Parents, are you dreading the day when you have to sit down with your child and have “the talk?” Dr. Michelle Callahan, psychologist and parenting expert, recently visited the Rachael Ray show to explain that you’re not alone. “We’ve been through the sexual revolution and everybody should feel more comfortable [about sex],” she says, “but when it comes to talking about it to our kids, we still clam up, we still get very nervous and just feel like, ‘Oh, how am I going to do this?’ We need to just relax.”

Dr. Michelle says that even if you’ve put off discussing sex and now your child is a teenager, it’s never too late to get the conversation started. “The first words out of your mouth should be ‘Hey, how are things going at school?’” she suggests. “And then you follow that up with, ‘How are things going with your girlfriend?’; ‘How are things going with the ladies?’” Questions such as those are good ways to ease into the subject, but do not say “sex” right off the bat. “You don’t want to make them get all nervous,” Dr. Michelle warns. “And you don’t want to get embarrassed. You want to feel relaxed, so start the conversation slowly then introduce the concept of sex.”

Dr. Michelle advises to be prepared before you talk (make yourself some notes, if necessary), so that you’re not caught off guard. “Don’t let him ask you a question that puts you in a moral dilemma where you don’t know what to do,” she says. “Don’t let him shut you down. Don’t get intimidated, don’t let him make you back down; stay focused, stay on it, and even though it feels awkward, just keep going.”

If you find having the conversation so embarrassing that you avoid it altogether, Dr. Michelle explains that you could be doing you and your child a great disservice. “Hoping that your kids are going to figure it out on their own is how not to talk to your kids about sex,” she says. “You have to tell them what’s going on because they come up with all these misconceptions. There was a study done on 14- to 18-year-old girls and they actually thought that by jumping up and down that you could avoid getting pregnant after sex. There’s information out there that confuses kids so you want to be the source of that knowledge; don’t rely on anyone else to take care of it for you.”

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