Sex education highly needed in school
BY WANAJALA .B. DANSON
The whole idea of sex education in our school and how comprehensive sex education should be are controversial subjects. People in our society would rather just tell kids to abstain, but does that really solve our problem nowadays?
This whole idea harkens back to the days of marrying young girls off to older men without telling them about what a wedding night entails.
Sex is not a topic that kids are discussing at home with their parents. Many parents aren’t comfortable discussing sex and prefer to hope that their children are figuring it out from other sources such as television, movies, their friends and school. It is a dangerous hit and miss method that leaves kids in the dark, causes them to make it in disastrous mistakes.
The other point, kids are bombarded daily by the media with sexual topics and images. All you have to do these days is turn on the television, read the newspaper, or surf the internet to find sexual themed media. Our kids have easy access to it, and these media often do not provide accurate information to the kids.
In addition, studies have shown that when kids are given comprehensive sex education in school, the rates for teens getting pregnant or contracting STDS goes down.
Most Children are having sex at earlier ages. 63% of kids who are high school age have had sex by the time they reach their senior year. If this isn’t a scary thought to parents of teens, it should be especially if they haven’t taken time to sit their kids down and explain the consequences.
Rates for teens getting and transmitting STD’s is scaring. Kids are clearly not getting the message about safe sex practices because the rates on teens and STD’s are up and climbing. We need to educate our kids before they get to the point of being sexually active so they don’t wind up contracting diseases and or getting pregnant in the first place.
Telling kids to abstain, or “just say no” to sex only fuels the fire. Often when you tell a kid not to do something without explaining why, they are going to go right out and do it anyway. This is human nature. It is far better to give kids all the information so they can make dubious choices instead of tearing them in the dark with the phrase “just say no”