Sex education at age three? There’s a limit to my honesty

My stance on compulsory sex education can usually be summarised thus: I am Sweden. I am of the belief that, here in Britain, we are largely a bunch of post-Victorian prudes who giggle at every single euphemistic use of the word “knob” like schoolgirls who have just encountered the bit in Lady Chatterley’s Lover where he puts flowers in her pubes.

When it comes to talking about sex, I believe that honesty is always the best policy. Those shock tabloid headlines about how the Government is apparently planning to hand out leaflets about masturbation to five-year-olds hold no sway with me. The more adults treat sex as a normal part of everyday life, rather than a source of acute, painful embarrassment, the better the prognosis for the child’s future relationships.

But even my eyebrows were raised by the suggestion from John Ashton, the head of the Faculty of Public Health, that parents should talk to their children about sex from the age of three. Yes, three. When a three-year-old boy asks why his anatomy is different from that of a girl, Ashton says parents should give a factual response about the production of sperm.

I can’t help thinking that a chat about spermatozoa is going to be little bit beyond the mental faculties of a child who has barely passed the mirror stage. One of the developmental goals for a three-year-old is that they should be able to build a tower out of nine blocks; engaging them in a discussion about the biological building blocks of life will surely confuse.

I’m not saying that parents should lie, exactly. But three is around the age that children start asking incessant questions, many of which – particularly those of a metaphysical nature – adults will struggle to answer. Children have a particular knack for expecting you to come up with the goods to the kind of philosophical conundrums that have troubled great thinkers for centuries. A flatmate of my parents had a genius solution to the Paxman-eque interrogations to which they were regularly subjected by my three-year-old self. It was, simply: “Dunno”.

I was recently babysitting a four-year-old who turned with an inappropriately dressed Christmas Tinkerbell doll. “She looks like a stripper,” I whispered to my boyfriend, as I took in the fur-trimmed red minidress that resembled one of those budget “Sexy Mrs Claus” outfits you can get in Ann Summers. His reply: “Stop slut-shaming Christmas Tinkerbell. You’re supposed to be a sex-positive feminist.” In fact, Christmas Tinkerbell might have provided an excellent excuse for an in-depth discussion about the commercialisation of female sexuality within a patriarchal capitalist hegemony… but the child in question didn’t belong to me, so I just said it in my head.

No doubt I’ll be grappling with all this and more when I have my own children, and by then all my grand plans for gender neutrality and a Disney princess embargo will turn spectacularly to (fairy) dust. When you hear a four-year-old talk about “my vagina”, you do start wondering whether the term “front bum” is really all that bad.

I’m sure those negotiating the complex ups and downs of parenting are grateful that they can add Ashton’s advice to the pile. Personally, though, I’d hold off on the topic of sperm production for now. At least until they are five or six.