Age of starting sex education
in Epiphanies
This discussion was created from comments split from: UK officially fucks Trans kids over.
Comments
So the question really is about what you see the function of sex education as being about, and to what extent your are able to teach it alongside the social rules about when it’s appropriate to discuss sex.
This sort of thing maybe all you really want to do with a five year old though (this link is safe for work).
At my kids' school, sex ed started early. The first couple of years of sex ed was a very gentle introduction, involving a cat giving birth to kittens, and then rabbits mating, both in a fairly general non-detailed way. Mine had already seen lambs being born in real life, and rabbits mating so were way ahead of the curve.
It was called "sex ed" but there was nothing initially that your average village child hadn't already seen in the fields round the village.
In fact, so gentle was the introduction that my daughter asked me whether people have to eat grass before mating. Great emphasis had been placed on the initial "Here's a rabbit. It's eating grass!" bit, and my daughter thought the "eating grass" bit was a vital part of the "making baby rabbits" process. The actual mechanics had been skimmed over.
As to "what age should sex education be started" I think that's like asking "how long is a piece of string". According to my kids' curriculum, I started sex ed when my son was 18 months old by telling him he was going to be a big brother because there was a baby in my tummy. Because apparently "babies grow inside their mothers" is Lesson 1 in Sex ed.
I don't understand "no sex ed before nine" at all. Will the "baby animals" stuff simply be renamed as something other than sex ed? Will they skip the gentle introduction altogether?
So already some here seem to be arguing for a gradual approach to sex education of children. They probably don't need to know everything, including contraception, at age 7 ?
Hopefully though we can avoid that misinformation and stick to more informed comment. Didn't you do some work on the history of sex education @North East Quine and how it developed?
At a boys' Grammer Skool (as you can imagine), Secks and Philth were much talked about, with smutty magazines - tame by today's standards! - passing from boy to boy surreptitiously, whilst we puffed away at No.6 cigarettes (1/3d for 10) at the edge of the sports field..
Yes, I think I would go along with this. Quite what parents decide to tell their child(ren), and when, is up to to them, of course.
There is education in personal development and health, relationships, safety and respect for others. Of which teaching about sex is a part.
Two reasons for saying that. Firstly sex obviously needs to be taught in that context, it's so much more than biology. Secondly and more importantly, the contextual stuff is relevant from the beginnings of education. As noted above, telling an 18 month old that they're going to be a big brother is sex education. My four year old knowns that frogs lay eggs, eggs hatch into tadpoles which become froglets that grow into frogs. My six year old knows that same sex relationships exist because one of his classmates has two mums. Oh and it's a normal part of child development for a 2-3 Yr old to know that they are a boy or a girl.
So much of these government guidelines are doomed to failure in educational terms because they come from a premise that the world is a certain way (I.e. the right wing fantasy) when in reality it isn't. The reason this tangent started in the thread on Transgender children is because the government clearly believes if they pretend hard enough that trans kids don't exist, then it will magically become true.
All children (maybe adults too?) need age-appropriate sex education. These guidelines are not designed to achieve that, they are designed for political point scoring and forget the real-world consequences.*
AFZ
*see also Conservative policy on Brexit, Small boat migration, disability benefits...
Didn't you do some work on the history of sex education @North East Quine and how it developed?
The Free Church of Scotland produced Sex Ed pamphlets for parents to give to their children in the late C19th. Despite the fact that thousands were distributed I've not seen a surviving one, so I have no idea what they covered.
The Free Church was concerned about girls going into domestic service at the age of thirteen fourteen and being "surprised in sin." They knew that teenage girls in domestic service were extremely vulnerable to the predations of their employer, or the sons of their employer, and felt that sexual ignorance made them even more vulnerable. The pamphlets were produced on the basis "forewarned is forearmed". There were pamphlets for boys, too; again I haven't seen one. They seem to have been aimed at twelve year olds.
Not sure this is the case; I think they are deliberately trying to import a US style culture war into the UK in order to narrowly whip up panic and gain votes.
The people driving this have been the various self-styled National/Popular Conservative groups, featuring MPs like Danny Kruger, Miriam Cates and Michael Gove (who has been very right wing for a long time, but always gets very sympathetic press coverage)
What do you mean by "sex education"?
Know where babies come from? Most toddlers know pregnant people, and then subsequently meet the small baby. Learning about relationships with other humans? We start that before our children are able to understand language. Learning about respect, and consent, and about how not everyone likes the same things, and that's OK? Again, that's a continuous process since birth.
The menstrual cycle? Age of menarche varies, but before age 10 will catch most people. And yes, talk about the menstrual cycle with boys, too. Which is not to say that a lot of children won't learn earlier, in an organic fashion, because they have menstruating relatives and ask questions.
If you mean learning about sexual activity: about the kinds of activities that people find enjoyable, about how to do them whilst minimizing the risk of transmitting disease or pregnancy, and more detailed and specific talks about consent to sexual activity, and about the ability to consent when impaired by drink or drugs, and about how consent to one particular act one time does not imply consent to other acts, or to the first act on a different occasion, and how consent can be withdrawn at any point, including "during", then again, that's an ongoing process. The more detailed stuff can wait until the kids are seriously contemplating that kind of activity; general principles including consent, and that it's OK to say no if you don't like something, and that should be respected, should start early.
