"It may be the most important talk you will ever
have with your child! The "big talk" about sex shouldcome early (we recommend the eighth birthday), but
it is never too late! A "preemptive strike" can give your
child a healthy, positive, respectful view of human intimacy
that will stand up to all the garbage that will come from the media
and the peer group."(value)
I asked my roommate about something that is both folk knowledge and oral knowledge and he immediately said "The Talk." The talk is something that as far as I can gauge all parents
dread the time when needing to bring up the talk of intercourse. Some people prefer to avoid the topic and others tend to attempt to make a joke out of it. I am certain that this is one topic that has been both folk knowledge as well as oral knowledge. I know that for the most part until recently parents didn't have any help from outside sources to figure out what they were going to do tell their children. I think the most difficult thing for parents with this topic has been that they needed to figure out when to tell their children and how much to tell them. Today there are many books out there which can be used to aid in talking to children about intercourse.
I ran into these type of books when I helped out in a library on my mission in Canada. There are many different levels of books some are for children and some are for young adults and others still are for teenagers, I found this out as I re-shelved many of the library's books. The thing about these books is that while they can help to break the surface of the topic with children the way that parents are most likely to share The Talk is to give the same talk that they were given when they were young. Folk knowledge is something that with the technology advancements that has been happening is that people are attempting to convey all of the knowledge that was once only known because they were told from one person to another is now having the ability for people in random areas of the world to hear one group or persons opinion about life from someone else super far away.
Okay, so the first thing that caught my eye on this post was that t-shirt and I was thinking, "Well, this might be an awkward one to comment on..." But I think you had a really interesting idea here Montana, that's definitely a type of folk knowledge that every person who has ever lived to maturity has some experience with. I also like what you said about what used to be folk knowledge who's perspective was limited to the area it was shared in is now able to reach many people.
ReplyDeleteI really like what you said about how (until recently) parents didn't have outside help in knowing how to teach their children about sex. Now they do. There are books and articles written on the subject of not just sex but teaching about it.
ReplyDeleteWe live in an age where information is readily available. One can learn to do almost anything with just a few simple keyboard strokes. Before the advent of the internet, people relied more on their mentors and peers to teach them folk knowledge. Now all it takes is a keyword typed into Google and you can learn to knit, to skateboard, to swim, etc. Of course, many of these skills cannot be efficiently transmitted with just some text and a couple of YouTube videos, but it at least gives people a place to start.
I never actually received 'the talk'. That information I received from my sex ed class in school. I remember when I asked my parents the fateful question "where do babies come from?" and they bought me a book that told me where babies come from. It was a pretty great book actually. It had all these cool clear film flip things of the human body and the stages of baby development in the womb.
ReplyDeleteSo learning where babies come from was something I actually did first learn from a text. But understanding of it probably did not come until I did take my sex ed class.
This is definitely a topic that should be passed down as folk knowledge, speaking from experience, it makes those childhood questions a lot clearer for the child, as awkward as it may be for parents to answer them.