'Teen Mom 2' star Kailyn Lowry says she only had 'one sex ed class in sixth grade': 'The only thing I remember from that class was seeing pictures of STDs'

Yahoo Life’s School Report Card: Sex Education series examines what adolescents are being taught about sexuality — and why it's about more than the birds and the bees.

Kailyn Lowry, 30, is opening up about having early sex talks with her oldest child.

The Teen Mom 2 star, who give birth to her first child Isaac in 2010 at age 17, tells Yahoo Life that it’s been challenging finding the right things to say to her pre-teen son.

"I have already started to open the communication doors to my oldest son about sex and things like that," Lowry says. "It is really weird because he's 12, about to be 13, but I really want to have an open conversation with him so that he can feel comfortable coming to me about things. But it is weird because, you know, I've never been a mom prior to him, so it's not like I had ever done it before. This is the first time for both of us. He's hearing it from me for the first time and I'm also talking to a child about it for the first time."

She adds that she doesn’t want to "say too much that he's not ready for, but I don't want to say not enough."

"I kind of just take it as it goes," the mom of four notes. "If he starts having questions for me or I start asking him about his curiosity levels or anything like that, we kind of just take it by the conversation. But [the conversations are] happening — just very slowly."

Lowry’s own sex education consisted of "just one sex ed class, in sixth grade."

"The only thing I remember from that class was seeing pictures of STDs in the textbook," she recalls. "That was the only thing that I remember. I don't remember seeing a birth video or anything like that."

In fact, Lowry says the most classic sex education experience she personally had actually came from a partnership about safe sex she participated in while working with MTV on Teen Mom 2.

"I had to put a condom on a cucumber," she recalls. "At that point, I already had two kids. I knew how condoms worked, I just wasn’t using them."

When the time comes for her to talk to Isaac about sex, Lowry explains that she wants him to know that "a lot of the feelings that he may feel or start to feel are very normal."

"[It’s about] how you act on them, and you want to be safe," she says. "Explore your own body first. I have always maintained that had I had sex conversations when I was younger and really taught about my own body, I probably wouldn't have explored with other people as soon as I did … He should understand that it is OK to explore your own body on your own, in your own private time."

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