Talking to your kids about sex is embarrassing. You don’t want them thinking about you doing it; you definitely don’t want to think about them doing it, or, in fact, anyone even remotely related to you doing anything like it. A friend of mine refuses to acknowledge her brothers have genitals at all. “They’re smooth down there,” she says. “Like Ken dolls.”

The problem is, you have to do it. Talk to your kids about sex, I mean. Otherwise, who knows what the hell they’re going to pick up at school? I’m not talking about venereal disease – although, they’ll probably get that too if you don’t deal with this situation soon enough. I’m referring to them hearing erroneous information. In college, I once had someone ask me, post gyno visit, if “everything was cleaned out down there now.” That guy needed to pick up a copy of What’s Happening to My Body?, stat.

I’m not sure that having one big “birds and the bees” conversation is the best route to take. Depending on a kid’s age, he or she is going to be ready for different levels of information – and it may be best to dispense it over time, in response to specific questions. Maybe if the kid never asks any questions at all, there could come a time when you decide to drop some knowledge in a concentrated chunk, but I generally feel it should be an organic, continuing dialogue than a single, formal occasion. It just seems more natural and relaxed.

Speaking of being relaxed, I think it’s also important to have a sense of humor about the whole thing. If you’re overly serious about it, sex becomes a looming monster of a topic that one sets aside time to Talk About, but is far too weighty for casual discussion or ridicule. My mum and grandma gave me nuts-and-bolts (I said “nuts.”) sex-education info, but I also learned from the dirty jokes they told one another when we were driving to the grocery store, or their occasional pondering over topics like amputee fetishes. “Ooh, there are some pervs out there, aren’t there?” my mum would muse over a cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon. “Still, as long as they’re not killing anybody.”

This can all go too far, of course. There’s sex-positive and then there’s sex-positive. I wasn’t up for blithely discussing my sex life with my parents, nor they theirs with me. We could talk in the abstract about any question I had – and if I really had a specific problem, I could confide in them. But we weren’t all like “blah blah my vibrator, your father did this to me last night.” That is just weird. I’m sorry.

Still, it must be done. Sex, and the discussing of it with your kids. If you don’t, some dude will end up convincing your daughter that condoms ruin the feeling of it, and it’ll be OK to go without, just this one time. If you won’t have the sex talk with your son because it stresses you out too much, your son could end up with a weird attitude toward sex, which will undoubtedly make him lousy in the sack. OK, I just grossed myself out, because I have two sons, and they are my baby boys, and oh my God. *scrubs brain with Brillo pad* See how hard this is, but also how absolutely crucial?

Those of you who’ve, ahem, tackled this subject with your children – what approach did you take?