In the mid-1970s, I attended a seminar that promised to train me to become an instructor in positive discipline methods. It turned out that the methods amounted to one: talking. Any behavior problem could be solved, the trainer told us, by properly reasoning with a child.

By this time, I had had enough experience with trying to reason with my own kids to recognize baloney when I heard it. I argued with the trainer and was ultimately informed that even if I completed the class, I wasn't going to be certified.

The nouveau philosophy promoted in that seminar captured the popular imagination, one sign of which is the fact that today's parents, by and large, believe in talking.

When their children misbehave, they talk. I call it "yada-yada discipline." They also seem to feel that if a child asks a question, he is due an explanation. The problem, as the mother of a 5-year-old girl recently discovered, is that children sometimes inquire about "the darndest things."

Said mother and her daughter are together one afternoon when the child asks what "hump" means. (At this point, it is my obligation to inform my audience that this column contains adult material.) The mother, startled, blurts out that a hump is what one finds on the backs of camels. So far, so good.

"I know that," the child says. "I mean what does it mean for one person to hump another person?"

By now, the mother is sweating bullets. She asks her daughter who told her people hump each other? The child answers that a boy (no surprises here) told her adults sometimes hump each other.

"Like this," she says, demonstrating a pelvic motion familiar to fans of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

The mother tells her daughter that this is an inappropriate discussion, and that making that particular motion is inappropriate.

All this talking, I will bet, only further inflamed the child's curiosity. She probably told her friends that her mother said that to talk about humping was "inappropriate"; therefore, they will certainly talk and giggle some more about it and even make that motion with their hips.

The mother's sister asks, "What would you have done?"

Easy. I would have given the camel answer (or said that it means to carry something), but then, when the child persisted, I would have said, "I have no idea what you are talking about. Your friend at school is mistaken." Children are entitled only to answers to questions that they should be asking.

Family psychologist John Rosemond answers parents' questions at www.rosemond.com.