Proper Sex Education Is Necessary
I had sexual education earlier than most children thanks to three publications: an intermediate first aid book, which included how to deliver a baby and a study of female sex organs, a book about the pleasures of sex that belonged to my aunt and a graphic AIDS pamphlet.
Sex education is usually a very uncomfortable conversation. Parents are supposed to have “The Talk” with their children. If they fail, that job falls to teachers. However, it seems that only a few states actually mandate accurate and comprehensive sexual education.
As a result, teens are left vulnerable to their own ignorance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that people ages 15 to 24 account for 50 percent of all new sexually transmitted diseases reported in 2013. According to IndexMundi, a website containing multiple statistics from multiple countries, this age range makes up less than 15 percent of the current population.
You can blame lawmakers for this. The Sexuality Information and Education Council of The United States says that since 1981, they have funded abstinence only sex education. In an article published in 2011 for The National Center for Biotechnology Information, Kathrin Stanger-Hall and David Hall, professors at the University of Georgia, stated that abstinence only sex education actually increases the amount of teen pregnancies in the United States.
According to the The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, many states have decided to use different methods to combat teen pregnancy and we’ve seen a decline in teen pregnancies all over the United States lately. These methods have greatly impacted states such as Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Stranger-Hall and Hall have researched that states that still stress abstinence over expansive education about sexually transmitted diseases have higher pregnancy rates than other states, which include Florida and Indiana, where Vice President Mike Pence once resided as governor.
Parents should take control of their children’s sex education and shouldn’t be so afraid of introducing it to children because guess what? They’re going to find out about it anyway!
Ignoring sex is hurting everyone. Teenagers are not ready to tackle the responsibilities of parenthood and neither are their bodies. There’s no need to mention the financial burdens that parents have to deal with.
Proper sex education also includes LGBTQ issues. These days we’re likely to hear about children being aware of their otherness very early. Not talking about it may lead to depression and suicide, according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In November, NBC reported about a father who killed his 14-year-old son for being gay.
In some accounts of child molestation, the child doesn’t understand what was happening, and therefore they were not able to speak about what was happening to them. For this reason, children need sex education as they approach the age of reason, which is well before puberty.
The best thing to do is equip them with accurate information to help guide them as puberty nears and enables them to make the best choices for themselves.
