Sex Education
Sex education helps people gain the information and skills they need to make the best decisions for themselves about sex and relationships. Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest provider of sex education, reaching 1.2 million people a year through education and outreach.
Facts About Sex Education
Sex education is high quality teaching and learning about a broad variety of topics related to sex and sexuality. It explores values and beliefs about those topics and helps people gain the skills that are needed to navigate relationships with self, partners, and community, and manage one’s own sexual health. Sex education may take place in schools, at home, in community settings, or online.
Planned Parenthood believes that parents play a critical and central role in providing sex education. Here are sex education resources for parents.
Comprehensive sex education refers to K-12 programs that cover a broad range of topics related to:
Human development, including puberty, anatomy, sexual orientation, and gender identity
Relationships, including self, family, friendships, romantic relationships, and health care providers
Personal skills, including communication, boundary setting, negotiation, and decision-making
Sexual behavior, including the full spectrum of ways people choose to be, or not be, sexual beings
Sexual health, including sexually transmitted infections, birth control, pregnancy, and abortion
Society and culture, including media literacy, shame and stigma, and how power, identity, and oppression impact sexual wellness and reproductive freedom
There are several important resources that helpwith implementing sex education, including:
The Future of Sex Education Initiative (FoSE) seeks to create a national dialogue about the future of sex education and to promote the institutionalization of comprehensive sex education in public schools. They’ve developed the first-ever National Sexuality Education Standards, National Teacher Preparation Standards, and many additional toolkits and materials to strengthen comprehensive sex education implementation and professional development.
The SIECUS Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education were developed by a national task force of experts in the field of adolescent development, health care, and education. They provide a framework of the key concepts, topics, and messages that all sex education programs would ideally include.