Personally, I remember having one of those "how your body works" books that described bodily functions in terms of machines, and had a "daddy machine" with a large spring for a penis when I was 6 or 7. Aged 9, my school biology textbook had detailed line drawings of the male and female reproductive organs in humans, in a chapter that also had drawings of pistils and stamens.
So what do you mean by "sex education"? The kind of thing you might find in a biology class? The kind of thing you might find in the Karma Sutra? Or the kind of thing that is really a continuous part of the "how to be a decent human" lessons in personal / social education?
Because obviously I'm aware it is a multifaceted subject without a simple succinct definition.
I was picking up on what @Doublethink said "it's (schools not teaching lessons on gender identity) also bound up with their idea to ban sex education entirely for the under nines.".
I meant my question to be a discussion starter in the context of what is laid down to be taught in state schools.
(as a tangent I can imagine certain independent 'faith' schools being extremely unhappy to be required teach the kinds of things we are talking about here to under nines!).
But *all* these things *aren't* being taught to under-nines; I read @Leorning Cniht saying something along the same lines as that described by afz up here.
There are some things that are about the private parts of sex - about the details of what goes on between (ideally) consenting adults in bedrooms, or in the back seats of cars, or on the sofa when you're babysitting and illicitly sneak your bf/gf in, that are best saved until closer to the time that children are considering engaging in those acts. I could go along with age 13 as a reasonable time for that sort of detail.
When you teach a girl about her menstrual cycle, it makes sense to include a discussion of the hormonal changes (rather than just "once a month you bleed. This is what you do with a tampon"), and it is natural for that discussion to extend to a discussion of hormonal contraception. It doesn't make sense to wait for age 13 for that discussion, and some number of girls aged under 13 will be prescribed hormonal contraceptives to control their periods. (Mine always used to use the pill to avoid having the hassle of having to deal with a period whilst on a backpacking trip.)
I agree with you. The government wants the culture war. But I think it's kinda both.
The unspoken philosophy of the policy is that Transgender is not a real thing (with a side order of I'd never even heard of it when I was a kid). Therefore we only hear about it because of radical wokeys talking about it. Fight the wokeys, Transgender disappears...
AFZ
This song is now stuck in my head, just to let you know.
While I would certainly hope that 13 would be early enough I don't think we can discount that puberty, and with it sexual desire, often arrives earlier than that, and some kids are likely to have already experimented among themselves or, worse, crushed on an adult with abusive tendencies. I'm not sure what the solution is.
Mine too - so now we know how to respond to any advances made on our persons.
My parents were fairly liberal in sharing information with us when Mum was pregnant, and good at answering questions. My older brother and I were each given books about development of boys and girls bodies, although I think Mum was a bit shocked when she discovered we had swapped books, (at my suggestion).
Yeah, I just don't think they care about actual outcomes, apart from reversing the tide of social progress, in the same sense that those who have pushed for abortion bans in the US don't really care about the downstream outcomes.
And these issues are connected, Cates et al are now pushing for stricter regulations around abortion in the UK.
Just to join in, that's really good. Not surprising as it's from the NSPCC. I will use it with my 6 year old.
In a professional capacity (I'm a paediatric surgeon) I often have to examine children. In the last few years with younger children and with older children with learning disabilities, I've met a few parents who have been proactive in teaching what is ok and what isn't. Usually it's something like "this is OK because it's the doctor and Mummy is here." The point being 1) they've taught their child to know this isn't normally ok and 2) this is good to teach the children the exception and how thar doesn't change the general rule. I am compliment and commend the parents when I see this. It's a vital safe guarding strategy.
AFZ
It was amongst our child protection resources at work and once heard, never forgotten !
As parents we teach our children about the world around them, about themselves and the way they are made, etc. We should answer questions that arise factually, tailored to the child's level of understanding. Taking a child to the doctor should always be to encourage the child to explain for themselves how they feel, where it hurts, etc.
I'd add that teaching boundaries is also vital, starting from the simple level of "Some people call those bits/areas private parts because we're meant to keep them private" so it is taken on-board at the same time as why we say "please" and "thank you".
Maybe we should look at the bigger question of why as a nation we seem to have so many ignorant adults and educate them first?
As for government, of any stripe, giving guidelines for sex/relationship education, I'd say this is doomed: there will always be a group which tries to grab hold of it and hitch it onto their own particular hobby-horse.
Me too.
What a brilliant song.
It's disastrous. It encourages a tabloid kind of prurience, and separates sex from relationship, although I'm sure teachers don't.
To be clear, the sort of advice I was thinking appropriate starting at age 13 was rather explicit; less explicit advice, including a lot of discussion of consent and not doing things you're not ready for because "if you really loved me you would", or "all the cool kids are doing this" or whatever would come earlier and on an ongoing basis. Also earlier than 13 would be a debunking of the various myths that surround pregnancy (when I was a kid, "she won't get pregnant if you do it standing up" did the rounds quite a bit.)
There's a tension in doing the more explicit stuff in schools, because kids do develop at different rates, and the year variation in age of members of a particular class is also a factor. The challenge is that some kids really need this sort of advice, and some of their classmates aren't even remotely ready to hear it. In an ideal world, parents would do this with their kids when their own kids were ready for the lessons, but the reality is that many of the kids who need this most have parents who would not be helpful here.
In Secondary there was a Talk about menstruation about 2nd year, by which time it was old news since I hit menarche aged 11. There was also one, by a visiting male speaker which seemed to be about the danger of ever being seen in your underwear, so I assume it was the usual female blaming.