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Kids

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BONDAGE
AND
THE KIDS

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"DADDY!
WHAT ARE YOU
DOING TO MOMMY!?"

by Sir Red, Red Daly

That's the question no young couple wants to have to answer, especially not while wearing nothing but a Lone Ranger mask and a pair of handcuffs between them. So teach your young children to knock before opening doors and entering rooms other than their own. Make sure the lock on the bedroom door works, and use it.

With very young children, infants and toddlers in the house, learn to tie quick release knots positioned where your "damsel in distress" can reach them herself. If leather or metal restraints are your thing, buy and use the kind that open quickly and easily with just a thumb slide. Handcuffs and padlocks should have large, easy to find keyholes and spare keys handy, preferably already inserted or within easy reach and use by the captive. If that takes all the fun out of it for you, you've forgotten it's just a game. Hire a sitter and rent a motel room.

Some of you might be wondering why I think quick release is so important if the door is locked. Experienced parents know that little ones will wake up crying in the middle of the night at the worst possible moment, and mothers who are delayed in reaching them by more than a second or two won't be willing bondagettes again for a long time. Trust me on this one. I learned it the hard way.

But little ones grow up, and as they do, all the experts agree we should deal with their questions about sex honestly and openly, providing them with accurate information appropriate to their level of maturity and understanding. Huh? That sure sounds fine, but it doesn't tell us much, does it? How do we know what's appropriate to their level of maturity? Or what they already know? What if they don't ask questions? What do you volunteer and when?

My youngest wasn't a problem in that area. She was always asking questions, which we always tried to answer as best we could. I remember once at an age I had always thought was far too innocent to care about such things, she wanted to know the difference between adultery and fornication. Her mother patiently defined adultery accurately, and in terms she could understand. The little pixie listened solemnly until her mother paused and then piped in with sudden enthusiastic insight, "Then 'fornication' must be having sex with someone from another country!" We sent that story in to Readers' Digest, but for some reason, they never published it.

It was my oldest daughter I worried about. She was a quick learner and years ahead of her classmates at school, but she never asked a single question about sex. She always seemed to just know. I think she was nine when her mother insisted I bring the subject up. She laughed indulgently and gently informed me that it was already years too late for us to have the traditional conversation about the birds and the bees. She went on to assure me that while the subject wasn't relevant to her own life just yet, if she had any questions about the finer points in the next few years, she'd be sure to bring them to me. When she finally did, ten years later, it was to ask if I had any hard data on recidivism rates among convicted sex offenders broken out by age and educational levels from the sixties.

I postponed writing this piece for a long time, because I really had no idea what to say. I needed to research it by sending detailed and exhaustive questionnaires to at least a hundred adult children of bondage loving parents. But time was running out and I only knew two. So the next time my oldest daughter called me on the telephone to chat, I told her about this article and my dilemma. She didn't have a clue how to find a hundred such people either. I told her I knew of two, but since her sister was out of town that left only her. Would she mind answering some questions, if I promised to accept "No comment" for an answer to any she found embarrassing? To my complete amazement, she agreed and we had our first ever, real conversation about sex. And did I ever learn a lot!

She started by confirming my suspicions that kids today, even more than when she was little, know a lot more about sex than us old folks like to think they do. Most of what I was curious about, she couldn't remember not knowing and taking for granted. Mommy and Daddy had just always kept ropes under their bed, and she had understood why long before she even knew those games were sexual. Had it ever frightened her? No, why should it? Had she thought we were different or unusual? Of course, but everybody's different and unusual in one way or another. It took me awhile, but I finally "got it." They were our games, -- not hers. She'd known; she just hadn't cared. Sex -- even bondage games -- had never been a secret we had kept from them. Knowing about it had been a secret they had kept from us.

Finally she told me I'd been asking all the wrong questions. There wasn't anything special about us bondage people. Ordinary sex could look and sound frightening enough to very small children, and just locking the door was not always enough. Recently, she told me, a five-year-old had knocked on her door and wanted to know if she was all right. She had been screaming like she was hurt. Just like her mother, I thought. I wanted to ask when, where and with whom that had happened, but I settled for how she had handled it.

She told the little girl they had just been playing a game for grownups and she was sorry she woke her up as she led her back to bed, of course. Isn't that what anyone would do? I asked her why she thought that. Did she know of other such cases? "No. It just seemed natural," she told me. "Anything else? I need to go now."

Suddenly, my memory of one night twenty years ago got a lot clearer than hers. I wanted desperately to reach through the telephone and stroke her hair and pat her shoulder like her mother had done a quarter century earlier when she told her we were just playing a game for grownups and hadn't meant to wake her.

I didn't tell her. I just said roughly the same things I had that night. "Thanks for checking on us, Honey. We're fine. You go back to what you were doing now."

It doesn't matter what positions you favor, or games you play, or costumes you wear in bed for sex. Your kids will know, but they will respect your privacy enough to not care. Just make sure they see you love each other and treat each other, and them, with kindness, affection, honesty and respect. And if you're as lucky as I was, they'll grow up to do the same.

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