HIV FAQ: What about when your child is old enough for dating and sex?

Oh, goodness. This is a topic I think about a lot, but I'm nearly breaking out in hives at the thought of blogging about it, because (a) SEX! and (b) MY CHILDREN ARE ALL AGE SEVEN AND YOUNGER, FOR THE LOVE!

But these questions are totally valid and might be helpful to some readers, so here goes...

This is in the way future, but how will you handle discussions about sex? What will be the same and what will be different?  

What do you plan to teach your child about dating relationships? Like, when should they disclose? Up front or after some time?

How will you address HIV as your child grows and possibly becomes sexually active? That can also be an age of children rebelling against parental advice. My child is HIV+, but she is an adult. I know you know her story: nogoingback-thereisonlyforward.blogspot.com Please feel free to share her blog with your readers. Now going into our third year living with HIV, we barely think of it after the horror of our first reaction to hearing that diagnosis. Life is just normal now.  

How do you educate the HIV+ child about protecting others from infection? (ie informing a school nurse or friend's parent if they skin their knee and need bandaging)  

First, to answer that last question, HIV isn't transmitted via skinned knees, so you might want to read this post: How do we keep other kids from catching HIV? But I included the question because issues of dating and sex are all about protecting others from infection.

Honestly, I can't answer most of these questions. Not because I haven't thought about it, because I have. OH, HAVE I! But I know from friends further along in this parenting journey that "the talk" with each child is different, depending on age, personality, and maturity.

When it comes to the stage in relationship that disclosure should happen, that's not a decision we'll make for our child. We'll talk about it, but that's a personal decision and not one Mom or Dad can make.

As with any parenting stage, we'll draw from resources available to us, including the AMAZING folks we have in Duke's pediatric infectious disease team. One is a social worker whose job includes helping us navigate these challenging topics. I expect that Rachel and I will have many conversations about sex and HIV in the future.

Finally, I'm optimistic that more and more medical advances will be made before our child is ready to be sexually active. That's the biggest reason why I can't answer how we'll talk about it then, because I simply don't know what the facts will be then. Already in the six months since we've been home from Uganda, new advances include:

• advances in the medication already available for an HIV- person to take to prevent acquiring HIV from their HIV+ sexual partner, 
• the development of a cream that can be used vaginally to prevent male to female transmission,
• progress in personalized gene therapy to create HIV resistance in previously infected individuals,
• President Obama's announcement in the most recent State of the Union of the intent to increase science research funding that could lead to a cure for HIV, 
• promising outcomes in HIV vaccine development in research with monkeys, and 
• early findings indicating that HIV+ individuals may not be infectious - even in the most high-risk sexual activities - as long they are on ART treatment, which our child is and will continue. (That study doesn't wrap up until 2017, so we're still waiting on the final news here, but the research group is large and the cases of transmission so far are ZERO.)

All of those advancements were reported in 2014. We are hopeful that this trend will continue so that, perhaps, our dating and sex talks with our child who has HIV will be no different because of how far modern medicine has brought us by then.