Parents Need To Think About Sex Education too.
In 2020, it’s safe to say the hyper-sexualized media environment we’ve created isn’t going away, at least anytime soon. In the time of Tinder, free hardcore porn anywhere at any time, super sexy selfies, music videos and memes, children and young people are bombarded with messages on sex and sexuality. Through them, they are learning about sex and having their values and behaviours shaped in ways that aren’t always healthy.
Of course, these things influence our adult tastes and ideas too, but it’s the youth who are especially susceptible to these powerful messages. Their young brains are very literally having their sexual identities and taste developed, often without any critical filters or counter-narratives.
Despite this plethora of sources that are swiftly shaping sexual identities (not to be confused with sexual orientation), there is still a big gap in giving kids and teenagers the information they need to healthily navigate the landscape society has created for them.
“There’s definitely no conversations going on about how to have good sexual experiences.
-Angela Rennie”
In both 2007 and 2017, the Educational Review Office (ERO) conducted studies of sexuality education in New Zealand schools. Despite the ten years between them, both studies showed that overall, curriculum coverage remains a mixed bag and what is taught differs dramatically between schools around the country.
For most schools, “...biological aspects of sexuality and puberty are well covered, [though] more in-depth coverage is needed for aspects like consent, digital technologies and relationships. Sexual violence and pornography were covered in fewer than half of the secondary schools ERO visited”. The topic of how to teach having pleasurable sexual experiences too continues to leave much to be desired.
As someone who regularly speaks in highschools about these issues, when I ask teenage students how they have learnt about sex it’s little surprise the answer is always either porn or “my mates”. Neither of which are particularly reliable founts of information on how to have physically and emotionally safe, informed and pleasurable sex.
Angela Rennie, a therapist at Intimacy Counselling (with not one but four degrees in psychology), who has spent time as an educator in schools about healthy relationships, observes that what’s delivered in most schools at present, isn’t adequate it all, commenting “There’s definitely no conversations going on about how to have good sexual experiences. It’s all about what not to do. Which are important...but it’s just as important to have positive sexuality messages.”
While some schools are doing a good job bringing in external providers to cover the gaps or respond to issues as they emerge, when schools aren’t teaching kids what they need to know, Angela agrees that it’s the internet, and specifically porn, that fills the gap. She notes,“The majority of porn is derogatory and violent towards women”. She continues, “I hear all the time of instances in schools where that’s actually spilling over into [boys’] behaviours towards women, sending dick pics. Boys are sending unsolicited videos of themselves masturbating.” If porn is problematic, what’s a counterpoint? Where do kids learn about sex if their school doesn’t cover things they want to know and the internet teaches things that can be a problem?
Lief Pearson is a former sexual health nurse and now the resource and liaison lead at The Light Project. She acknowledges there continues to be a big deficit when it comes to sex education and teaching young people about pleasure. Within that, there’s a lack of an easily accessible alternative to the narratives taught by porn.
Lief says parents have a huge responsibility here in helping their kids learn about sex healthily. “If parents were equipped to be able to have these conversations from an early age it would help children have a healthy understanding of sex. But they need to be equipped and sometimes they actually need to work through their own issues first.
“Parents need to work on their own values around sex...what we keep quiet about is what we make taboo and what we make shameful. So if we as parents are not talking to our kids, in our silence we are telling them what they should be ashamed of.”
To put it simply, parents can help their children develop healthy ideas about sex by using positive language around the topic and talking about it openly. At present, there is a massive disconnect in that kids are growing up in an environment flooded with sex and sexual themes but there’s often not any meaningful conversations around these issues at home.
Parents can change this by finding teachable moments when kids are consuming media that have romantic or sexual content. Working on non-judgementally asking questions of our children to gauge their understanding when a song about sex comes on the stereo or there’s a sex scene in a movie everyone might be watching is an easy way to start having these conversations. It’s much better than ignoring things or sweeping them under the rug, which can lead to youth internalizing a sense of embarrassment and shame about sex and romance which should be a natural and normal part of the human experience.
Some parents might be cringing at the thought of talking with their kids about anything to do with sex, but Dr Natalie Hendry, a Lecturer in Education at Deakin University in Melbourne, says exploring these topics is something that can be done more easily if treated as something that is humorous and funny. It doesn’t have to be sitting down and having a heavy talk, and it means being open to conversations when they arise.
“It requires you as a teacher or educator to shift from being the expert into being a say, facilitator, and actually asking them really good questions and listening.” Rather than talking at young people, parents and teachers alike need to listen to them. Dr Hendry says that talking through a topic helps a young person to clarify their values for themselves, the values in their friendship groups, and the different norms that have been established.
That can start with a question as simple as “well why do you think that?” when a child makes a statement to do with something around sex or sexuality.
It might seem daunting, but normalizing these conversations around sex can start at a young age. Helping your children use the anatomically correct language from infancy is a simple start. Teaching them not to be embarrassed of their bodies, and being open to exploring and learning together builds the foundation for pathways to important conversations as children move into adolescence and becoming sexually active.
Research shows that one in four New Zealand children see porn at the age of 12 or younger and while schools continue to develop a more comprehensive and uniform approach to sexuality education in the modern age unless parents and caregivers want the internet and pop culture to be their kids first source of information, they need to be open to learning themselves and talking with their kids about sex to help them develop healthy ideas and behaviours.