Kids and Sexual Suggestion

It's not so much a problem that children are exposed to sex early, it's the way they are exposed to it. People seem to prefer exposing sex to kids coyly and comically on a regular, daily basis, rather than honestly and factually in small doses. Society is still hung up about sex, and so (after decades of declining standards over the acceptability of its suggestion) has been going to great lengths to throw sex into everything "suggestively," failing to find suitable any honest and accurate depictions of sex acceptable for viewing by children.

So if we have to be concerned about anything (and I don't think we do anyways), it would be that kids are getting the wrong idea of what sex is, and the real implications of it. A child can watch a commercial where a bikini woman opens a beer bottle with her "parts" while serving it to a leering man, and it is completely acceptable, but it is thought that if that same child saw even just the image of a vagina, or a penis, he or she is going to be traumatized for life. Neither is traumatizing. To view one as more hazardous than the other is mere superstition, and just an indication of how backwards a child's everyday reality is in the 21st century.

Expose them to sex early, sure. Expose a child to sex suggestively, sure, but counter it with exposing them to sex as an uncensored reality as well. If we leave it up to parents to pick the time when their children are "ready" to see an accurate portrayal of sex, the kids have already had 15 or so years of seeing sex as a series of untruthful, amoral, absurd, sexist, and exploitative imagery, and will likely have a misunderstanding about the word. It will all have to be unraveled and untangled before any discussion about sex as a real thing with real implications can be presented.

All the parental controls in the world are not going to stop the abundance of media from seeping into a child's everyday life, so it's best to just confront the issue early on as an inevitability. Show and tell them the honest truth about sex the way one would if asked any other question concerning human biology, and move on--tailoring the lesson to their developmental comprehension. Censorship of reality doesn't work, all it does is turn the illusion into reality.