*this might need a trigger warning but I'm not sure*

Or do you plan on discussing it when they're older or when you have kids?

You can vote without reading my post, it's just my explanation of why I think you should discuss it.

Please don't post any hate about this. I've had a lot of backlash when I've mentioned this before in other places which is really worrying because I know there are so many other people who had the same experience.

My parents never discussed masturbation with me so when I figured it out at around 8 years old I knew it was something private but I didn't actually know what it was that I was doing. I don't remember the exact age but sometime before 11 years old I used to sneak onto the computer without my parents knowing (it was in the basement and they didn't know I knew the password) and end up in chat rooms. I kinda knew they were a bit dangerous but I wanted to talk to people and school wasn't great so I started making friends online in chat rooms. Eventually I started getting sexual messages but I didn't fully comprehend them so I just ignored them. At some point I remember talking to someone perfectly normally then out of nowhere he asked for a nude. I refused then he started trying to make me feel guilty about it but I kept refusing and eventually he gave up but not before making me feel like a bad person for not doing it. It stuck in my mind after and I couldn't come to a proper conclusion as to why I refused which then got me thinking about why shouldn't I, if I ever wanted to. Please remember I was a kid as this point and didn't fully understand the seriousness of the situation.

What happened after that is kind of blurry but around the same age I started thinking I was a lesbian and got talking to other girls my age through chat rooms. I'm not a lesbian but looking back I think it just felt like a safer way to explore my sexuality at the time, it obviously wasn't safe in retrospect but in my 11 year old brain there wasn't a risk. I ended up webcamming with other girls my age which turned into sexual stuff without faces involved but it was definitely not appropriate. Again I kind of knew it wasn't okay but it was a vague feeling because I didn't understand the weight of the situation so for me as a kid it was just a way to masturbate.

This carried on for a while then when I was 13 I had the first realisation that people could play videos and make it appear like a live webcam stream. I noticed a 'girl' I'd been doing this looked different the second time we did it. I pointed it out and met my first pedophile, he'd recorded the stream of my webcam too which I didn't know was possible and started blackmailing me with it. After a few months I begged him to just delete it and he claimed to have thousands of files so couldn't find it. I'm still trying to get back through my accounts to report this pedophile because I thought if I did it at the time that police would turn up at my house but as an adult I now want to sent him to jail for life.

Long story short I ended up in a downward spiral and got addicted to it where I couldn't get off without webcamming. I got depression and anxiety and tried and failed to kill myself twice. I tried to tell a counsellor at Childline (free online counselling for children in the UK) and they did the whole "why didn't you just stop?" which made me feel even more shit and out of control because it wasn't that simple but they shrugged it off whilst it was eating at me from the inside and literally wrecked my preteens-teens, everything from 8-16 years old is tainted by it because I was in such a screwed up mental place because of it all.

I'm now 19 and finally getting over the mental mess it left me in but I just wish my parental discussed masturbation with me just like they discussed sex. It's something we've never spoken about so I never felt like I could turn to them for help about it and didn't report the multiple pedophiles that manipulated and abused me because I was terrified that the police would get involved and my parents would find out so they still don't know anything about it to this day.

Tl;Dr - teaching your kids about masturbation is just as important and education about sex.