In the Beginning

By Frances Ess

The other day, my seven year old son told me that he can only have baby sex when he is married while it is perfectly o.k .to have talking sex all the time. I was caught off guard and wondered what he meant.

I soon recalled that in one of our many talks with our children, we made a distinction between social intercourse (talking sex) with sexual intercourse (baby sex).
We just hope that when our son announced to the whole that he is having sex with his parents we will not be arrested.

Sex. Just a three letter word. Yet, such a misunderstood and mysterious word.

In Singapore, it seems that there is an interesting dichotomy. Teenagers and young adult, who are not married, are actively having sex and going for abortion while the married Singaporean are too tired to produce two babies to replace themselves.


Like many parents, at first, I feel uncomfortable to admit to my children that my husband and I have an active sex life. It was also difficult to see my children as active sexual human being.

Studying in the convent in the 1970’s, my only source of information about sex were from friends, Her World magazine and for some of us our boyfriends.

Fortunately for us, the convent had a good sex education programme. The irony was that the nuns and priests, who have vowed a life of celibacy, were the most open when it comes to this issue.

From them, we learn to understand our own sexuality and that being masculine and feminine is not a crime. Moreover being interested in the opposite is part of growing up.

When my husband and I were courting each other, we were sorely tempted like any hot blooded teenager would. However, we choose not to be engaged in pre-material sex because we were not sure that we would be marrying each other.

Now that we are married, we are glad that we have waited. We need not live in fear or uncertainty that we have had a shot gun marriage.

Sex education is more then the process of acquiring information, which the education system is doing, by providing our students systematically with a set of relevant information in class.

It is about developing attitudes and beliefs about sex, sexual identity, relationships and intimacy. It equipping our children with a set of skills so that they can make educated choices about their sexual behaviour.

Moreover, they have to feel confident and competent about acting on these choices and not be tricked or pressured into doing something that they might regret later.

Therefore, sex education ideally should be conducted at home. Sex between two happily married persons is seldom seen in T.V. movies or other mass media. Often teenage sex or extra-material sex is glorified.

The best gift we can give to our children is to let them understand that sex should be engaged within a marriage context. Hopefully by see this model, they will be able to develop a set of belief and value system that do not use sex as a bargaining tool to get approval or acceptance .

At the age of five or six, we teach our children to respect their own bodies and that no one should be allowed to touch them. We introduce the three letter words sex, so that they do not find the concept difficult, shameful or mysterious.

When they reached their eighth birthday, they are allowed to ask any question they have about sex and we would answer them, factually, truthfully and sincerely. It is better then they receive it from their friends or strangers.

For our teenagers, we acknowledge that if they want engaged in pre-marital sex we could not be there to stop them. This does not imply that we encourage them to have sex. However, if they choose to not to heed our advice we encourage them to protect themselves against Aids, HIV and STD.

Having cultivated the value that sex is the deepest form of communication between two persons in love, hopefully our children would not be seduce by the heat of the moment and regret for the rest of their life the choice that they made.

This article first appeared in TODAY