When Kids are Kids No More

Do you remember your very first sexual education experience? For me, it was the 7th grade, and our gym teacher, who was male, divided the boys and girls up, took the boys into a different classroom, and we were left with a female teacher's aid. We talked about the biological side of reproduction, but not much more than that. Keep in mind I went to a catholic school, so talking about sex at that age may not have been considered appropriate due to the frowning upon pre-marital sex thing. 


This is a major issue in sexual education; when do we start educating our youth about sex? When are they ready to hear it? Will it be harmful to them if they are not ready? What is appropriate at what age? These questions have many answers, depending who you ask, but we are going to try and come up with some today. Buckle up people, these results might surprise you. 


Today we are reviewing, "Is Earlier Sex Education Harmful?", a correlational study by Cheryl Somers and Matt Eaves (2002). This study examines two main questions: 1) how the timing of sexual education affects the involvement of youth in sexual intercourse, and 2) the relation of timing with the frequency of sexual behaviour.  This is what they found:

• For girls, learning about sexual intercourse, birth control, and masturbation resulted in less frequent communication about these issues with parents, friends and partners
• For boys, the reverse was true: early learning resulted in more frequent communication, but it also resulted in more frequent sexual behaviour such as masturbation, petting and kissing (stop giggling! I can hear you from here...) 
• Only for boys was there a correlation between earlier learning about masturbation and earlier age of sexual intercourse. This was the only significant finding for the second question. 

So... let's think about this for a minute. What do these findings mean to us? Well, for starters, at first glance, we could say that we obviously shouldn't teach boys about sex, because their just going to start doing it earlier. However, if we take a longer look, we realize that this study is correlational. Now, for all you psychology majors out there, what is the one thing we are told time and time again? Say it with me: Correlation does not imply causation. Therefore, we cannot definitively conclude that earlier sexual education causes one to have intercourse at an earlier age. Somers and Eaves (2002) acknowledge that parents often do not start teaching their children about sexual education until the behaviour has already started, therefore implying that it could be that those who received earlier education were already experimenting with sexual behaviours. As for the girls, we have to realize that sexual education and the issues it brings up are, for some, deeply personal. Somers and Eaves (2002) suggest that hearing about topics before one is ready can cause this lack of communication, which is a behaviour that we want to encourage. They acknowledge that it there may be a fine line at which one is ready to hear something and when they are not, implying that there is such a thing as too early. This research is preliminary, and the authors admit that there are some important limitations in their study i.e. wide learning range, use of self-report, and the need for better methods to determine what topics were learned at what times. This aspect is somewhat under-researched, according to Somers and Eaves (2002), so there is obviously a need for future, improved research in this domain.  

General conclusion of the study?: "Overall, as a preliminary evaluation of the timing of sex education, the data suggest that sexual education at an early age can be beneficial when care is taken in the topics taught" (Somers and Eaves, 2002, p.31). I think the most important implication that we can take from this is that saying the word sex is not going to cause kids to go out and do it. This, in my opinion, has been a major push behind the fear-based, abstinence-only programs that, as we discovered in our review of Bay-Cheng, are the current norm. In class, we talked about a concept called "the politics of innocence". I won't bore you with the intimate details of the entire article, but it talked about the depiction of adolescents in AIDS education in Southern Africa. Mitchell et. al. (2004) described this depiction as one of adolescents being naive, innocent, and in need of protection. We know how important interpretation is, and if this is how we view the youth of today, it makes sense why there is such fear at starting sexual education at an early age. If adolescents are viewed as not knowing any better, as unable to control their "hypersexuality", as being naive and in need of protection from the evils of the world, it makes perfect sense that earlier sexual education is normally not something that happens. Yes we all learn about how a baby is made before high school in theory, but who out there learned about STD's and contraception before high school? And with the mean ages of sexually active teens lowering by the minute (Somers and Eaves, 2002) it might behoove us to rethink this conception of adolescence and childhood. Innocent does not have to mean naive and ignorant. 

To finish off, I would like to briefly discuss a quotation in Somers and Eaves (2002) that really resonated with me. It is the following: "It is normal for adolescents to have sexual experiences, regardless of their levels of education. All sexual behaviours are not necessarily bad or undesirable" (p.31). This is a very refreshing thing to hear, and it rang true with me. It's all part and parcel of discovering our bodies, and developing our sexual identity, which are important parts of healthy development. It seems counter-productive and downright idiotic to attempt to prevent this. Rather than trying to prevent sexual behaviour, we should be trying to prevent IRRESPONSIBLE sexual behaviour. That's where the problem lies, not in the behaviour itself, but how it is enacted. I'm not saying we should encourage rampant sexual activity, but simply that we should provide adolescents and pre-adolescents with the tools they need to be responsible citizens, and to experiment in ways that do not harm others or themselves. Knowledge is power and agency, and we should not keep our youth in the dark to their own disadvantage. 

So, we know that earlier sexual education is not all that bad, provided you're not scaring 10 year old's with graphic pictures of chlamydia, or raunchy videos. (OK, a bit dramatic, but you get my drift). Stay tuned for discussion about current programs of sexual education, what works and what doesn't? Feel free to leave opinions, stories, and random thoughts. It's always nice to know what others think about what you're thinking about. 

References

Mitchell, C., Walsh, S., Larkin, J., (2004), Visualizin the politics of innocence in the age of AIDS, Sex Education 4(1), p.135-147. doi: 10/1080.1468181042000176524

Somers, C.L., Eaves, M.W., (2002). Is earlier sex education harmful? An analysis of the timing of school-based sex education and adolescent sexual behaviours, Research in Education 67, p.23-32.