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My Child Said What? Body Parts Edition

Or why we no longer get changed together

Kim Fedyk
2 min readDec 16, 2023
Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash

My husband and I have always been very open with our five-year-old about his body. We have always believed in teaching him the proper words for his private parts.

If someone touches him inappropriately, we want him to be able to say someone touched my penis and not someone touched my “muffle-snout.”

We have also been fairly open with him about our own bodies. We don’t make a point of being naked in front of him, but since he’s only five, if he sees us that way we aren’t overly concerned.

I was very confident in both of these choices until one day last year at the public swimming pool.

For convenience sake, we use the family change room so my husband and I can both help our son change and we only have to pack one bag.

We naively enter the changing room as we have done so many times before and I start to help my son take off his wet bathing shirt.

Then suddenly his eyes go wide. He pops off the bench and points at something behind me. “Daddy! You have a really big penis!”

At this point folks, we made a huge parent faux pas. We should have ignored it, played it off as nothing, or really done anything else.

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Kim Fedyk
Kim Fedyk

Written by Kim Fedyk

Published author, freelancer, wife and mom. I blog about motherhood, life and feminism. Need a freelance blog-writer? Reach out to me on Instagram @Fedykkim

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