Sex Education Essay

A Modern Family System’s Theory to Adequate Sex Education

Teen pregnancy rates in the US are extremely high in fact they are 2x higher than England, Whales, or Canada, and 4x higher than those of France or Sweden. Each year 1 million unmarried women become pregnant and 10,000 of those are girls 15 years of age and younger. When young, unwed women become pregnant it usually leads to the father leaving, or not being part of the child raising process, leaving mom to raise the child alone. This usually leads to burdening of grandparents and community. Single motherhood can lead to “low income, inadequate housing, and lack of transportation, loneliness, poor nutrition, physical health problems, and a cluster of stressors.” (Olsen). High pregnancy rates in the US are directly affected by the lack of adequate sex education in the home, school, and community. In interviews with the Kaiser foundation in 2000, 1/3 of people said that “adolescents should be told to only have sex when they are married”, this is an unrealistic approach which leads to being uneducated and forced to learn about sex from their also uneducated peers. There is little evidence to prove any effectiveness from “just say no “programs. In the Family systems theory everything that happens to a family has an impact on everyone else in the family. Therapist Carl Whitaker says, “There are no individuals in the world only fragments of families.” How people behave is based on their family background and creates a ripple effect influencing their family, neighborhood, and community.
I can’t really recall any sort of sex education in school, other than faintly remembering a field trip around 5th grade that kids jokingly called “the sex house”. I remember the boys and the girls being split into different groups and each watched a 30 minute video. The girls watched a video about a woman giving birth (mostly censored), and the boys watched a different video but we (the girls) never found out what it was about. The amount that I remember from that day tells how effective that “sex education” was, the kids mostly laughed about it, no one took it seriously. Throughout school there was always some kind of propaganda on the wall to the effect of “just say no to sex”, this was the general attitude towards sex in my home, school, and community. I never received an adequate sex talk at home either. My mom mentioned once that she didn’t want me having sex,

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Comprehensive Sex Education