Vanessa and Xander Marin offer practical advice for parents whose kids walk in during sex: use a lock, stay calm, and have an honest follow-up conversation that normalizes intimacy without shame. They provide example lines and link to their video on talking to kids about sex.
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Maybe I'd start a video like that. Picture this. You're in the middle of an incredible sexy moment with your partner. Things are hot and heavy. You're both enjoying yourselves.
Tell me more.
All of a sudden, you hear the doorknob turn.
Who's coming?
It's your kid.
No.
And you are caught in the act.
Today we are going to go over what to do if this happens to and how to prevent it from happening in the first place.
But first, we want to hear from you. Do you have any hilarious stories about your kid walking in on you? Let us know in the comments. Or if you don't want to spill all the beans, you can just give us a little thumbs up to let us know that it's happened to you, too.
But first, we just want to say hi. Especially if you're brand new to our channel. We are Vanessa and Xander Marin. Vanessa here is a sex therapist. I'm a regular dude. We've been together for 14 years. Also, if you happen to see two little dogs barging in on this video, those are our pugs, Winston and Maggie. They're not here now, but they might sneak their way in later.
They're down at our feet right now. But our account is all about giving you the tools, tips, and techniques that you need to create a truly extraordinary relationship inside the bedroom and out. So if you are interested in that, because who wouldn't be, just go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
All right, so let's start this out with our number one pro tip, which is just prevent this situation from happening in the first place. So the key here is putting a lock on your bedroom door and actually using it when you're having sex. I think a lot of people do have locks on their bedroom door and forget to use them or don't want to use them. Now here's the thing. If you have a lock on the door, if you're going to put a lock on the door, you don't have to use it all the time. I think this trips a lot of people up thinking, I don't want to have a lock on my door, or I have one, but I can't use it because something horrible could happen. All we are saying is use it only when you are getting intimate.
Yeah. And just a simple way to prevent the situation from happening in the first place. Okay, we just took a quick pug break. They're here with us now.
They barged in.
So let's talk about what happens if you don't use the lock. Your kids do. Come Barging in. Okay, so the single most important thing you can do in the moment is to keep you're cool. So if your kids come barging in, it's totally natural that you're gonna feel like, startled and caught off guard. Maybe you're worried about, like, what did they see and what are they gonna think about all of that. Like, it's totally natural to just feel really shaken up in the moment, just not know what to do. But the best thing you can do is just not make a big deal out of it. If you really freak out, the message that you're gonna be sending to your kid is like, something terrible is happening. And it was a really bad thing of them to come. Like, the reality is your kid was probably just coming in because they had a nightmare. They wanted to be soothed. Maybe they heard some noises and they were coming to investigate. So it's like, it's not like your kid did anything wrong. And you don't want to leave them with this impression that they've done something terrible and that they've witnessed something terrible as well. So do the best that you can to just stay calm and collected in that moment.
Then what you want to do is loop back around later, like after things have calmed down, maybe even the next day, and use this as an opportunity to have a real conversation about sex. And that's something that you should already be doing. And this is just an opportunity to start having that conversation. So you can kind of reframe this as an opportunity for yourself to answer questions that your kid might have.
And we do have another YouTube video about how to talk to your kid about sex with different age appropriate things. So we will link to that in the description box down below. But another important thing about that conversation is like, don't lie about what you were doing. Like, depending on your kid's age, like, they probably have a pretty good idea what was going on, or in a.
Couple years they will put the pieces together and realize, yeah, so you don't.
Want to create a lie around what was happening. Because again, that just gives this message that sex is something shameful, embarrassing. You're invalidating your kids experience. It's just a bad thing.
Yeah. And it tells your kids that sex is something that they may need to lie about too. And that's not. That's not a message that I think you want to send to your. Your kids.
Yeah. So another thing that you might want to like, kind of subtly work into the conversation is just making sure your child understands that you are enjoying yourself. So you don't have to go into any sort of detail about this, of course, but sometimes kids walk in on sex and they think that it's like one partner hurting the other partner. Like, maybe there was some spanking going on or it was a position that looked like wrestling. So if your kid has that sort of impression, you may want to make sure you say something like, you know, this is something that we do to feel close to each other, to be intimate with each other, like, this is a good thing that was happening, that kind of thing. You may also want to have a little bit of a conversation about boundaries, about knocking first, making sure that you guys are giving each other privacy. And you can also just take a moment to kind of gauge your child's facial expressions and body language and see how are they reacting to it. Every kid's going to be different. Every situation is going to be unique. But you can get this sense of, you know, is this something that's really startled and upset your child versus is this something where your child was just kind of annoyed? You know, so however your child is reacting, you kind of want to let that guide the conversation.
All right, now let's get into the nitty gritty of some specific things that you can say to your kid after this happens. So number one is you could lead with an apology. Like, after all, it's not their fault that they walked in on you. It's not their fault that you were having sex. So you could just say something like, hey, I'm really sorry that happened. We have a lock on our door and we should have been using it.
Like, I was kind of mentioning earlier, you do want to validate their experience. So I was talking before about, like, don't lie about it. But here, like, again, just don't pretend that nothing happened, or, like, make up some elaborate, you know, alternate reality of what was happening. Also, remember that we want to normalize sex and set the understanding that, like, this is something that couples do. It's very normal, it's natural, it's healthy. Like, this is something that all parents do. Or, like, you know, we were having private time together doing something that we really enjoy doing together.
Yeah. The bottom line here is that you just want to be able to talk to them super matter of factly and be really honest about what it is that they just saw.
I can tell you, as a professional sex therapist, a lot of kids have walked in on a lot of parents having sex. It's a very common experience. You absolutely can get past this and make it be Not a big deal. It does not have to be, like, this horrible, scarring, traumatizing experience for your kid if you handle it in the right way.
And if you're watching this video and you're like, oh, this has already happened in the past, and I can see now that I didn't handle it in a very good way, we just want to say it's never too late to loop back around and have a conversation or apologize, so come back to it.
Yeah, there's always a chance to salvage it. Of course, like, I'm sure you would have preferred to see this video before it happened, but it's never too with kids to go back and say, like, hey, you know, I handled something in a way that I wish I hadn't. And I want to, like, go back to that and apologize to you and explain what was really going on. All right, well, that wraps up our video on what to do if your child walks in on you having sex.
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