Many parents are more and more anxious because of the increasing number of sexual assault cases, fearing that their children will also be hurt. Many parents will ask me how to protect my children, and even many institutions will invite me to give lectures and talk to me about preventing sexual assault.
Of course, the topic of sexual assault prevention is very important, but I am more worried that parents will turn sex education into sexual assault prevention education.
What kind of sex education should be carried out?
Sex education is not equal to sexual assault prevention education. Simply doing sexual assault prevention education is not only ineffective, but even harmful. No matter how well sex education is done, it can't prevent children from being hurt, just as we have taught children to obey traffic rules since childhood, but it can't prevent children from accidentally rushing out of the road while driving and hurting others.
The risk cannot be assessed, not to mention that most of the children are adults, and their strength is very different; If the teacher hurts the child, the child can't resist at all. Most sexual assault cases (60%~70%) are committed by acquaintances, and adults often have a tentative process when committing crimes.
I once came across a case. When a child goes to a cram school, the cram school teacher will first express his closeness to the child, praising the child "You are very good", "The teacher likes you very much" and "You are a good boy". When the teacher saw that the child was happy and unprepared, he began physical contact. First pat the shoulder, then slowly develop to the thighs and buttocks, and finally develop to sexual assault.
If children can identify early and ask their parents for help in time, we can minimize the risk and block the injury in the initial stage. But if we only educate our children about sexual assault, but not other sex education, and even avoid talking about sex-related topics when children ask, then they will form a cognition that I can't ask about sex at home. In this way, when children are sexually injured, it is difficult to ask their parents for help because they are afraid of parents' criticism.
The child's attitude at home makes her encounter many obstacles on the way to help, and parents will also lose the channels to help their children.
Why is pure sexual assault education harmful?
First, if you only do anti-sexual assault education, it is likely that children will mistakenly think that sex is a dangerous and terrible thing, and this negative feeling about sex will be rooted in their hearts.
In adolescence, children will secrete a lot of hormones and have uncontrolled sexual feelings. At this time, the child will feel that something very bad has happened, and his heart is full of contradictions and conflicts, and even tangled. I'm not normal, I'm not good, I was wrong.
Adolescent children usually resist feelings in two ways. One is depression, that is, they have no feelings at all. Although there seems to be no problem in a short time, there are many negative effects for adults to enter intimate relationships; The other is self-blame, that is, why can't you help but produce bad things? This kind of psychological conflict will lead to many sexual and emotional problems.
Some children cannot accept their sexual feelings. Whenever they feel sexually, they watch some horror movies or supernatural videos to suppress and escape. This does play a certain role, but in the long run, it will cause a lot of fear, and even cause a series of behavioral and emotional problems such as turning off the lights at night, being unable to sleep, and being afraid of going to the toilet by yourself in the dark.
At present, there is no systematic sex education course in China. Some well-done sex education courses abroad must first talk about the positive aspects of sex to avoid children's fear and negative cognition of sex to the greatest extent, and then talk about how to prevent sexual assault.
Secondly, many parents think that when they are young, they don't know anything, but when they grow up, there will be no problems. Although children don't understand sex, they will naturally understand it when they grow up. Actually, it's not.
Many people didn't receive sex education when they were young, but they encountered various problems as adults and took many detours in intimate relationships. One of the most important reasons is the neglect of social development and change, which makes the problem of sex education more and more complicated and severe.
When we were young, we knew nothing about sex education and spent our adolescence in a blank. But today's children can't enter adolescence with a blank, because they receive all kinds of information through various channels, and the amount of information is unprecedented huge and complicated. There are a lot of soft pornography in videos, advertisements and games, and there are also many misunderstandings about sex in some so-called popular science articles on sex education. Even adults can't make good judgments, let alone ignorant children!
Even if I am engaged in sex education, I will still be shocked by many real situations in reality. When an academic conference was held in Sichuan last year, a teacher got help from his parents: a child aged 12 bought a sex toy as a birthday present for his child. This kind of thing will happen in two situations. One is that children think they have been insulted and attacked, resulting in emotional problems; The other is to use sex toys after receiving gifts.
From an academic point of view, before entering sexual relations, using sex toys to experience sexual feelings may bring many problems. Moreover, most children don't have much money and buy "three noes" products. Moreover, children do not know how to clean and protect during use, which is easy to cause infection. These phenomena are very worrying, but no one can tell.
