Health education ignores sexuality

By Susa Beckman Nahmias

Teens are becoming complacent about sex since we, as adults, don’t talk to them about it.

Parent-child communication is essential — parents need to talk about their personal values to enable their children to develop their own.

However, many parents feel ill-informed about the various aspects of sexuality and reproductive health, which is why it is vital that our schools provide students, in an age-appropriate manner, with the basic facts and with the skills to avoid risky sexual behavior.

Kids desperately have to get this education to counteract misinformation, media in all forms and peer pressure. They need it, not only to prevent potential lifelong health consequences, but to be able to fulfill their dreams, uninterrupted by pregnancy or disease.

Georgia will soon get new performance standards for health education. The expectations are high since we are in dire need of providing students with up-to-date knowledge and skills to reduce and prevent a number of health concerns among our young, not only sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and dating violence, but also obesity, high cholesterol, alcohol and drug use.

However, in the 120 pages of standards, there is much to be concerned about. As a parent, physician and public health advocate, I applaud the emphasis on developing health-promoting skills in our children, but the new Georgia Performance Standards for health education don’t provide the biological foundations needed to develop these skills. To be able to take care of your body, you need to know how it works.

The U.S. National Health Education Standards are the basis for our new standards, providing broad guidelines for states to develop their own state-specific curricula. It would be reasonable to assume that state performance standards would then reflect not only current educational and health research, but also local health concerns. That’s not the case.

The Georgia Performance Standards are vague and provide little guidance, and will fail not only our children, but local counties and health educators.

In the past, few school districts have developed specific health education curricula. Health educators are guided by the Georgia law, the teaching materials approved by county Health and PE/ Sex Education Committees, and by the Quality Core Curriculum. With the new standards, every county will have to create its own curriculum. If they don’t, the door is left open for substandard health education of our children, which is unacceptable.

The standards claim to integrate the six “Adolescent Risk Behaviors” outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The behaviors include alcohol and drugs, injury and violence, tobacco, poor nutrition, inadequate physical activity and risky sexual behavior — as well as common health education areas. Growth and development is not discussed after second grade. What happened to puberty education?

Too many children reach puberty unprepared — they need this instruction before they are in the middle of it.

And, since the new standards omit such cornerstones of sex education as the human reproductive system and puberty, it really should not come as a surprise that pregnancy is not mentioned at all.

It appears that these omissions are part of a trend to avoid dealing with teen sexuality, as evidenced by the repeated mentioning of the CDC’s first five adolescent risk behaviors, but not of the sixth — risky sexual behavior.

Teachers have a hard enough time teaching sex education. Why make it a Herculean task by virtually omitting it from the new standards?

So, why do we need to provide our children with age-appropriate, timely and medically accurate sex education in our public schools? Why do we need to talk about sexuality, dating violence, sexually transmitted infections including HIV/AIDS, and about pregnancy prevention, including delaying sexual activity (abstinence)?

There is a reason Georgia law requires sex education. We just need to look at the statistics.

According to the latest CDC Youth Risk Behavior Surveys, 33 percent of ninth graders in the U.S. have already had sexual intercourse, and, by 12th grade, 65 percent have had sex.

We aren’t doing any better in Georgia. In DeKalb, 14 percent of high school students have had sex before the age of 13, and 57 percent of all DeKalb high school students surveyed have experienced sex, compared to 48 percent nationally. Georgia ranks 10th in the nation for teen births.

Pregnancies among 15- to 19-year-olds in Georgia increased from 67 to 69.2 per 1,000 between 2005 and 2007. A recent CDC report found that sexually transmitted infections continue to increase among young adults.

When the state standards finally talks about sex, the kids are already in high school and the only example of risk-reduction mentioned is abstinence. Abstinence-only education may impact delaying sexual activity among the very young teens.

For high school students, it will be too late. A 2009 CDC report summarizing research on sexual risk reduction interventions finds “insufficient evidence for the effectiveness of group-based abstinence education.”

The health performance standards need to be revised. Educators, parents and health professionals need to contact the Department of Education. Our children will make up their own minds about sex. If we, as adults, want to be part of that process and not leave it to media, Internet and peers, we have to talk to our kids about sex — at home and in school.

Susa Beckman Nahmias chairs the Georgia Parents for Responsible Health Education, an Atlanta-based non-profit organization working to improve sexuality education in Georgia’s schools.