The task of forming healthy sexual attitudes and understandings in children requires considerable skill and tact, and parents are often keenly aware of their lack of preparation to do the job. However, for those parents who are able to handle the instructional process correctly, the responsibility should be retained in the home. There is a growing trend for all aspects of education to be taken from the hands of parents (or the role is deliberately forfeited by them). This is a mistake.
Particularly in the matter of sex education, the best approach is one that begins in early childhood and extends through the years, according to a policy of openness, frankness, and honesty. Only parents can provide this lifetime training.
The child's need for information and guidance is rarely met in one massive conversation provided by dry-mouthed, sweaty-palmed parents as their child approaches adolescence. Nor is a concentrated formal educational program outside the home the best alternative. The ideal approach is a gradual enlightenment that begins during the third or fourth year of life and culminates shortly before puberty.
Despite the desirability of sex education being handled by highly skilled parents, one must admit this is an unrealistic objective in many homes (perhaps the majority of them). Parents are often too sexually inhibited to present the subject with poise, or they may lack the necessary technical knowledge of the human body. For such families which cannot, or will not, teach their children the details of human reproduction, assistance must be sought from outside the home.
It is my strong conviction that churches believing in abstinence before marriage and in lifelong marital fidelity should step in and offer their help to families sharing that commitment. Where else will moms and dads find proponents of traditional morality in this permissive day? There is no other agency or institution likely to represent the theology of the church better than representatives of the church, itself. It is puzzling to me why so few have accepted this challenge, given the attack on biblical concepts of morality today.
A few parents who have their children in Christian schools are able to get the help they need with sex education. Even there, however, the subject is often ignored or handled inadequately. What has developed, quite obviously, is an informational vacuum that sets the stage for far-reaching programs in the public schools, beginning in some cases with kindergarten children.
One of the problems with sex education as it is currently taught in public schools is that it breaks down the natural barriers between the sexes and makes familiarity and casual sexual experimentation much more likely to occur. It also strips kids--especially girls--of their modesty to have every detail of anatomy, physiology and condom usage made explicit in co-ed situations. Then, the following Friday night when the kids are on a date and attend a sexually explicit movie or watch a hot TV program showing teenagers in bed with one another, it is just a tiny step to intercourse--whereas a hundred years ago it was an enormous decision to give up one's virginity. This familiarity also contributes to the terrible incidence of "date rape" in North America. In short, the way sex education is handled today is worse than no program at all. Look at what has happened to the incidence of teen pregnancy and abortion since it was instituted!
For those moms and dads whose kids are in public schools today, it is imperative that they investigate what is being taught in the name of sex education. You have a right to examine curricular materials and textbooks. You can and must talk to the teachers and principal about what they hope to communicate. Look carefully for the hidden agenda listed earlier in the SIECUS guidelines, such as pro-homosexual and lesbian behavior, the safe-sex distortion, the belief that premarital intercourse is a "right," and any suggestion that pits teenagers against their parents. Find out if a pro-abortion stance is taken, and if Planned Parenthood or similar organizations are invited into the classroom.
If these elements are there, I strongly suggest that you keep your kids out of the program. What better way is there to undermine the value system we have taught than to invest authority and leadership in a teacher who ridicules and undermines it. Not only would I not allow my youngster to participate in such a program, but I would help organize parent groups to institute an abstinence-based curriculum in the school. And if that didn't work, I'd begin campaigning for new school board members. I might even campaign for that office, myself.
New The New Dare to Discipline
By Dr. James Dobson