Education is very important in any era, and it is more urgent in today's era. With the development of cognitive level, children will need knowledge. If we can't solve the puzzle from home and school, it will not disappear, but will turn to other channels, such as the Internet. If a child can get the correct answers to sexual questions before seeking the internet and get equal communication opportunities at home, he can look at the information on the internet more dialectically.
Although many parents put forward that it is forbidden to publish relevant information on the internet, and relevant policies have also suppressed the emergence of such information, we still can't completely avoid it. What we can do is to replace the Internet with appropriate channels, so that children have a strong sense of trust in their families and schools.
Children's comprehensive sex education
At present, comprehensive education is considered to be the most suitable and effective educational model for children's development. It can not only comprehensively treat therapeutic problems, but also adapt to the development characteristics of children's cognitive level at different ages.
What is comprehensive?
We have a one-sided understanding when we look at the concept of sex. For example, adults think about sexual behavior and feelings. In fact, the concept of sex contains many contents. For example, a child does not know his gender when he is born, but there is a process of development. In this process, he will learn how to distinguish between sexes, what is the difference between men and women, how to form his own gender role and how to establish relationships.
Comprehensive sex education includes sexual development, sexual relationship, intimate relationship, friendship, problem prevention, how to look at one's own body, how to look at changes in adolescence, how to deal with emotional changes in adolescence, how to build self-confidence and how to communicate better between boys and girls. We deal with different problems in different ways according to different age groups.
First of all, when should sex education begin? The answer is that the sooner the better.
Children begin sexual exploration from birth, so parents should prepare sex education content related to learning before their children are born. Some parents asked: how can a child do sex education when he is so young and can't speak? In fact, sex education is communication on the one hand and parents' words and deeds on the other.
After the child is born, he will explore his body and grasp his hands, feet and other parts. When he catches his genitals, he will show a happy expression. This is an early exploration and perception of sexual development and a natural and normal process. If parents don't accept this kind of behavior, they will scold or even open their hands as soon as they scratch their children's genitals, then because children have a very strong emotional perception of their parents, they will begin to establish contact. When I feel this way, my parents will be unhappy. This early negative perception of sex will affect a child's life.
When children talk, they will ask some questions about sex, such as where I come from, why the little boy urinates standing, the girl urinates squatting, what is the difference between mom and dad's figure and so on. At this time, parents should respond.
When many parents come for help, the children have reached puberty. I usually tell my parents frankly that it's a little late to deal with sex education now. First of all, there have been problems and challenges in the relationship between children and their parents at this age. A child's brain development level requires him to feel like an adult. He needs to let his parents hear his voice, not do things according to his parents' arrangement. It will be very difficult to get involved at this time. Secondly, if you don't talk to your children about sex when you are young, they won't talk to you again when you reach puberty. He will obviously think that if you talk to me about sex, you will think there is something wrong with me.
However, don't be discouraged by difficulties. We still have some solutions, which will be explained in detail in future courses. Of course, the sooner sex education starts, the better. In the reported cases of sexual assault, the youngest child is only 16 months old and has no self-protection ability at all. Protect children from childhood and teach them to protect themselves when they grow up. This is the most important reason why sex education should start as soon as possible.
Methods of sex education for children
If the child asks, "Where am I from?" What would you say?
Almost all parents will encounter such problems. Please feel it in your imagination. When a child asks you this question, what is your first reaction? What does the child want to know? Is this question difficult to answer? Why is it difficult to answer? If it is not difficult to answer, why?
I once discussed this issue with my parents during training, and many parents answered that sperm and eggs are combined. When the child continues to ask, how did sperm get into the egg? Faced with this question, many parents can't continue to answer. "Where am I from?" The first reaction of adults to this problem is actually related to adult sexual behavior. This question is difficult to answer, because we look at children's sexual behavior from the perspective of adults.
What adults see is actually different from what children see. When adults talk about sex, they think more about physical attraction, physical sexual behavior or masturbation between two adults, and physical excitement and physical changes caused by sexual attraction, such as heartbeat changes and accelerated blood circulation. How do we feel about love and intimacy, what kind of people we have established intimate relationships with, and so on. It is the cognition of sex in our adults' minds.
Children are completely different. When he asked himself where he came from, it was actually the same as asking "Why did it thunder and rain" and "Why did the apple fall to the ground". If the parents' answer to this question is "The sperm is in the father's body and the egg is in the mother's body, and the two are combined into a baby", then the child will continue to ask "How can these two things be combined?" This is actually out of children's curiosity.
