Parents Must Take a Proactive Role in Educating Children About Sex

Regarding the Birds & Bees column April 30 (“Don’t Let TV Be Your Teenager’s Main Source of Sex Education”): I am a school nurse in Orange County and have a business called the Birds & Bees Connection. Our mission statement is to decrease teen pregnancy through parent-child education.

As a sex educator for the past 20 years, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the material our children are exposed to on a regular basis. In each class I teach, I find especially the boys are becoming more and more sex-obsessed. They’ve been allowed to watch whatever they want and surf the Internet and access material way beyond their conceptual ability. I’ve seen first-graders who’ve accessed X-rated Internet sites and are witnessing material that can be physiologically and emotionally damaging.

As the article says, it’s vitally important for parents to become proactive, but the problem I’ve found is that parents either don’t know how to approach their children or they feel very overwhelmed by this information. For many parents, they really don’t have the concrete knowledge it takes to properly educate their children, therefore they choose instead not to deal with it at all, often waiting for their children to come to them.

In many states, there are educational programs offered to parents to empower them when it comes to speaking to their children. I would love to see a clearinghouse so parents can assess these programs for themselves. Even though pregnancy statistics have gone down, we still have a major problem with our children not getting proper sex education. As the statistics confirm, our children’s sex educator has become the media and the Internet. Hopefully, with articles like these and parents reading Net sites like Children’s Now, we can start to see parents take a more proactive role in their child’s psychosocial behavior.

LESLIE DIXON

School nurse; director of the Birds & Bees Connection