SEX EDUCATION: ROLE OF PARENTS

If sex instructions are imparted in the family, church or the school their broader" moral values will be respected.
Not only do many parents fail to understand what sex education is but also, they leave its application to chance. Of course setting limits on behaviour is necessary but youngsters want to know clearly what they can or cannot do. As they grow older they want specific reasons for required behaviour.
Parents should educate by promoting enquiry providing sources of information and encouraging discussion and debate for weighing of values and decision making. These intellectual activities if encouraged and reinforced at home, will definitely lead to wide choices of behaviour. A few would deny that the basic responsibility for educating children about sex, belongs to their parents.
With love' and will sometime use sex to obtain 'love' while boys having stronger and more easily stimulated sexual urges, are in love with sex 'and may use love to obtain sex'.
But now what should conscious parents do? How can they pass their knowledge and experience they might have?
It's all very well to say, wait until you are asked. If parents wait, they might wait for ever. Parents don't need to touch on sex only on those rare occasions. On ordinary dinner table conversations or after a T.V. programme on an interesting topic there are bound to be discussions and different topics can be introduced and talked about. Parents should express their convictions in these discussions and children may listen without having to be told to do so. But we should remember that the youngesters "Nothing puts them off more than preaching".

Sometimes such parents who have had a rigid upbringing or who were maladjusted themselves during their youth often project their hurts on their children. We often consider them as our appendage or extension of ourselves and want them to do what we did. But if we could learn to feel that our offspring are individuals then many problems can be solved peacefully.

Sometimes fathers have no confidence to guide their daughters as how to 'manage relationship with the opposite sex and there is hardly any communication on these issues between many a mother and daughters. So prevention they think is the best cure. But sometimes this sort of attitude hits back on them because very few girls can control their emotions at this age and they may have repercussions for whole of their life. But if there is an educated mature mother, with love and understanding probably with the help of same age group daughter in law if any can explain to the daughter at puberty about the different aspects of the personality and heterosexual relationship, its merits and demerits, as a natural part of growing up. By doing so there will be reciprocal love and understanding between daughter and mother.

Otherwise we see that as a result of either unconcerned or ignorant parents or their laxity or the communication gap, teenagers choose their own way of life and life style. College students become involved in clandestine affairs or attend disco clubs under the influence of drugs or experimenting with them in peer groups. And their interpretation of sex and morality goes to any length of defiance.

Parents are often afraid of bringing up sexual topics because they are afraid it will lead to experimentation. They ignore the other side of the coin that children who are unaware of facts and are full of ignorance about sex will still try to find out about it, which may likely to lead to exploration, experimentation or imitation. Wise and correct explanations by parents will help in building correct prospectives of life and sex in living. For this unembarassed answers should be given to the questions asked by the child.