Roger Collier

M y wife heard the giggles coming from behind the closed door of our daughter's bedroom. Inside the room were our daughter, 7, our son, 5, and two kids from the neighbourhood.

"Where did you get this?" my wife heard the oldest kid, a 10-year-old, ask our children.

"My mom got it from the library," my daughter replied.

"What? Why?" the 10-year-old said, incredulous. "This is wrong. I lost my appetite."

That's when my wife realized why the door was closed, why the kids were giggling and why one of them would be skipping lunch. They were reading what had become known in our house as "the privates book."

The actual name of the book, by Dr. Gail Saltz, is Amazing you! Our daughter is too young to learn about sex but old enough to learn about the human body, including the "private" parts. And any book read to our daughter is also heard by our son, so his anatomy education is beginning early.

The problem with children's books on this topic is that you never know what you'll find inside. My wife chose three books from the library, two of which went straight to the top of the refrigerator, out of reach of little hands.

One of the books, Mummy Laid an Egg! by Babette Cole, starts out fine. Two parents decide to teach their children where babies come from but offer goofy explanations instead of facts. Some babies are delivered by dinosaurs, they say, while others grow in greenhouses.

The children, however, already know the truth. They tell their folks about Daddy's seeds and Mommy's eggs and tummies that grow fatter and fatter until babies pop out. This, too, is fine. But then comes the Kama Sutra page.

"Here are some ways mummies and daddies fit together," the children explain, making sketches of a man and woman conjoined in various positions. In one sketch, they are doing it on a skateboard; in another, the woman is standing on her head.

Then there is the picture of the woman straddling the man as he floats above the ground with balloons tied to his wrists and ankles. Really? I'm all for teaching children where babies come from, but that's a tad kinky. Besides, I don't want my kids to think only members of Cirque du Soleil can have children.

The third book, Boys, Girls & Body Science by Meg Hickling, is dense and technical, containing words like "urethra" (not a Motown singer) and "vulva" (not a European car). I barely got through two pages.

Though it did have this humdinger of a sentence, said by the teacher in the story to a class of children to explain how a man's sperm gets into a woman's body: "The interesting science is that the father can only do this when his penis gets erect, meaning it grows longer and becomes stiff." To which the young students, naturally, respond in unison: "Interesting."

Yeah, right. So much for verisimilitude. In junior high school, my health teacher once used a colloquialism for "scrotum" (think paper or plastic). The students in my class did not say, "Interesting." If I recall, we exploded into laughter.

Anyway, my children don't need to learn about the "interesting science" of erections just yet. That book will remain atop the fridge until it's returned to the library.

Even Amazing you! has some parts that are a bit much. On the cover, it is described as a book for preschoolers. I'm not so sure that preschoolers need to learn about labia or that the vagina is "very, very stretchy."

What my wife and I have learned is that our daughter is not yet interested in learning about certain parts of her body. "I thought it would be about how elbows and knees work," she said after first seeing the book and quickly dismissing it, asking for a "real" story instead.

Our son, on the other hand, thinks it's hilarious. The other day, he burst through the front door and asked if he could show "the privates book" to some friends a few houses down. "No way," I told him.

We had not intended for any of the children in our neighbourhood to see the book, and we certainly weren't going to pass it around. I'll gladly show the kids on my street how to catch a baseball or shoot a jump shot. But if they want to learn about vaginal elasticity, they can ask their own parents