Parents and Sex Education

Parents are the right persons to teach sex education at home. This is the official stand of the Catholic Church in the Philippines on the recently aborted issue on sex education promoted by the DePed. The Church has been vocal and critical on this event while the DePed people are busy in disseminating their modules to be given to the pilot schools in public secondary level. Their undertaking will be evaluated, and if it proves to be successful, another option will push through for the elementary levels on the same topics.

The church keeps repeating that parents are the right persons to handle the issue on sex. Her position is borne out from the development of the doctrine on the sacrament of matrimony, where Augustine began the idea of the three goods of marriage, and later Aquinas modified them to ends of marriage. What is the contention all about? The first end of Christian marriage is to procreate and educate their children, and it has become the basis of the Church's stand on the brewing issue of sex education.

Following the thought of the Church, when it comes to who is the right person to teach their children about sex, the answer is very clear – parents and not anybody-teachers. The role of the teachers is not being downplayed here, but the role of parents is indispensable because it is their prime duty to exercise as such.

If the right persons on this matter are the parents, it follows that the right place for sex education to be conducted is in their very home. Why is that so? It is where the bond of friendship, intimacy, belongingness, familiarity among parents and children established. And everybody seems to believe that the home is a place where all the positive values such as love, respect, care are taught and practised.

The opposite might be true when sex education will be taken place at school. The situation is not healthy and conducive for a well-rounded process of learning, where students and teachers come from different family backgrounds and perspectives. Only when parents become active teachers to their children especially on the issue, the fear of negative effects such as promiscuity, increasing of AIDS victims, unwanted pregnancy, abortion and the like will be of less possibility to occur.