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WHY IS SEX EDUCATION NECESSARY?

If children and adolescents receive timely and effective sex education, it will help :
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Improve the quality of their relationships.
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Develop a healthy and positive view of sexuality.
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Promote healthy and responsible sexual behaviour.
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Reduce the risks of negative outcomes from sexual behaviour like unwanted or unplanned pregnancies and infections.
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Create awareness of psycho-sexual issues like sexual abuse, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV/AIDS, thereby, enabling them to protect themselves.
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Develop young people's ability to make decisions over their entire lifetime.

As mentioned earlier, one of the key elements of sex education is providing information to adolescents.

Your daughter and her friends will have access to information about sex and sexuality from a wide range of sources including each other, literature, media and the Internet. Some of this will be accurate and some inaccurate, and some will be at variance with what you as a parent believe and espouse.

For sex education to be effective it will be thus essential to first assess and understand what your child already knows, correcting any misconceptions she may be harboring, and finally providing her with information that she lacks, thereby filling the gaps. Accurate and appropriate information is also critical since this will enable your daughter to make informed choices and develop appropriate attitudes and views about sex and sexuality.

At appropriate ages and phases of their development, adolescents should be informed of :
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The physical and psychological changes associated with puberty.
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The process of fertilization, conception and reproduction.
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Contraception and birth control, including kinds of contraceptives, how they can be procured and used, and also how to decide which method is suitable.
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Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs), their causes and treatment, including the fact that if ignored, it can lead to HIV/AIDS.
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HIV / AIDS, its implications and methods of prevention, also how to deal with people living with HIV/AIDS.
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Issues of abortion, sexual abuse, homosexuality, and how to deal with these if one has to.
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Relationships about attraction and infatuation, about love and commitment, marriage and partnership.

While some information which needs to be imparted to your adolescent is being provided right here, or in other chapters of the book, it is by no means comprehensive. Our emphasis in these pages being more on how to approach the realm of sex education, we urge you to look for more detailed material related to each of the information areas enumerated above, to share with your child.