Is 9 Too Young To Explain What “Virgin” Means? Parenting Tips For Early Conversations
Merge onto the parkway, one hand on the wheel, the other digging for a loose french fry I’d left in the cupholder from lunch, when my 9-year-old, from the backseat where he’s still crunching cheddar Goldfish, says, “Mom, what does virgin mean?”
I almost hit the car in front of me. I yank the wheel a little, clear my throat, and pull off at the next gas station exit, because I don’t want to try to answer that while driving. When I turn around to look at him, his scuffed soccer cleats are propped on the edge of the seat, his half-done clay dinosaur is rolling around on the floor, and he’s just looking at me, curious, no embarrassment, no mischief. He says he heard two sixth graders yelling it at each other on the playground while he was waiting in line for the slide. He asked his best friend, and his friend said it’s a bad word you can get sent to the office for saying, but no one would tell him what it actually means.
I used to work as a paraeducator in the elementary wing of our local school, so I’ve answered all kinds of unexpected questions: why boys have nipples, why some kids live with foster families, why dead fish float upside down. I should have been ready for this. But I wasn’t. I’d mapped out all the big conversations in my head: puberty at 10, more details about sex at 12, consent before high school. 9 wasn’t on the schedule. I’d always assumed 9 was too young for this kind of talk.
I remembered a training I’d gone to a couple years back for school staff, that said if a kid asks a question, answer only the question they asked. Don’t dump extra information they don’t want or need. So I took a breath, and I said, “It’s a word people use to describe someone who hasn’t had sex yet.”
He frowned, crunched another Goldfish, and said, “Why were they yelling it then? That doesn’t sound like something to yell at someone.” I said, “Some people use it as a mean joke, or to make someone feel bad for no good reason. It’s not a bad word itself, but using it to bully someone is wrong.”
That was it. He nodded, thought for two seconds, and said, “Can we get mint chocolate chip on the way home?” I laughed, paid for gas, and we got ice cream. I spent the whole drive overthinking it, wondering if I’d messed up, if I’d given him too much too soon, if 9 was really too young after all.
I’ve talked to a lot of other parents about this since, and most of them say 9 is definitely too young. They say you’re robbing kids of their innocence, that they don’t need to know that stuff yet. I get that instinct. I want my kid to stay 9 forever, to only care about dinosaurs and soccer and what flavor slushie he’s getting after practice. But innocence isn’t the same as ignorance. He already heard the word. He already knew it existed. Not explaining it doesn’t make it go away. It just means he’ll go get the explanation from someone else — probably a 12-year-old on the playground who doesn’t know what it means either, or a random internet search that will show him a whole lot of stuff he’s definitely not ready for.
I used to buy into the idea that you wait until the “right age” to have one big “birds and bees” talk that covers everything. But that’s not how it works, really. It’s a bunch of small conversations, over years, answering questions as they come up. If your 9-year-old asks what a word means, you don’t have to give them a 20-minute lecture or dive into all the details of sexual relationships. You just give a simple, neutral answer that matches what they asked. If they want more, they’ll ask. If they don’t, they move on to ice cream, like mine did.
If you’re caught off guard and don’t know what to say, you don’t have to wing it right that second. You can say, “That’s such a good question, I want to make sure I answer it right. Let’s talk about it after dinner when we’re both sitting down.” The only rule is that you can’t forget to bring it up later. If you brush it off and never talk about it, they learn that this topic is off limits, that they can’t come to you with awkward questions next time. It also helps to not act like the question itself is dirty or embarrassing. If you stammer or blush or sound upset, they’ll pick up on that shame, and they’ll stop asking you things down the line.
It’s been a couple months since that car ride. He hasn’t asked any more questions about that word, or about sex in general. That’s fine with me. I’m in no rush to move on to the next big conversation. I still think there’s a lot of stuff 9-year-olds aren’t developmentally ready for, that they don’t need to know about yet. But when they ask a straight question, they deserve a straight answer.
I don’t know if I did it perfectly. I’m sure I’ll mess up the next conversation, whenever it comes. But this time, it went a lot better than I expected. I didn’t break him by answering his question. I just let him know that no matter what he hears at school, he can come ask me, and I’ll tell him the truth, and then we can get ice cream. That’s enough for right now.
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