DECADES OF teaching Family Life Education in schools and public information messages through the mass media, it seems, have not sufficiently bridged the gap between parents and children in their knowledge of and attitudes to sex and sexuality. Teenagers attending a recent Gleaner Editors' Forum in Montego Bay said they needed guidance from their parents in navigating the troubled waters of their own sexuality.
Such guidance is often not forthcoming, however, because parents are ill-informed about the dynamics of sexual behaviour, its moral and medical dimensions. Ironically, the youngsters apparently know more about the sexual environment than their mothers and fathers but this knowledge can be antiseptic without the loving understanding of parents.
Failure to acknowledge the reality of sexuality in human nature has in the past been an unfortunate cause of oppressive guilt and failed attempts to deal with it. Much embarrassment occurred when one or the other parent was obliged to tell a son or daughter about the 'birds and the bees'. Such secrecy was psychologically damaging and often resulted in medical problems and unwanted pregnancies.
A weather change in public opinion occurred with the publication of the Kinsey Report in the United States, which brought to the study of sexuality the rigours of scientific investigation based on surveys with statistical validity. Then came the Pill and the beginning of a remarkable sexual revolution.
In all of this, it seems that some Jamaican parents have been left in the backwaters of an age gone by and their children are concerned about this residual reservoir of ignorance. One teenager at the Forum pointed out that the knowledge of many parents in cases of sexually transmitted diseases stopped with gonorrhoea when their children needed help in coping with HIV/AIDS.
Joan Harris, communications officer at the Type Five Health Centre in Montego Bay, has said that the need to educate parents in matters having to do with sex is a problem that must be addressed quickly, a call to action supported by Dr. Beverly Scott, family therapist and executive director of the Family and Parenting Centre. Teenagers at the Gleaner Editors' Forum were refreshingly frank and honest in recounting their concerns and we hope that a nationally-sponsored programme will be launched to educate Jamaican parents how to communicate with their children on important matters of sex and sexuality.
This is an issue which the Ministry of Health, with the support of the Jamaica Information Service should revisit and address.
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