Kids asking questions.....

[peaches_n_cream]

OK I am new here. We are kinda new to swinging. And the other day our 16 yr old daughter flat out asked us if we were swingers. She had found an icon on the computer to a swingers site. I thought since we all had different desktops that it would not come up on her desktop. BOY was I wrong.

WARNING... if you download it on the computer it MIGHT go to ALL the desktop accounts. Then you might have some explaining to do, as we did.

Anyway....
I talked to a few friends and got a wide range of advice. From: be totally honest to lie your ass off. One really made me think, but talking to my kids about my private sex life is not an easy thing to do....and How honest do you get?

This ones advice was to try to stay as honest as I felt comfertable. Seeings that this person knows how close I am with our daughter. Close enought that when she had her first sexual encounter she came home to share with me. So not wanting to lose her closeness and trust, telling her some things honeslty I decided was the best I could do to keep our great relationship.

I decided to tell her a few things: Yes we have friends that are swingers and yes we have been invited to swingers party's and the icon on the computer was to a swingers site and it was how we kept in touch with a few friends.

I decided to tell her not so much, but what I did tell her.... was truthful.

She proceeded to tell me that it was weird and gross. Which led me to tell her a few more things. I told her that I had had some of the same feelings and questions she was having. She mentioned it would be like her boyfriend and another couple swaping girlfriends for sex. I told her, yes that is how some couples do it. She just thought it was gross.

I decided to tell her that sex and love are two different things and that sometimes couples after being together a long time decided that they would like to have SEX not love with other people. And who are we to judge, what others do behind closed doors is none of our business. Peoples sex lives are private and not for us to judge.

SOOOOOOOOOO............

Have your kids asked questions?
If yes...
How did you handle it?

Do you think it is none of their business and would lie to them?
Do you think honesty is better?

I am curious and I know more questions from the kids will be coming sooner than I would like.

Thanks for reading,
Denice

[Mark & Lin]

Hi Denice,

That's one heck of an eye-opener, isn't it? Personally, I think that what the parents do sexually, behind closed doors, is simply none of their business - as long as it doesn't harm the rest of the family. You were a lot more open with your daughter than I would have been with any of my kids. I really don't know how I would have handled it. Part of me would have told them that some things just don't concern them, while another part of me knows that a 16-year-old just wouldn't have accepted that.

That's a tough call. I do think you handled it ok for you and your situation - nobody was hurt by it, and you didn't get into gory detail with her. You know your relationship with your kids better than anyone else, so you know what you can say to her and what you can't. I do think, however, that even with such a close, open relationship between the two of you, some things just need to remain private - your sex life being chief among them. I think you know that too. As such, we as parents have to go the extra mile to ensure things like this don't happen. If that means cleaning icons off of desktops, deleting browser histories, and purging the browser cache on the computer before we log off, then so be it. I mean you wouldn't hang a sex swing in the middle of your living room, then leave it there for them to find, would you? While your case might not have been as blatant, it is along the same lines.

I wouldn't stress about it. Kids will ask their questions in their own time - assuming they have any more, that is. When they do, just remember that your sex life is between you and your partner, and is really none of their business. Yes, answer them honestly so they can learn, but by the same token incriminating yourself in their eyes is a bad move as well. I'm not speaking as a guy who got caught by his kids - I'm speaking as a father of 5 who has been asked some pretty wild questions, and spent a lot of time stammering as I tried to think of an answer - wondering the whole time where the heck an 11 year old came up with the question in the first place. I'm also speaking as a man who has been married twice (first time 7 years, this one 20 years) and has learned that absolute, total, 100% honesty does on rare occasion have to take the back seat to protect the relationship. Any man who has ever had to answer the dreaded, "Do these pants make my butt look big?" question knows what I mean. Talk about thinking on your toes and using some heavy diplomacy...

My opinion is that you should let things lie where they are and observe. You're probably worrying over nothing - she may have been totally satisfied by your answer. Don't bring it up, and if she does, deal with it at the time. Discretion has to be the better part of valor here. And yeah - they're going to have questions on a whole gamut of topics. That doesn't end until they move out and start their own lives as adults - sometimes not even then.

Mark