Oddly, my childhood is remembered as: mostly being a ridiculously naive and clueless teenager (I didn't understand all the sexual references that my friends made jokingly until I was in my mid-twenties). It wasn't so much that there was a big taboo as that my parents just DIDN'T talk about such things. My mother didn't "tell me" (I already knew, of course) about menstruation until my paternal grandmother insisted that she did (I was 11ish, reasonably mature physically, and about to fly to NC to visit my grandparents, and my grandmother thought it would suck for my period to start before my mother had even bothered with that talk). My mother tried to give me the other talk right before I married my first husband!
When I was a very small child, the mention of death was verboten -- words like "kill," "die," etc. were forbidden. My parents wouldn't take me to my great-grandmother's funeral for this reason. I don't really know their reasons for this. I think it would have been easier for me to handle various pet and family (one and the same to my way of thinking) deaths later in life if the topic of death hadn't been so hush-hush.
Taboos
When I was a very small child, the mention of death was verboten -- words like "kill," "die," etc. were forbidden. My parents wouldn't take me to my great-grandmother's funeral for this reason. I don't really know their reasons for this. I think it would have been easier for me to handle various pet and family (one and the same to my way of thinking) deaths later in life if the topic of death hadn't been so hush-hush.
And people wonder why I am such a loon! :-)