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As she hears tidbits about Ontario’s new sexual education curriculum, Sarah Carlyon-Baker admits to being a “little wary.”
Children will learn about homosexuality and same-sex marriage in Grade 3. In Grade 6, they’ll talk about puberty — a chat that will cover masturbation. When they get to the subject of sexually transmitted diseases in Grade 7, they’ll learn just how they’re contracted, including through oral and anal sex.
The new curriculum, expected to be released on Monday, is a far cry from the sex-ed the Jasper, Ont., mother remembers getting as a student — brief talk of menstruation in Grade 5, with everything else gleaned from “the schoolyard” or from a book wordlessly slipped to her by her mother.
“I am wary,” Ms. Carlyon-Baker says, “because I don’t want my kids to grow up — I want them to stay innocent and sweet and continue to think that unicorns are real and that all people are good.”
I don’t want my kids to grow up — I want them to stay innocent and sweet and continue to think that unicorns are real and that all people are good
She wants Annabelle, 5, Eamonn, 3, and one-year-old Bobby to be prepared when they enter a world in which the media seem consumed by sex and technology makes records of sexual activity both permanent and widely shareable. But that doesn’t make it any easier to discuss sex.
Ms. Carlyon-Baker’s struggle is shared by parents all across Canada who are dealing with a rapidly changing landscape when it comes to sexual education and who are trying to tackle those perennial questions of how much information is too much information? How young is too young?
Ontario’s Minister of Education, Liz Sandals, said the new curriculum — the first update since 1998 — will look a lot like the controversial plan the government scrapped in 2010. This one, however, will include more focus on consent and healthy relationships.
In Alberta this week, two big city school boards voted unanimously to push the province to include consent in its sexual education curriculum. Edmonton and Calgary public school boards said they want students to know the cues of consent and what the legal boundaries are.
Despite wide support for Ontario’s plan, not everyone accepts the changes. A petition launched by Ontario Catholic parents group Parents as First Educators reads “We do not believe that prepubescent children should be overloaded with explicit information about sex,” and demands “an end to plans” to update the sex-ed curriculum. “The values of self-control, morals and marriage are not considered in this [current sex-ed] program and the emotional consequences of loveless sex, with no commitment, are not addressed,” Sandra Van Raay, an Ontario grandparent who signed the petition, told the Chatham Daily News.
Minister Sandals has said the curriculum will not be up for debate once announced and will be in place by September.
It’s a clash of two schools of thought around what it means to protect children on the tricky, taboo, and confusing matter of sex: withhold information for as long as possible and hope for the best or educate children early so they can make informed choices?
“It’s always reasonable for parents to be wary about what kind of information their kids are getting about really important things in life,” says Dr. Miriam Kaufman, head of adolescent medicine and sexual health educator at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.
The fear is that consent-based education will encourage kids to have sex, but research does not support that
“I don’t think kids who are in Grade 1 [should hear] that quite often men stick their penises into women’s vaginas. I think that could be a very scary concept to a kid that age,” she says. “Parents also … do tend to be more protective around that stuff and freaking out about their kids knowing about this stuff.”
Having good information from school and from a parent familiar with the curriculum, Dr. Kaufman says, is much better than the more dubious messages young people pick up online, on TV or from overheard conversations.
That’s a standard being adopted by many parents across the country as they see high-profile cases alleging sexual violence in the news, particularly those of former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi and comedian Bill Cosby, says Toronto sexuality educator Nadine Thornhill.
“We’re having these stories surface again and again and again of people not respecting consent, of people not honouring sexual boundaries,” she says. “The silver lining of that very big cloud is a lot of people are maybe starting to realize and accept the fact that these are conversations and aspects of sexuality we’ve neglected to talk about.”
“Previously the thought was ‘Well, people just figure that out on their own,’” she says. People are now realizing that may not necessarily be true.
In her parent-coaching sessions, Ms. Thornhill — who has an eight-year-old son — hears that parents want to have these conversations but want to do it correctly. More and more parents, she says, have the same expectations for what their children learn at school — evidence-based and age-appropriate information.
Children are starting to show an interest in their genitalia as preschoolers, Dr. Kaufman says, and it’s important to know the names of these parts, even as protection from sexual abuse. By kindergarten, a curriculum like Ontario’s, or the one being promoted in Alberta, would teach children about boundaries — yes means yes and no means no — and that they have control of their own bodies.
Lauren Dobson-Hughes, president of Planned Parenthood Ottawa, says she’s already teaching these concepts to her two-year-old daughter. When the toddler was recently kicked by another child at daycare, Ms. Dobson-Hughes sat her daughter down and said “when someone hurts you, you say ‘No, stop.’”
“It’s about encouraging a conversation around consent and enthusiastic ‘yes’ and what it means to say no all the way through their life in a way that’s meaningful to them,” she says. The same will apply to sex later in life.
It’s something Cristina Stasia, a professor of gender studies at the University of Alberta, has lobbied hard to be included in Alberta’s curriculum and was pleased to have seen some success this week.
“The fear is that consent-based education will encourage kids to have sex, but research does not support that,” she says.
A recent meta-analysis of 174 studies on the impact of sexual-health promotion intervention on youth found they don’t lead to more frequent sex with more partners.
Children usually aren’t even asking about sex when they ask the dreaded question: where do babies come from?, says Deborah Roffman, the author of Talk to Me First: Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Kid’s Go-to Person.
It’s more about their origins — where they were before they were in the world and how they got here, she says. Thinking about it that way might help parents and school administrators overcome their anxiety about “too much, too soon.”
“I think the most important thing is we have to see this subject more broadly,” she says. “Everyone is a sexual and gendered person, from the moment of birth on. The first thing we look at to discover [a newborn’s sex] is [his or her] genitals. We have an interest in this and children pick that up.”
Still, it’s difficult to shake that anxiety in a culture that passes the taboo about sex from generation to generation, she says. And as sex-ed across the country seeks to modernize, there will be wrinkles — especially when there’s a communication breakdown about what’s being taught.
Last year, Vancouver island-based sex educator Claire Vanston heard from parents who were upset to learn the types of things their children were learning about sex at school. Turns out,the principal had not sent word home.
“The first thing I said to them was ‘I’m sorry,’” she says, adding that parents should always know what their child is learning in class, especially on the topic of sex.
It’s an anxiety Brian Evoy, president of the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education, has recently heard.
“I’ve spoken to parents who’ve called me, and had this fear that their kids were going to be taught things they didn’t want to be taught,” he says. Grandparents have also expressed concerns that children are being taught about “free sex.”
His organization was part of the consultations on the updated sex-ed curriculum, he says, and the process was a positive one. He’s confident the Institute for Catholic Education will find ways to interpret the curriculum so it makes sense for Catholic students.
“I don’t have a crystal ball and can’t tell you it’s going to be embraced by everyone,” he says. “But our organization is very much in favour of the curriculum and all of the changes that will be made.”
National Post
