Explaining Sex To Kids: What Are The "Bases"?
First base is eye contact. Third base is high fiving.
This is the first installment of a new series called Explaining Sex To Kids. Pretty sure I don’t have to describe that any further.
I have a theory that I’ve carried with me since my son was born less than 11 years ago and I realized I would have to either explain everything in the world to him or take responsibility for exposing him to other sources of explanation. The theory is this: there’s an age-appropriate way to talk to kids about literally anything. I have yet to find a place where this isn’t true, but holy shit—the older my kid gets, the more ways he finds to challenge the universality of this theory.
To be clear, believing there is always an age-appropriate way to explain anything has more to do with being able to answer any question they throw at you. It doesn’t mean proactively initiating conversations that kids of a certain age have no real need to be exposed to. I never sat my 5-year-old down and said, “Ok, let’s talk about what the morning-after pill is!” But if we were on the subway and he saw an ad for the morning-after pill and asked what it was, I could answer that question in a way that was both accurate and able to be understood by a 5-year-old.
Photo: Noted egregious gender essentialist, the “boys have penises, girls have vaginas” kid from Kindergarten Cop
My goal with my kid has always been to give an answer to any question, provided I actually know the answer (and if I don’t, I always make sure to say, “Oh, I don’t actually know! Let’s find out together!” which demonstrates both how easy and casual it is to admit when you don’t know something—a crucial life skill if you don’t want to be an asshole—and provides a good opportunity to teach your kid how to find information, an increasingly fraught but still essential task). This practice matters to me for several reasons:
It gives them access to the world from day one, which feels important and vastly beneficial.
Answering kids’ questions, no matter how tricky or definitively age-inappropriate, makes them feel like they belong in the world, that the world is available to them, that it’s all there for them to engage with, from their earliest age. As much as I see the value in preserving the integrity of kids’ innocence (or whatever), I don’t think that has to mean withholding all exposure to concepts that feels too adult, although I definitely understand why that’s many parents’ approach—it’s much simpler, for starters. But the more challenging (and I have to believe, more advantageous) approach is not to say “oh, don’t look at that” or “I’ll tell you when you’re older” but to find the age-appropriate way to let a seed of the idea live in their minds. That way, they can get their little heads around it now, in the form you explain it to them, and as they grow, their understanding will develop and become more complete. I just feel like this is a less jarring way to be exposed to the world, as opposed to having huge swaths of it blocked off from your view and then dropped into the deep end at some point.
It fosters openness and honesty with kids.
One of my nagging fears is that something will be wrong with my kid and he won’t tell me. With the rates of adolescent depression and suicide being what they are, and how it’s all happening in younger and younger kids, this is not a totally baseless fear. For this and countless other reasons, cultivating a relationship with my kid where he genuinely feels like he can talk to me about anything or ask me about anything—it’s not an overreach to say I believe it could save his life at some point, and by extension my life as well. The line between “answering a question about why people get bikini waxes” and “being more likely to have meaningful visibility into his mental health in high school” is a weird one but a very real one. We can talk about anything he wants! I’ll figure out a way to make it work.
It’s really fun to come up with the right answer.
So, the real trick to all of this is that I do not believe that you should just talk to kids in blunt terms about things they are not developmentally ready to hold in their minds. And finding a way to give real answers to tough questions without traumatizing kids (and maintaining your own privacy sometimes) requires a lot of creativity. The process is something like stripping the “inappropriate” thing of its context, distilling it down to its factual elements, thinking about how you would explain that to a kid, and then thinking about the context and thinking about how you can sort of blur the edges and explain it in vague terms to a kid…It actually looks a bit different every time.
And that’s why I decided to do this series. Because explaining things to kids—if you’re really going to lean in and commit to doing it—is a completely unique exercise every single time. And I think it’s really worth doing. It’s also (and I cannot over-emphasize this) extremely funny.
And with that, here’s the first installment, a little gentle, low-stakes softball of a question:
What are the “bases”? You know—the *low, I’m-talking-about-sex voice*–the bases.
Before I say what I told him, I must shout out my kid for having a deeply funny joke answer to his own question, which he delivered in a perfect deadpan:
Honestly, he’s 10.5 years old now, in 5th grade, and answering his sex questions is both a lot easier (there’s just a lot less I need to water down for him—he needs the facts at this point) and much funnier now. That said, he’s still a sweet little baby, and I’m absolutely not going to say things like “dick in mouth” to him now or maybe ever.
So here’s what I did say:
1st base:
“Making out.”
Easy, he already knows what this is.
2nd base:
"Making out but also using hands. Ya know—*give him a faux scandalous look*—butts and boobs.”
Anytime you can say words like “butt” or “boobs” while also delivering factual information, like, just a total hit with 10-year-olds.
3rd base:
“Look, I’m not gonna lie to you: This is when people start touching other things than butts and boobs, if you know what I mean.”
Again, the nice thing about him being this age is that he absolutely does know what I mean. There were a lot of years of saying the actual names of body parts, and I still do that almost always when talking about them in a non-sexual way, but it’s a balancing act. Once kids know the basic mechanics of sex and which body parts are involved in sex (which I always spoke about very plainly when he was a bit younger and first asking about that—I’ll write about that at some point), and they start asking questions with answers that involve specific sex acts, I actually think it’s more age-appropriate to be a little jokey and a little less technical. It’s fully weird (and potentially fucked up) to explicitly describe sex acts to kids. It’s probably important that I clarify my stance on that, considering this entire topic. “Being honest with kids about everything” and “being explicit with kids about everything” are very different things. You can tell them the truth but not the whole truth, so help you god. The fine line to walk with this question, to a kid of this age, with the basic understanding of sex that he has, is to give him the understanding that 3rd base involves people putting their hands on each other’s junk without ever specifically describing it.
4th base:
“Fourth base is just sex.”
And then I told him that no one cool ever talks about sex in terms of bases, and that it can mean looking at making out or having sex like a game where the goal is just to always go further, and that’s a horrible way to look at it, which dovetails easily with the other things I’ve told him about sex and how to be a decent person about it (which will later help him be good at it, although I’ve never come close to talking to my young child about his prospects for future sexual performance and neither should you). He said that made sense. And then I told him that, that said, the bases are fun to joke about, because it’s all so silly, especially when you’re 10 and the word “boobs” makes you laugh. And then he laughed and we went back to playing Mario Kart.