Gaps in sex education can have lasting impacts throughout adulthood, including relationship struggles, lack of confidence, and reduced quality of life.
This is according to a study – “If I Only Knew Then: Single Adults’ Perceptions of the Impact of Sex Education on Their Romantic and Sexual Lives” by Jessica J. Hille, Justin R. Garcia, and Amanda N. Gesselman – that was published in the International Journal of Sexual Health.
Here, the researchers surveyed 3,895 US single adults (aged 18 to 98 years) on 16 topics typically included in comprehensive sex education programs.
The researchers found:
- approximately a third never received any kind of information about healthy relationships, consent, communicating with partners, pleasure, or dating during their youth from any source, including school, family, friends, or somewhere else.
- Only one of the 16 assessed topics was learned about in school by a majority of participants, with 55% stating they covered reproduction or pregnancy.
- Other topics participants most commonly learned in school included puberty (44%), preventing or testing for STIs (43%), and contraception (41%). Very few learned about consent (17%), gender (12%), or healthy relationships (7%) in school.
- The least covered topics related how to make you or your partner feel good and communicate about what you want, which were all around 4%.
More than 90% of participants reported receiving additional information would have created a positive impact in their lives today. Specifically, a large proportion of participants said that better sex education would have led to healthier romantic relationships (44%), a better understanding of how to be a good partner (40%), improved sexual confidence (40%), a better quality of life (35%), and a better understanding of their own body (29%).
To date, sex education research has largely focused on youth and adolescents, rather than adults. However, according to the researchers, these results demonstrate that comprehensive sex education is important for supporting healthy romantic and sexual relationships throughout adulthood.
The researchers stated that to compensate for deficits in formal education, learners may turn to alternatives like peers and social media, with variable quality and accuracy.
As such, “reliable alternatives to school-based sex education curricula are important to fill gaps in knowledge for adults who are no longer in school but wish to augment the sex education they received, if any. Such extra-curricular sources may become even more important for disseminating accurate, evidence-based information about critical areas such as consent, abortion, pleasure, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other topics that the current findings demonstrate are unlikely to be routinely covered in school settings, especially in a sociopolitically conservative environment. Researchers, educators, and learners must be prepared to explore and use nontraditional avenues for comprehensive sex education.”
