What are the rules of sex when you have children? Don’t have sex with or in front of them. Everything else is fair game.

          Paul says: My children are growing up in a sexually charged environment.
That is not to say that Ron Jeremy has replaced Big Bird for our morning TV but my kids do see us kiss and hold each other in ways that would have been censored on 1950’s sitcoms. The thing is that Lee and I believe in sex. It’s a natural and important part of life, up there with love, mistakes, faith, and work. It is something that needs to be modeled and, if done unhealthily, can create a lifetime of pain.

          I admit that I listen for appropriate childhood reactions from my kids to help me gauge whether I am modeling or demonstrating. Modeling is good. Demonstrating requires social services to intervene. So far, when my 5 year old sees Lee and I kiss, he still makes a yuck noise and wanders away. If my teen daughter picks up on an innuendo casually flung about, she plugs her ears proclaiming ‘I don’t want to know’. Then there is the 2 year old, who I call Trojan because he is more effective than any condom.

          Since my children seem to be acting appropriately, as none of them are humping the furniture or anything like that, you might ask why we think that they should see any of this intimacy at all. First, it is important for Lee and me to be sensual and if our children acted as little cock blockers in my life, there would be resentment. I do not care how strong your ego is, when you say yes and someone else says no and they win, there is anger that taps into issues that go all the way back to mommy. So I am going to let my wife know that she is physically attractive to me and my kids just need to lump it, even Ricky the human condom. Secondly, I want my kids to see what healthy sensuality looks like and that sexual behavior can continue into the ripe old age of 44.

          There is one other important aspect to this modeling which is that we keep the sexual behavior between us. We do not sexualize our children because…well, yuck… and we do not sexualize others. My children will never see me look at another woman or spout one of those ‘I could tap that’ type of comments. This is how we maintain our own brand of morality in our relationship.  

          Lee says: Let me explain because even I have a little issue with ‘sexually charged environment’. We are normal, healthy adults who demonstrate appropriate public displays of affection in the open areas of our home. This includes some kissing, hand holding, hugging and the occasional well hidden grope. My kids are raised to understand that this is what married people do. Unlike me who was raised by parents who never kissed in front of us and yet I was raised in a very sexualized environment.

My father tended to be quite verbal in his appreciation of women and my mother would tell me that she was a virgin. The mixed messages were enough to confuse an adult let alone a little girl.

          Bobby, our five year old, says things to us like, ‘I know you kiss each other because you’re married and love each other.’ This is the lesson we want him and the rest of the kids to learn. Marriage is not the death knell to a healthy sex-life and that it is desirable to establish a long term relationship with someone to experience a deep affection with them. 

          I would also point out my children will never find pornography or inappropriate magazines of any kind in the home. Just because it happened to you and you like to think you turned out all right doesn’t make that a good thing. This warps little brains. These are the experiences that raise the bar sexually for a person; where it takes more excitement just to get people off. But this is such a big topic I will need to save it for another sex week. So I need to sign off now and since the Trojan is taking a nap, I can make my move on Paul.