I KNOCK ON THE door of Tim's bedroom and find him sitting with his knees up at the top of his bed, face buried in Minecraft.

"Hi," he says without lifting his eyes from the screen.

"Tim. Hello." I can already feel my voice going all serious and preachy in preparation for THE TALK. No, I tell myself. Must not deliver this talk like a Catholic school nun, voice steely and authoritarian, insinuating that the subject matter is something repellent and thereby damaging my son's ability to love and be loved later in life. I clear my throat and try again, more casually this time. Woman of the people voice.

"Hey bud. So..."

I reach into his bookcase for the copy of What's Happening to my Body? that I bought for him off Amazon when he was just out of diapers. I was, obviously, eager to avoid ever needing to have this conversation in the first place and had hoped my son would be curious enough to self-educate. As it has turned out, his love of screens is directly proportional to his distaste for reading, and I strongly suspect based on the uncracked spine, that my son has never once opened this book.

Which means he must be brimming with unanswered questions. What 13 year old hasn't questioned their changing body, lain awake at night in terror that their private parts are in some way deformed or, at least, irregular? What 13 year old doesn't wonder what the word 'orgasm' means, especially when he's overheard his own grandmother use the word (and probably a hundred others that he doesn't know).

I sit beside him, back against the headboard, book open to the first page.

"I wanted to, you know, open a listening space between us."

Oh god, I hear myself channelling my therapist now. Well, better Hippie Harry's voice than Sister Mary Prudacious. I press onward...

"I think it's important that you know that I'm here, with everything I know, to answer any questions you might have about... well, about anything, really. But especially, I guess, about, ssss... bodies and what they can, like, get up to. When people, people's bodies I mean, are older of course. Not right now, per se, for you. Although, certainly, you might have questions about what your own body is... up to. These days?"

It occurs to me that I might have to physically remove the screen from his face in order to assess whether any of this (incredibly good so far, I think!) talk is sinking in. I put my hand on the screen and gently turn it over.

Bravely, I sum up with a straightforward question that leaves no room for anything but a reply of some kind.

"So? What do you want to know? About sex and anything related to it."

My son shrugs and maintains a sort of blank, middle-distance look in his eye.

"Come on! There must be something, Tim. You can ask me anything."

He shrugs again but can see his mouth is twisting, formulating the big question -- the question that will open up what is sure to be a warm, uber-healthy and frank discussion of the birds and the bees.

Wait, don't use old, obfuscating expressions like 'birds and bees', I admonish myself. Nothing could be more guilt-reeky or catholic-schooly than that! Must use only updated, forward-feeling language! I decide to call it "human sexuality" and drop all references to flying creatures going forward. That's if he ever gets around to asking an actual question.

Okay, here he goes!

"I seriously don't have any questions," he says finally, reaching for his Minecraft, which I hold away like a schoolyard bully.

"Oh, come on, Tim. You MUST have questions. You're a thirteen-year-old boy. You must at least be wondering why yours looks different from some of your friends'—"

My son winces with embarrassment, but I press on, eager to impart at least some new information.

"—and the answer to that, I'll tell you, is that based on overwhelming evidence and the media's disposition at the time, your father and I decided not to interfere with nature, which was in line with, I believed, the unspoken agreement of all parents of boys born in those years. Of course, now it seems that quite a lot of us went ahead and interfered anyway since that's what we sort of got used to, aesthetically speaking, which is a bit disappointing for those of us who thought we were starting a movement of some kind. But all that to say, I think you're probably seeing pretty mixed bag out there. Vive la Difference, right?"

My son blushes but neither confirms nor denies that he is, in any way, concerned about his body in the way I obviously think he ought to be. Evidence that he is already more well-adjusted than I am. Excellent.

"What else do you want to know? As you can see, I'm a super cool, casual, ask-me-anything kind of parent so..."

He sighs and looks me straight in the eye.

"When I wonder something, I Google it," he says. "So I already know everything I want to know."

Google?!

Google!? That breeding ground of misinformation and misogyny? The very gateway to the nine circles of hell and worse?

That's where my tender young boy is having his most sensitive questions answered?

Suddenly I am praying that we have Safe Search on. Do we? Surely, we must have. We're responsible, careful parents who are savvy about internet safety... aren't we?

To hide my terror, I calmly say "I see" and run off to check that all computers in the house have adult content filters.

BACK IN THE KITCHEN, I find Vic still wiping tomato sauce from the kitchen cabinets.

"How'd that go?" he asks, already guessing the answer.

"Do we have adult filters on?" I demand.

"Come again?"

"On the computers. Like, if a person in this house typed 'sex' into Google, would they get, you know, educational information suitable for anyone? Or would they get..." I blanche just imagining what Evil Tech in partnership with PornHub might have served up to my thirteen-year-old's curious eyes. Oh my god.

Vic stops his wiping and says, "I'm not sure. Why don't you try?"

I do, typing "sex" into the search field with nervous fingers. An array of WebMD links and a deluge of discourse around the new Sex and the City reboot appears. 

Okay, okay. We must have filters on. This isn't too bad. Not ideal, certainly. But not as bad as I'd imagined. Still, we need somehow to prevent him from turning to the internet instead of us, his parents, for information.

"Vic, you need to go finish the talk. I can't do it. I don't even know where to begin with this."

My husband nods stoically. You can tell he doesn't know where to begin with this either. We didn't grow up with the ability to type 'boobs' into a search engine and get all the pictures you could ever want served up, gratis. We got by with what we glimpsed on late-night TV, or maybe, in a magazine pilfered from someone's father, passed around and giggled over. We didn't have the unfettered (or, thankfully, slightly fettered because content filters appear to be ON!) access to an entire world of sex and sexuality the way kids do today.

I wait in the kitchen, trying various other search terms to see if I can crack through the filters.  Vic reappears an unsatisfactory 5 minutes later.

"What'd you say?" I ask.

"I told him not the use the computer to look up sex and to talk to us instead."

"That's it?"

"That's all that needed saying, I thought."

"What'd he say?"

At this, Vic looks uncertain. "Not sure. He nodded. I think he got the message."

Oh. Okay.

Good then. Problem solved.

Just need to burn all the computers and smartphones and, possibly, develop a time machine to bring us all back to the 80s when everything was safer, the internet didn't exist and sex was something you learned about from Catholic school nuns.