Comprehensive sexuality education is a very touchy subject that many people would shy away from talking about.
However, Women’s Reproductive Health Advocate Carol Agengo says that young people need to be made aware for their own protection.
Agengo said that parents and guardians must have such conversations with children and young adolescents, especially in this information age.
“Children are increasingly learning more than we do so it is important that we have these conversations in very open ways and in a language that they will be able to understand,” she said.
She said that there is no one formula to talk to young people about their sexuality, no one-size-fits-all.
“When I’m talking to a teenager, for example, I cannot assume that they have the hindsight that I do. I must remember that my hindsight was informed by a totally different social context,” she said.
Agengo advised parents and guardians to listen to their children and engage them and not just rush toward giving a solution.
“Listen, understand and try to create solutions together because we also learn from younger people,” she said.
She said that as older people are increasingly taking charge of younger people as their sole guardians or as part of their nuclear families, then an intergenerational approach must also be taken.
“We have young people who live their children with their parents or those who stay at home with their parents and their children so the conversations that happen with the children of these young people are happening with their grandparents as well,” she said.
She said that the way the social fabric is woven today is not as it was when older people were young so a different approach needs to be discussed with them.
“When we were growing up, any mother in the locality would stop you and tell you ‘I can see that your breasts are forming, you’re now growing up. You can’t be hanging out with the boys anymore,” she said.
The way society took charge of young people’s well-being, Agengo said, has changed today.
She also said that the fear of speaking openly about sexuality has reduced since those days.
“When I was younger, our source of comprehensive sexuality education was reading the Mills and Boon books which were just romantic fantasies, with some explicit writing and we would hide them from our parents because we couldn’t imagine the horror of them finding us reading them,” she said.
Agengo compares that to now when children can come up to their parents or guardians and speak to them about their bodies, what they are feeling, what they have heard their friends talk about, what they’ve read about, or what they’ve watched on TV.
She said no one answer can fit such questions.
“You have to look at it each in its context, each in its nuanced ways but the conversation must be had in the end,” she concluded.
