This Valentine's Day, Demand Better Sex Education For Kids

In classrooms around the country, young students are sharing Valentine’s Day cards with their classmates and friends to mark relationships and connections and show care for one another.

However, this light-hearted rite of passage — often filled with humor and candy — may mark the last time personal relationships get much classroom attention. Just about the time paper hearts and chocolate kisses are getting replaced with lectures about how puberty leads to body odor and periods, the focus on relationships get pushed aside.

Too often, sex education teaches young people about their changing bodies, but not about much else. In a new article in this February’s American Journal of Public Health special issue on pleasure, we call for an expansion of sex education to place greater emphasis on pleasure and relationships.

The full op-ed is available at Romper.