By Brittany Jones, Esq., policy manager for Family Policy Alliance®
Who is giving educators, school officials, legislators, and parents advice on teaching kids about sex these days? The answer: college students at some of America’s most liberal universities.
This is actually happening in states like California. Students barely out of high school at the University of California, Santa Barbara are making suggestions to our school administrators and parents about how to teach children as young as toddlers about sex. Even more terrifying—they are suggesting that parents and teachers allow students to engage in activities that would be considered abuse in any other context.
In fact, the Sociology Department’s website, run by college students, encourages parents to let children engage in “sex play.” The website encourages parents to react positively when kids engage in this “perfectly normal” form of play. The students on the website equate a child’s natural curiosity about everything with sexual curiosity. They even say, “[S]ex play in children [is] not cause for panic; many children engage in these behaviors.”
They even go so far as to encourage parents to allow children to touch other children’s genitals as long as it is consensual for both parties. This is clearly allowing child abuse and even grooming children to abused by adults. The recommendations are horrifying because parents are discouraged from teaching their children healthy and appropriate boundaries that protect children from abuse.
To make matters worse, parents are encouraged to be ok with their children watching pornography and to “just talk to their kids about it” because they believe children will see it anyway. Yet, we know pornography leads to multiple harmful health, relational, and psychological effects later in life.
These are the experts and ideas that are advising our teachers and our decisionmakers.
The philosophies espoused by these college students at the University of California have become the underlying principles guiding California sex ed. Parents in California have been so horrified over what is happening in their schools they have begun to pull their children out of school!
Sadly, these ideas aren’t isolated to California. Even states like Idaho with laws that only permit basic anatomy & physiology to be taught in the classroom are facing sex ed curriculum changes that clearly go outside the bounds of their law. Often, state Departments of Education are swayed by the liberal sexual agenda put forward by public university “experts,” and they too will recommend disturbing curriculum changes for schools in even conservative states.
What can you do about this? It is vital that parents be involved in their children’s school so they can be aware of what is being taught in the classroom. In fact, most states require that parents be given access upon request to the sex ed curriculum. And, believers can work together to promote good public policy that protects parents’ rights and ultimately protects children from harm.
Ultimately, we believe that God has given parents the responsibility to guide their children’s education—especially about how God designed our sexuality. Family Policy Alliance works to advance policies that protect parents’ rights to guide their children’s upbringing and education—and to support lawmakers who will do the same. With your partnership as parents and grandparents, we can restore our states to a nation where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished.
