Sex education and sexual socialization: roles for educators and parents.

Sexuality is an essential component of healthy development for young people. Both the World Health Organization and the report from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development emphasize the importance of healthy sexual development to overall mental and physical well-being. In 2001, U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher echoed these sentiments, stating that, ‘‘sexuality is an integral part of human life,’’ and ‘‘sexual health is inextricably bound to both physical and mental health.’’ Despite the widely recognized importance of sexual health, education to promote it remains a sensitive and sometimes controversial issue. Underlying the social conflicts that surround sex education programs are disagreements about the role of government in family life and sex education; parental control of the content of sex education; core values to be included in sex education, such as gender equality and personal responsibility; and, fundamentally, what constitutes appropriate adolescent sexual behavior. The array of popular literature and research on the topic (for example, seeWoody or Blakey and Frankland) indicates that parents of all political stripes feel uncomfortable approaching their children about sexual matters. Yet liberal and conservative views on the appropriate manner of providing sex education remain widely divergent. Central to disagreements about sex education have been questions about the basic premises and content of sex education and about who is best able to provide it—i.e., whether parents or schools should be the primary sex educators. In this commentary, we propose that clarifying the distinction between sex education and sexual socializationwill help resolve some aspects of this controversy.We argue that promoting healthy sexuality is not the exclusive domain of parents or educators; instead, we support a collaboration between home and school that best provides adolescents with the tools they need to become sexually healthy adults.