Encore: Shameless Parenting

What happens when you mix a sex-positive grandma, a childhood spent figure-skating on frozen lakes, and a lifetime of dismantling religious shame… with modern parenting, porn, and kids with iPads? In this episode of Skin and Soul: Beyond the Pale, I sit with Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers — therapist, educator, and author of Sex, God & the Conservative Church and Shameless Parenting — for a wildly honest, surprisingly funny conversation about raising shame-free kids in an over-sexualized world. We talk about babies discovering their genitals in the bath, toddlers who just want to hug everyone, and why “hands in your pants at the dinner table” is not a crisis but an invitation to teach boundaries without shaming desire. Tina walks us through what real “family life education” looks like from 0–18, why one hundred tiny, awkward one-minute chats beat the one Big Talk, and how to start when you feel like you’re years too late. We go there with porn, phones and tablets, patriarchy, boys’ right to say no too, and how to help our kids recognize exploitation instead of becoming numb to it. We also talk about re-parenting ourselves, healing the little one inside who never got these conversations, and the strange grace that can show up with aging parents and dementia. This one is for the exhausted, tender, secretly terrified parents who still want their kids to know: your body is yours, your pleasure is good, and you never have to trade your soul to belong.