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I write genre fiction stories with romance. Sometimes they include adult sensibilities about sex. Sometimes not. I'm proud of all my stories in any case but being a writer who sometimes writes sex scenes affects my role as a parent in a way I didn't expect.
My kids want to read my stories.
The four of them are my biggest cheerleaders and they get really excited about mom's writing. Which is awesome but can be a problem when they read romantic or sex scenes written by their mother.
Awk-ward.
I had to decide whether to let them.
And, the answer, as it usually is when talking about parenting, is that "it depends."
It depends on the type of scene, the context of the scene, the age of the kid and the sensibilities of the kid involved.
For example, I wrote an alternate history novella, Freya's Gift, story which explored what would happen to a society in which nearly all the women in a community die from sickness.
This community was a mix of pagan Vikings and Native Americans of the Lenape tribe because I wanted to blend patriarchal and matriarchal societies to provide conflicting impulses for what might happen. I wanted to know how these people would recover from such a loss and what part their religion would play in that recovery.
When the solution to the story problem turned out to be a fertility ritual that involved more than two people, well, that story became for adults only. I did not show this story to any of my kids but since it was my first published work, my eldest daughter, then sixteen, asked if she could read it.
This is the kid who, at age twelve, grabbed Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me off my bookshelf and read it before I could stop her. Even if I could have stopped her, I'm not sure I would have done so. I feel it's a mistake to censor their reading material once they reach a certain age. I know I would have seriously resented it if my mother had forbidden me to read a book I dearly wanted to read at age twelve. I'm sure I would have gone ahead and read it anyway, in secret.
So I developed a habit of discussing their reading choices with them. Sometimes I recommend that they don't read the book and, so far, they've listened.
Bet Me, however, was not a book I'd have recommended if my daughter had asked first. It is a wonderful book with sparkling dialogue and great characters but it also has a sex scene involving Krispy Kreme donuts. I asked my daughter if she had any questions about it and she was a bit confused, so we talked it over. We also talked about how all the successful relationships in the book are good role models for how people should treat each other.
By the time she was sixteen, I'm sure my daughter read plenty of other sex scenes.
But I pointed out that Freya's Gift was X-rated and it was written by her mom. Did she really feel comfortable reading that? "Oh," she said, and then agreed that would be kinda squicky. Her brother, two years younger, didn't want to know much about it once I told him it was X-rated. That was fine by me.
The decision was different with Dinah of Seneca, the full-length novel set in the same alternate world. My daughter really wanted to read it when it was in manuscript form.
There are some PG to R-rated scenes, including one that owes something to the fertility ritual in Freya's Gift. But this story isn't about sex as healing, it's about a women finding her place in the world in the middle of a war. It's definitely not X-rated, so I gave her the go-ahead this time.
Thankfully, she really loved it. She even wanted to write a sequel starring Dinah's daughter, which was very flattering. (She doesn't like everything I write. It's quite deflating, btw, when your teenage daughter can pick apart your work. Another parenting pitfall.)
The eldest will be eighteen in a few months, so I no longer have to worry about whether she reads my books or not. And I'm glad that she knows what my books contain, so she won't ever be blindsided by finding them on the internet.
But, that wasn't the end, I had to revisit the issue with my youngest son, who really wanted to read a superhero novel, Phoenix Rising, that I wrote. At the time, he was eleven.
I wrote the story with a romance but any sex scenes are short and more implied than descriptive. But I have to admit, I forgot about these scenes when I told my youngest he could read it. I'd forgotten they were in there because I was used to thinking of the book as PG-rated. Total momfail on that one.
Not as bad as the time I let my older son, then eleven, but the Terminator DVD. We'd watched it together on cable so I knew he was okay with the violence. I explained about the swear words. I totally forgot that the DVD sex scene featured a little more nudity than the cable version. When I realized what I'd done, I tried to take the DVD away but he pointed out that he fast-forwarded through it anyway. Too much kissing, not enough action. (He did confide to me a few years later that he no longer fast-forwarded through the scene.....)
In any case, after my youngest son read Phoenix Rising, I tackled the problem head-on and talked it out with him. He quoted a line of dialogue from the scene and said he knew that while something happened between the two characters, he wasn't quite sure what. So I may be off the hook there, although there's always the chance that years later, I'll hear about it to the tune of "Mom, I can't believe you let me....."
As you can see, I didn't have a consistent answer to the problem even with one child, never mind all four. I'm sure other parents would choose differently depending on their comfort level. And that solution would work for them. But I would definitely recommend having a plan and talking to your kids about it.
