Bonnie J. Rough - Beyond Birds and Bees: Bringing Home a New Message to Our Kids About Sex, Love, and Equality

With care and clarity, Bonnie J. Rough breathes new life into our national non-conversation about sex. Taking her cues from other countries sensible approaches, she guides us gently towards a saner and healthier future.

Michael Kimmel, bestselling author of Manhood in America and Guyland

Filled with sweet, poignant, and laugh-out-loud stories, Beyond Birds and Bees is a most accessible and most informative book that will help parents and caring adults become more adept at talking to young people about healthy sexuality. Bonnie J. Rough offers practical advice, gentle encouragement, and is vulnerable enough to let us learn from her own failures and successes. If youre looking for a book that provides a heartfelt and common sense approach to raising sexually healthy children, youve found it!

Al Vernacchio, MSEd, author of For Goodness Sex: Changing the Way We Talk to Teens About Sexuality, Values, and Health

Bonnie J. Rough has written a brilliant book about sex, gender, justice, and joy, and its one that manages to be simultaneously sobering and buoyant. Her main ingredients for raising healthy kidswonder, humor, and trustconstitute a kind of inspirational worldview, applicable to all aspects of parenting certainly, but even beyond that, to life itself. Im so glad I read it.

Catherine Newman, author of Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy

With humor, humility, and gentleness, Bonnie J. Rough takes us on her journey of discovery and leaves us somewhere surprising and wonderful. Along the way, her practical tips add up to a transformative rethinking of what it means to teach our children about sex. This is a book that can help everybody: parents who know what theyre doing, parents who worry they dont have a clue, and the rest of us, too, who never got the loving, tender teaching we deserved.

Lisa Wade, bestselling author of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus

What a gift! Bonnie J. Rough offers a much-needed breath of fresh air in her wonderful new approach to discussing sex, love, and equality with our kids. Her smart, vigorously well-researched, and funny book is a great guide for families to read and discuss as their kids grow up.

Caroline Grant, Co-director, Sustainable Arts Foundation

Finally: a parenting book that abandons preachiness for a joyful and thoughtful inquiry into how we might guide our kids, and grow with them, as they become healthy, happy young adults. Bonnie J. Roughs experience in the Netherlands and her wide-ranging research offer an inspiring and practical alternative to help children (and their parents) become more comfortable in their own skins.

Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys

Beyond Birds and Bees is a must-read for every parent. With humor and grace, Bonnie J. Rough invites readers to learn alongside her as she embarks on a journey to understand how we can create truly gender equal societies and raise happy and healthy children who celebrate their own bodies. I wish Id read this book when my daughters were little, but Im grateful for it now, because it is never too late to talk openly with our kids about sex, sexuality and our bodies. This book is validating, eye-opening and truly life-changing.

Kate Hopper, author of Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers and Ready for Air: A Journey Through Premature Motherhood

The conversation Rough starts about sexuality and gender equality in Beyond Birds & Bees is one we all need to be havingwith our partners, our kids, our kids teachers, our legislatorswell: everybody. Read it. Start talking.

Jill Christman, author of Darkroom: A Family Exposure and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood

To my children