"Why are babies pink?" my daughter, Lucie, asked me upon seeing an illustration of a couple with their newborn. She was 3 at the time.

"When some babies first come out, they're pink," I replied.

"Come out of where?" Lucie wanted to know.

I was stymied. "You know, I'm not sure.... Let me check and get back to you."

I had always planned to be open and honest with my kids about sex, especially since my own mother was just the opposite. She considered abstinence the only sensible birth control until marriage. This was in a conservative suburb of Pittsburgh in the '70s and '80s, a land that the sexual revolution forgot. I was led to believe sex resulted in immediate pregnancy and birth control pills caused cancer. The whole thing seemed dangerous and unpleasant, with very little upside. Not surprisingly, I was a late bloomer. My first few encounters were horribly awkward. I didn't know where anything was or how it worked. My first orgasm came as a complete surprise—I actually tried to hide it from my bemused boyfriend.

I was determined to raise my kids differently, in an environment of give-and-take in which nothing was taboo. If, at 3, Lucie wanted to know where babies came from, then it was time to tell her. So, after my initial stalling tactic, I sat her down and launched into a detailed lecture about the vagina, the seed, and the penis. A minute into it, she turned away and started playing with her Groovy Girl dolls. I have to admit I was relieved. But at a Passover seder a few months later, Lucie had more questions.

Lucie: If a baby starts out as a seed, and the daddy has the seed in his penis, how does the daddy give the seed to the mommy? (All eyes are on me, including my mother's.)
Me: The man sticks his penis in the woman's vagina and gives her his seed.
Lucie: Yuck. (She looks from herself to her little brother.) And you did this twice?

I had wanted a no-holds-barred approach to sex talk, with everything on the table, so my kids could make smart, informed decisions. One could argue, though, that there was already too much on the table, culturally speaking. We live in New York City, where they have been assaulted by suggestive imagery at every turn, from the Calvin Klein billboards my school-age child noticed en route to the Hello Kitty store in Times Square to Abercrombie & Fitch ads that make the Calvin Klein ones look chaste. And then there were our high school–age babysitters, who would arrive with their butt cracks bared and their black bras thinly veiled beneath sheer tank tops. My kids were constantly curious about things having to do with sex. It would have been nice to wait a bit, but they had questions now. And it was my job to make sure the right messages were getting through. There was no way to do that without brutal honesty.

This wasn't just a theory I had developed as a reaction to my own upbringing; websites and books all seemed to advise "a continuous flow of information, beginning as early as possible." A Berkeley, California, parents' forum encouraged a "sex positive" approach. Never hold anything back, it warned. (Seems there is no such thing as too much information in Berkeley.) A number of organizations—WebMD, for example—pointed to research showing that teenagers from families in which parents talk frankly about sex wait until they're older before they start having sex. My friends with older kids also encouraged me to stay the course, warning me that at some point, open communication would be shut down (by my kids), so I might as well enjoy it while it lasted.

(I enter my bedroom to find a wiry little string bean of a boy, age 6, reclining on my bed while rolling a pulsing vibrator in his hands.)
Joe: I love this hand-massage thingy. Can I have it?
Me: (mortified, shaking) It's not a hand massager.
Joe: What's it for, then?
Me: (body tense with discomfort) It's, uh ... something I, uh ... use with Daddy (groping desperately) ... to ... make babies. (I grab the thing and toss it into the trash can.)
Joe: (clearly frightened as he stares at the hard plastic dildo in the garbage) I'm never having kids.

Next Page: Maybe a little mystery is good.