Do children need sex ed at age 5?

When I was five years old, I was innocent and free – I climbed trees, rode my bicycle, baked with my grandparents and played with my puppy. Gender roles in such activities are limited, thus boys weren’t really something of a big deal. When I was ten years old, boys were only necessary for a decent game of kiss, cuddle or torture. And, dependent on the aesthetics of the boy in question, it wasn’t rare to have to suffer the torture. When I was fifteen years old, I learnt how to put a condom onto a rubber penis in a room full of giggling girls. Childhood personified.

As England has made the move to enforce compulsory sex education lessons on children as young as five, we’re forced to ask ourselves whether learning about the birds and the bees so early will actually affect the way they handle relationships in future life.

Most people agree that five years old is just too early to be emotionally ready to absorb learning about relationships, whether civil partnerships (now compulsory education) or marriage. Some think that being able to correctly identify body parts in the lower regions will lead to actually using these newly found body parts. But if nobody actually sits you down and explains what’s going on down there, you’re never really going to be faced with it until you’re face-to-face with it.

Gone are the days when sex was kept sacred until marriage, a sad change in our society, but one that we have to accept. Children are growing up at an incredible rate nowadays, and we can see how when we look at their role models. Celebrities like Jordan, Hannah Montana and Amy Winehouse (heaven forbid!) set the bar for young girls, encouraging early use of fake tan and makeup so much that our younger generation look like a cluster of miniature prostitutes.

One of the positives about these lessons has to be that if a child is brought up in an environment where there is a parent missing, or it’s abusive, they may be conditioned into believing that is the norm for a relationship. But within the lessons, they will learn how to expand their knowledge of love in a positive way – gender roles will be explained, and the kids will learn that there are many ways to have a communicative, functioning relationship.

Of course, we can’t ignore the fact that the UK has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancies in the Western World. Personally, I don’t believe this is because nobody explained where people’s parts were when they were five years old. I think this is because all around us are provocative images and sexual references and nobody offers any other kind of recreation. We’re constantly being told about STI’s, STD’s and pregnancy, but it hasn’t deterred a vast number of people ignoring the use of the condom. But then, this begs the question – if condoms were handed out willy-nilly, would this be encouraging sex? Is that what we want to do? Or is it better to keep the condoms hush and hope for the best?

But I’m getting distracted. Children are about to be learning to tell the difference between their scrotum and their spermatogenesis, and I am questioning whether this will only further the fact that everywhere we look, sex is being broadcast. If they start learning the function of these body parts so young, it’s only understandable that they won’t wait for 11 years to legally be allowed to use them, and if they aren’t taught about responsible sexual activity, it will just lead to more and more teenage pregnancies. Everybody knows that there’s a lot of peer pressure about sex and who’s had it, and these lessons are only going to throw sex into the limelight constantly. Kids don’t need to know these things until they’re emotionally ready to put them to use, and learning them so early will only push them in the direction of using them. Sex used to be something that was deemed special, but it’s not anymore. People don’t care – children are having children due to irresponsible sex, and nobody is tackling the real issues. Nobody is learning that you don’t have to have sex to have a relationship or that you should wait, not necessarily until marriage, but until you’re emotionally ready. And legally, that should be at least sixteen. But if boys and girls are chatting about their bits and pieces from the age of five onwards, doesn’t it just seem like a matter of time until they use them, purely because they’ve now been conditioned into it? If sex is on everybody’s minds, people will start having sex, whether they’re ten years old or twelve years old. And because our society believes that they are tackling the teenage pregnancy epidemic, they won’t be able to handle this – are they going to teach eleven years old about sex and then hand them condoms? No, of course not. And thus, we will see yet another generation full of children pushing prams, because nobody thought through the fact that if you talk about sex, you need to think about the consequences.

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