Since part of a coordinated sex and family life education program must include a
program available to all youth, the program can best be provided by the school. The
school is the only institution that can ensure that at least minimal sex and family life-
education is made available to all youth in the community-an organized program
beginning in kindergarten and completed by the time the person graduates from high
school.
Educational resources for parents wanting to teach their own children should be
made available as well. Inexpensive literature on human sexuality should be
distributed to parents, since most parents find themselves ill equipped and incapable
of giving such education without help. The next generation will be made up of more
parents who are determined to provide adequate sex education for their children; that
resolve is often expressed, and materials to assist them in their resolve must be made
available.
I do not want my children to go through life experimenting with
either lack of or inadequate sex information. I do not want my
children to do the same things I have done and the way I did them.
I know when my children ask questions about anything that I shall
try my best to answer them truthfully. I shall not avoid a discussion
about sex. I feel that my children have the right to know how they
mature, and what they will feel towards the opposite sex, and the
type of behavior expected of them.
Adolescents testify that literature available in the home can be a constructive,
though not fully adequate, substitute for education from other sources. Such
literature, in and of itself, cannot be counted on to initiate parent-child discussions of
sexual matters, however.
And what about bad sexual literature? What can be done to keep it out of the
hands of young people? It is difficult to define or to contain prurient literature, and the
attempt to do so may have more negative than positive effects within a community.
One way in which the effects of the mass media can be counteracted is through
saturating the community with reputable sex and family life literature in home,
school, church, and on the newsstands.
An additional concluding comment needs to be made, and to be made
emphatically. We need more and better research on the sexual nature, desires, and
needs of human beings at all ages, plus research on sexual and erotic encounters, with
a view to making sexual-erotic experiences as constructive and as satisfying as is
humanly possible within the required limitations of life in community.
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