Not so Casual Results

Sex – it’s every where you look these days. It’s on the cover of magazines, it laces movies, and it often radiates throughout teen conversation. In schools today, depending on what state you live in, children are taught either comprehensive sex education or the abstinence-only approach. Comprehensive sex education, which consists of body image, masturbation, STDs, etc., begins as early as kindergarten with age appropriate material and progresses each year. Abstinence doesn’t cover all of the physical aspects, it simply instructs you not to do it.

While both approaches are good to cover, I believe that that educators are missing a crucial point - children need to be aware the emotional and psychological consequences.

Sex is so often misused, and more often than not, someone ends up devastated when left standing alone after an intimate encounter. STDs do not seem real until it happens. Pregnancy seems like a distant nightmare, until it happens. But the heartache and emotional scars left after casual sex are immediate, real and can last a lifetime. Doctors Joe McIlhaney and Freda McKissic, authors of Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex is Affecting our Children, show that casual sex can actually alter the development of the brain in adolescents often impairing the ability to maintain lasting relationships later in life.

Awareness of the physical consequences of sex should be taught, as well as the fool-proof approach of abstinence, if practiced. But the emotional consequences should be heavily focused on; after all, it is emotion that often drives teens to sex. Teens may not think twice about abstaining from sex if they don’t get a STD or pregnant the first few times. However, if they are scarred emotionally, perhaps they will look back on the lessons taught in sex education and realize that, for once, the adults had a very good point.