Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the How Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast, the bucket-emptying episodes. I'm your host, Dr Mary Han, psychologist and parenting expert. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat and enjoy the conversation. Today's episode is sort of a listener's question but actually is a topic that's come up at a recent parent talk that I gave and it's reminded me of a subject that comes up so many times and as parents we feel incredibly ill-equipped to manage at the time. So, we've called it, Help! My 7-year-old has a boyfriend. Now, do not feel that if you've got a 12-year-old, 15-year-old that this episode is not for you. Trust me, this is for anyone who finds themselves in a situation where their daughter or their son tells them at any. age that they have a boyfriend or a girlfriend and particularly because we. I think we kind of react to it so viscerally because it's like our little baby and particularly when they're quite young because we're kind of like, do they understand what boyfriends or girlfriends are? And we have this whole kind of. it sends us down a bit of a rabbit hole and sends us down a huge spiral and then often it's like, oh my goodness me, do I need to have conversations with them about sex? And so, my comment is, well, in response to the, do I need to have conversations with them about sex? We should be having conversations with our children about sex and sexual education from birth, really. Because as we're wiping our children's bottoms, their penises and when we're clearing out after we're changing a nappy, we can still be labelling their anatomic, you know, using anatomically correct language. So, it's, you know, if you're panicking about the sexual education thing and you. that's the. you know, you're panicking about the one thing that you've got a really big concern about, then my simple answer to that is we should be having conversations about that from dot. Now, obviously, it's age appropriate, stage appropriate, and we give them small doses of information. There is another episode that is coming up on that. I have, or you can dive into a previous episode, sex, drugs and rock and roll, how to have difficult conversations with our children. But if that's your immediate fear when you think about your child having a girlfriend, then you've got to have a conversation or a boyfriend. And I would simply say that that is. it's not now do I need to have that conversation. It should be something that we're having ongoing. What I want to cover in this bucket emptying episode, which is a short one, is really looking at four things that we can be doing. I am going to be covering a separate bucket emptying episode that goes into much more what do we do when our children come home and talk about some sexually explicit information. That's a whole other episode. This one is just simply how do we manage this concept that our children have now got boyfriends or girlfriends. So the first thing I would say is do not jump to conclusions because what your definition of girlfriend and boyfriend and what you, our narrative, what we think girlfriend and boyfriend mean to us as adults is often not necessarily the same as with our children. And particularly with much younger children, quite often a girlfriend or boyfriend just means that they're somebody that you hang, even in secondary school, they're someone that you just spend lunchtime with and you hang out with, or you're paired with, or a girlfriend or boyfriend is somebody that then ends up just becoming the label. So I would just say do not jump to conclusions. Don't let your thinking get projected onto what your child is suggesting and their definition of it. So that's the first thing. Number two then is be curious. So rather than us jumping into conclusions, let's be curious about when our child says they've got a girlfriend or a boyfriend, what does that mean? Let's ask questions. Let's be interested. Let's spend a bit of time with our children, just being in their space and trying to understand what that means. Now, regardless of your child's age, whether it's a seven-year-old, whether it's a 15-year-old, accept also that being curious is not a one hit pony. You don't just sit there. And then expect that they're going to tell you everything. They're not, because sometimes they'll just throw out this comment that they've got a girlfriend or a boyfriend and then happily go off and do something else. And when we try to have conversations with them, they're just, they're not interested. They don't want to. So be continually curious and don't jump to those conclusions. Don't go down that rabbit hole of assumptions that you might've made, because what we're trying to understand at this stage is what does that mean to our child? You know, what is that? Because what I've found tends to happen in schools is that they reach a certain year and it really depends on the type of school that your child is at. And this isn't a, you know, are they super academic or are they pastoral? It's just in some schools, you find that this becomes a really big thing. And it's usually also what we want to be aware of is it often depends on the cohort. The particular year group. And it's not, it tends to relate much more to do where those children may well be in the birth order. So if you've got a year