the modern day sex talk. Along with being a university lecturer, she has an EXTREMELY helpful and resourceful YouTube channel as well as an instagram account and a Tik Tok account, helping parents talk to their kids about sex. As you all know, I am the mother of two children - my kids are still 3 and 0, but sex education has been heavy on my mind lately. We are living in a day and age where I need to prepare my kids for all of the information that is available - just a quick internet search away - and if I don’t appropriately prepare them for that information, it could be damaging for them. I don’t mean this just as a pornstar, either - if we as parents don’t talk to our kids about sex, and we just hope they’ll learn about it from somewhere else, theres a good chance their first encounter with sex will be devasting, scary, and just really confusing. So when SHOULD I start talking about sex to my kids? About consent? Masturbation? PORN? How do I raise my kids free of the shame I grew up with? How can I equip them with all of the knowledge they need to grow into sexual beings in the most safe, healthy way? I’m a sexworker. My whole life is sex. If iiii don’t know how to address these things, I can only imagine that other parents are curious too. I reached out to Kathleen to help me navigate this topic, so I dont totally fuck it up. She gave me some great tips, and explained everything in a really easy way where I actually feel pretty confident now to start the sex talk with my kids. She broke it down into a timeline so I know exactly when to talk about each topic, and she gave me scripts so that I now have the language to educate my kids in those topics. I learned so much, and I hope you do too!