This is a tricky topic for me, as I am by no means an “expert” in this field. But it is something that needs to be talked about. I don’t think adults realize the number of teenagers that are sexually active. I am going into my sophomore year and am just about as inexperienced as they come, but I do have many friends that are in my grade, or even grades below me that are very sexually involved. I even have a decent number of friends that have gone all the way. And at our age, we don’t know overly much about STDs or other unwanted things you can get from sex. Many people my age don’t even realize that you can get STDs from “foreplay”.
At my school, and many others, you take a health class or two in middle school, but you don’t get into the nitty gritty details until probably your sophomore year. And by that point a decent number of kids have already had sex. And in many health classes you never go over how to use condoms, or what birth control is likely to work the best. I’ve even heard from friends that we never even cover the day after pill. We aren’t even taught how to use a pregnancy test. Maybe schools think that if they don’t tell you about that stuff you won’t have sex this young since you don’t know how to protect yourself. But teenagers are going to be teenagers, and most of us won’t stay abstinent.
Schools need to talk more about this sort of stuff, and at a younger age too. When I took my last health class in eighth grade I was not taught about diaphragms. I wasn’t even told what they were. I found out about them from movies. I then had to go research what it was. I have never had a use for one, and I don’t plan on needing one for a while, but there are certainly kids in my grade that should know what it is, or how to use it. In my health class we were told what condoms were, and that if we were going to have sex that we definitely should use one, but we weren’t even told how to put one on! Now, I have a general idea. But I really don’t know. And for the kids my age who know as much as I do if the time comes they won’t know what to do. For the kids my age who have already gone all the way, they may not have been able to figure it out. Or maybe they were so caught up in the moment that when they got confused by it, just threw it aside and had unprotected sex.
All of those things that we don’t know need to be taught to us in health class. And we need to know younger because kids are becoming more sexually active at a younger age and many of them are doing it without any knowledge of what can happen or how to protect themselves from the unknown.