group that happens to have a lot of sort of second, third and fourth children, for example, they're going to be exposed to a lot more because they've got older siblings. So sometimes we find that these things happen. So don't panic, don't jump to conclusions, be curious, ask lots of questions and be patient in terms of what those might be like. But it's that curiosity rather than our children feeling that they are being drilled, you know, and interrogated and grilled in that regard. The third thing I would say is reflect on, and this is not a blame situation. This is a simply a, an understanding the landscape. So children are much more likely to do what they see than what we say. So we want to reflect independently of our child. If we want to reflect on, where our children may be getting some of their information. So when we've been curious and our children are talking to us about what girlfriend and boyfriend means to them, if there are some flags within that, some red flags, and I'm going to do a whole other episode on that, but if there are, or if you're just curious about how they've acquired a certain level of language around certain things, is that I would ask you to reflect for a little bit on where your child may be getting their information. Please do not weaponise this. Do not start going into school and then finger pointing at the school gates at, you know, your child who's friends with someone who's got an 18-year-old, and suddenly they've been exposed to things. This is not about that. It is simply a, through the curiosity and the questions that we've asked, it's us then reflecting on, are there, because, you know, the fourth one is about filling skills gaps, or correcting gaps in their knowledge. So we want to reflect on where our children may be getting their information. Is it that in our home, we've got older siblings, and remember when, by the time we get to our third and fourth children, it's not like we're bad parents, but we've seen it and we've done it. And so what we, in a home where there are much older children, sometimes we forget how impressionable young children are and how they pick up on some of that information. So it could be that they've just got older siblings, and there may well be some content, either through communication, through language, through other things that they've picked up, that we'll then look at addressing in point four. So it could be that they've got older siblings. It could be that they're spending time with friends or cousins who then have older siblings, and they could be picking it up from there. They could be picking up on media content that we might not be filtering, whether that is through watching things on devices, through any sort of content, really. It could be programs that they're watching. So that third one, that reflect bit, is not a finger pointing. It is simply almost a bit of an audit, so that when we get to the fourth bit, which is fill in or correct any gaps in knowledge. So if our child is saying things during that curious, us being curious and asking questions, where they're making some incorrect commentary, then we want to be able to have that conversation with them, because we're just basically going to correct them in a gentle, nurturing, age and stage appropriate way. Or if there are specific gaps that we feel that are really important to fill in, such as this notion of relationships, what is a relationship? What does that look like? Is it talking about boundaries, talking about consent, talking all about that turn-taking, talking about how relationships change that dynamic? All of these things that we can then do are filling in, as well as then looking at correcting, so that when we're curious and we're asking them about what does a girlfriend and a boyfriend mean, and they make some statements that are just factually inaccurate, that we can then have that conversation. Or if they're making a statement where they've sort of got part of it, but not all of it, then again, it's about filling in those particular gaps. So don't jump to conclusions, be curious, reflect on where their knowledge may be currently being acquired, and then fill in or correct any gaps in that knowledge. I hope that that's been helpful. I hope that that's a helpful start point because this is something that comes up so, so often. And as parents, we often feel slightly caught on the back foot in terms of how do we respond to that? Do we encourage our seven-year-old or our six-year-old or our 12-year-old? Or do we just sort of say, oh, actually, really, that's not a girlfriend or a boyfriend. It's really, at this stage, it's about meeting our children where they're at and what they're using that label for. We don't need to correct a seven-year-old if basically boyfriend or girlfriend to them is just simply that they have a particular game that they like to play in the playground. That's fine. But we can then begin to fill in knowledge gaps about relationships that might take a different form later on as they grow up. So I hope that that has been helpful. And look out for the more intense episode to come that will be on much more explicit content for those of you who have got bigger or deeper concerns about some of the comments in that curious stage. As ever, if you enjoy listening to me, I'd love to hear from you. 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