Adventures in parenting - the "Where do babies come from?" edition. Ryan had started asking about this. Buggered if I know the appropriate age for this discussion. I found out when I was a little older than he is, by going to the library and looking it up. I figure following his lead was my best option. He already had some notion, largely through watching (prepare to be surprised) nature programs with his daddy. He understood that a father and mother share DNA to make a baby. (He voiced this understanding to me once: "Daddy, how long was I growing in Mummy's tummy after you shared your mixture?") But he's in all of second grade now, and he wants details, dammit.
Of course, first I explained just how important this aspect of life is by drawing lessons from nature, namely the extremes animals will go to in order to procreate. So he now knows that this is a part of life that it's important to share with someone you love, because male gladiator frogs are willing to fight to the death with retractable switchblades for the right to breed.
He now knows the basics of sex (his response: "eww"), which we discussed with the help of the Knowledge Encyclopedia. [link] This is an excellent book that we often read together at bedtime (interspersed with the 39-Storey Treehouse). I think it went well, although I'm concerned he may have formed the impression that men develop retractable bony spikes in their wrists during mating season. (I also warned him not to discuss it with his classmates just yet, as their parents may yet be Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men about it.)
The harder part of the discussion was on the next page, which covered the other end of the human story - in a column on life expectancy. There was a world map showing how it differs between countries (which led into a discussion about AIDS and life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa). And there was a pie chart showing causes of death around the world. One item caught his eye. "Daddy, what's 'Deliberate self-injury'?" So now my boy knows about suicide. It came up again last night, in all places, on a freakin' David Attenborough episode. It discussed Paul Kammerer, an Austrian zoologist who conducted experiments with amphibians. One of his findings was found to have been faked, and with his reputation ruined, he shot himself. That night, Ryan was asking me what he should do if he had nightmares about it.
In the last month, we've had discussions about Australia's policy on refugees, the US elections and Black Lives Matter. Somewhere around the start of this year I stopped just raising a child and started raising a future adult.