In today's digital age, kids need a source they can trust to find answers to questions about sex and love, and research shows how parents can help them do just that.I've never had the chance to do something that is almost the norm among British teenagers. Sex education means opening a very hard plastic packet, taking out a condom and placing it on a banana in a sex education class. I did this when I was about twenty-seven years old. Today I wasn't training to wear a condom, I was trying to learn how to teach someone else to wear a condom.
About 15 newly trained sex educators and I sat in front of our computers, bananas with condoms in hand.
“We often use flavored condoms because they smell more appealing than regular condoms,” explained our teacher on Zoom
He paused for a few moments to assess the reactions of the participants, obviously some of them didn't seem too interested
"It's very important that you don't feel any shame or hesitation when you do it," he said
"When you're encouraging your students to use condoms, you certainly don't want them to feel hesitant or embarrassed," he said.
Parental hesitation is a major obstacle.
Research shows that many parents may feel similar reluctance when trying to talk to their children about physical intimacy or sex, even though societal or individual attitudes toward sex education vary across countries and families. can vary widely between.
A review of research on British parents' involvement in sex education found that they were often embarrassed to talk about it.
For example, they may fear that they lack the skills or knowledge to talk to their children about it. However, the same review also found that parents in countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden Talk openly about sex from a young age and as a result teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are less common than in England and Wales.
Parents who find it awkward to talk about sex may find it difficult.
Many people would like their children to come to them with their questions and problems especially in this digital age where there is so much content online and children find it difficult to decide when and how to start. should be done.
What should parents do?
Eva Goldfarb, professor of public health at Montclair State University, co-authored a systematic literature review of the past 30 years of comprehensive sexuality education.
While the review focuses on schools, Goldfarb says the research also has important lessons for parents. A basic insight is that sex education has positive and long-term effects, such as helping young people form healthy relationships. The advice to the parents is to definitely talk to them and do not delay it.
She says to start talking about this with children very early, even with very young children you can talk about the names of body parts, the functions of these parts, body control.
This includes talking about issues that aren't about sex, including relationships.
In fact, when these conversations start at a young age, parents find it easier to talk to their children about sex and the conversations feel natural. Answering young children's questions openly and honestly creates a positive attitude that makes it easier to talk about more complex issues later.
This step-by-step approach can also be beneficial for children in terms of understanding their own identity and reality.
For example, research has shown that children born with the help of sperm donation and whose parents explained this from the beginning with the help of books and stories are more likely than those who did not. They used to feel positive who later came to know about this fact.
For parents who want to broach the subject of sex but don't know how to get started, this study suggests several ways to get started.
