What is Sex Education?

 



What is 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
  • 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.

There are several important resources that help with implementing sex education, including:

What Role Does Planned Parenthood Play In Sex Education?

Planned Parenthood education staff reach 1.2 million people each year, most of whom are in middle school and high school.

Planned Parenthood education departments around the country provide a range of programming options, including:

  • Evidence-based and evidence-informed education programs that have been proven to work
  • Peer education programs
  • Promotores programs and other community-driven, culturally relevant health education programs
  • Parent/family education programs
  • LGBTQ-focused programs for LGBTQ youth and their parents/caregivers
  • Training of professionals, including educators and school-staff, community-based organization staff, and faith-based leaders
  • Outreach and single session workshops

Sex Education Resources:

The best sex education resource is your local Planned Parenthood education department!

There are also many other resources available to inform and guide sex education programs and policies:

Advocates for Youth

Advocates for Youth partners with youth leaders, adult allies, and youth-serving organizations to advocate for policies and champion programs that recognize young people’s rights to honest sexual health information and accessible, confidential, and affordable sexual health services.

Answer

Answer provides high-quality training to teachers and other youth-serving professionals.

ETR Associates

ETR offers science-based health and education products and programs for health professionals, educators, and others throughout the United States.

The Guttmacher Institute

The Guttmacher Institute is the leading research and policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States and globally through high-quality research, evidence-based advocacy, and strategic communications.

Future of Sex Education

The Future of Sex Education Initiative (FoSE) was launched as a partnership between Advocates for Youth, Answer, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) to create a national dialogue about the future of sex education and to promote comprehensive sex education in public schools.

Power to Decide

The mission of Power to Decide is to ensure that all young people—no matter who they are, where they live, or what their economic status might be—have the power to decide if, when, and under what circumstances to get pregnant and have a child. They do this by increasing information, access, and opportunity.

Sex Education Collaborative

The Sex Education Collaborative (SEC) advances and scales K–12 school-based sex education across the U.S. by leveraging its collective leadership, networks, and resources, including through it’s training hub for youth-serving professionals.

SIECUS

SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change advocates for the rights of all people to access accurate information, comprehensive sex education, and the full spectrum of sexual and reproductive health services.

What Are the Goals of Sex Education?

Sex education is designed to help young people gain the information and skills they need to make the best decisions for themselves about sex and relationships throughout their lives.

Does Sex Education Work?

Sex education gives young people the knowledge and skills they need for a lifetime of good sexual health. They learn how to have healthy relationships, make informed decisions about sex, think critically about the world, be a good ally to those who are marginalized, and love themselves for who they are.

Research shows that sex education that’s culturally responsive and inclusive helps young people develop the social and emotional skills they need to become caring and empathetic adults. This type of sex education early and often leads to appreciation of sexual diversity, dating and intimate partner violence prevention, development of healthy relationships, prevention of child sex abuse, improved social/emotional learning, and increased media literacy. It also helps young people avoid unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

Sex education works best when it’s:

  • Taught by trained professionals
  • Taught early and often throughout the lifespan
  • Includes both information and skill-building activities
  • Evidence-informed
  • Inclusive of LGBTQ+ youth
  • Rooted in anti-racism practices
  • Trauma-informed
  • Adapted to the needs of the community 

What’s the State of Sex Education In the U.S.?

There’s broad public support for sex education, but many young people aren’t receiving the sex education they need and deserve.

Who Supports Sex Education?

Sex education is widely supported by the vast majority of people in the United States. In Planned Parenthood’s most recent poll on sex education, 93 percent of parents supported having sex education taught in middle school, and 96 percent of parents supported having sex education taught in high school. The vast majority of parents support sex education in middle school and high school that covers a wide range of topics, including STIs, puberty, healthy relationships, birth control, and sexual orientation. Other national, state and local polls on sex education have shown similarly high levels of support.

Sex education is supported by numerous health and medical organizations including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. More than 150 organizations are members of the National Coalition to Support Comprehensive Sexuality Education.

Federal & State Policy Related to Sex Education

Sex education programming varies widely across the United States. Currently, 39 states and the District of Columbia mandate some kind of sex education and/or HIV education. 

Although almost every state has some guidance on how and when sex education should be taught, decisions are often left up to individual school districts, creating a patchwork of inconsistent policies and practices within states. The sex education someone receives can come down to what school district they live in or which school they attend.

Planned Parenthood advocates for federal funding that supports sex education, such as the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPPP)and the Division of Adolescent and School Health. Planned Parenthood also advocates for better sex education policies, practices, and funding at the state and local levels.

What Sex Education Do Teens Get in the US?

The gap between the sex education students need and what they actually get is wide. According to the 2018 CDC School Health Profiles, fewer than half of high schools and less than a fifth of middle schools teach all 20 topics recommended by the CDC as essential components of sex education. These topics range from basic information on how HIV and other STIs are transmitted — and how to prevent infections — to critical communication and decision-making skills.

A recent study published by the Guttmacher Institute found that adolescents were less likely to report receiving sex education on key topics in 2015–2019 than they were in 1995  Overall, in 2015–2019, only half of adolescents reported receiving sex education that met the minimum standard articulated in Healthy People 2030. Among teens reporting penis-in-vagina sex, fewer than half (43% of females and 47% of males) received this instruction before they had sex for the first time. Despite these declines in formal education, there was no increase in the proportion of teens who discussed these sex education topics with their parents.

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