The potential risks of pregnancy, emotional harm, HIV/AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases are leading an overwhelming majority of American parents to support better, more comprehensive school-based sex education for their teenage children, according to a new survey released by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
The "Sex Education in America: A View from Inside the Nation's Classrooms" report finds that most American parents want their children to have a wide variety of information available to them in sex-ed courses -- instead of the current emphasis by many schools on abstinence-only instruction, the New York Times reports.
The report states 98 percent of parents said they wanted high schools to teach about sexually transmitted diseases, with 79 percent of parents also wanting sex-ed courses to discuss abortion and its consequences -- and 76 percent of parents asking that sexual orientation also be discussed.
The Kaiser report contacted 1,501 families for the survey, which has a three percent margin of error. Survey researchers say the findings are consistent across social, economic and geographic groups, the Times reports.
Parents also want their teens to learn how to use condoms, how to obtain birth control, and how to get tested for pregnancy and for AIDS, the survey found.
While abstinence has its place in the curriculum, parents now insist that sex education cover the whole range of topics. These findings show a large increase in support for more open discussions of sexuality than recorded 20 years ago, a likely result of most parents of teens growing up during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s, the newspaper reports.
The Kaiser results show that schools should "teach what students need to know, not to please the politicians or parents who scream the loudest," former New York City schools chancellor Ramon C. Cortines told the Times.
Parents also appear to want more information simply to protect their children. While a third of the surveyed parents said schools should emphasize abstinence until marriage, most of these same parents also said schools should teach birth control options.
One group that supports abstinence-only instruction, however, claims the survey itself has mislead parents.
"We believe that the parents who are participating in the study have been duped into believing that comprehensive-based sex education is what's best for their children," Heather E. Cirmo, a spokeswoman for the conservative Washington-based Family Research Council, told the newspaper. "If you have a standards-based approach to sex that says abstinence is what we expect from you, teens will live up to that."
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