Children's perception of sex means special feelings. A child can touch the reproductive organs, but he doesn't know that the reproductive organs are related to sex. The only perception is that my feeling of touching the reproductive organs is different from that of touching my hands and feet. This feeling is quite special. Children begin to build friendships around the age of 4, which is how they feel about sex; If you reach puberty, you will feel like an adult, but not exactly the same.
A very important principle for answering children's questions is: never ignore children's questions and never cheat them.
If you ignore your child's question, the confusion will not disappear with no answer. When you keep refusing your child's questions, he won't ask you any more questions, and he won't ask you when he encounters sexual confusion and injury, so you completely lose the opportunity to understand and help him. Therefore, as long as the child asks, we have to find a way to answer. Besides, don't cheat children. Some parents don't deliberately cheat their children, but they are so anxious that they don't know how to answer them, so they fool their children. When we did this, we didn't consider what effect it would have on the children.
I met more than one situation, most of them were girls. When I have some physical contact with my boyfriend or husband, I feel very scared. When we look for the reason, we find that this fear stems from the teaching of parents when they were young: parents told them that as long as men and women embrace each other, they will get pregnant.
Although the misunderstanding of knowledge can be solved, when you grow up, you will know that hugging can't get pregnant, but the emotional level will not change because of the update of knowledge. Although the rational level told her that she was going to have sex when she was pregnant, the emotional level still made her feel worried and anxious when she was in contact with the opposite sex, and she could not devote herself to intimate relationships. When I was a child, I had the opportunity to mend my knowledge, but it was difficult to adjust my feelings.
I know this truth, but I just can't follow the theory when I do it. This is the feeling at work. When some children hear their parents say to themselves, "You were picked up" and "You jumped out of a stone", they really believe this answer at first, believing that it will make them start to doubt their relationship with their parents, so whenever their parents criticize themselves, they doubt whether they are their own. Therefore, an adult's unintentional lies will have an unpredictable impact on children.
Some parents feel that the topic of sex is not very sensitive, but they know too much, and they don't know how to organize the language and which part to say. In fact, when we answer a child's question, we always start with a question and ask the child what he really cares about and what his imaginary answer is. For example, you can ask your child: How do you think you came into this world? Do you blame me? what do you think?
When we ask this question, we are actually doing two things:
First of all, understand the child's existing knowledge reserve. There are many channels for children to get information, such as the Internet, chatting with children and chatting with adults in the street. In this information, we need to judge what knowledge he already knows, what misunderstandings exist in this knowledge and what knowledge we don't need to talk about.
Second, find out the problems that children really care about and the good singularities. Don't look at the child's gender from the perspective of an adult, and analyze the child's problems. He doesn't want to know how sperm got into his mother's body. Very young children can't think of this layer, so we need to know what children are really curious about. Special children ask this question, in fact, to know if they are born by their mothers. If you tell him yes, he will be happy to play. We should visualize children's curiosity, so we should do sex education suitable for children's age characteristics at home.
We need to know the characteristics of children's sexual development and at what age we need to acquire corresponding knowledge. For every child, the biggest difference between family education and school education is the difference between individual education and group education. Each child's development status and speed are different, and the information received is different. Therefore, when doing sex education at home, we should understand the real situation of children and their real confusion. Only in this way can we give children real sex education and answer their confusion.
When we know children's curiosity, we can explain it in scientific, positive and easy-to-understand language. The simpler the better. For example, we can answer the question "The child comes out of the mother's body": "There are three holes between a woman's legs. The front is urethra, the back is anus for defecation, and the middle is vagina. This is where the children come out. "
Some parents will be confused. Answer in such simple language. Is the child still confused? It doesn't really matter. After we give our children a simple answer, we can give them the opportunity to continue asking questions, that is, break down their confusion into several small questions, and then break them down one by one, and briefly explain the questions in a positive and scientific language.
Metaphor and description are not recommended when explaining. For example, some parents said, "Dad planted a seed in his mother's stomach and grew up to be a baby." . After listening to such an answer, the child will cry in fear and ask the reason. The child said, "If that seed grows into a big tree and bursts my mother's stomach, won't my mother die?" For example, we can't predict which direction the child will interpret, so it's better to explain it simply.
Find a suitable time to talk about sex with your child. Some good times are when children need to talk about sex, and some are when parents need it. For example, before children go to kindergarten, parents should tell their children about self-protection and prevention of sexual assault. Secondly, when talking about sex, we should pay attention to children. If the child especially wants to play with toys or ask his friends to go out to play ball, parents should not discuss with him, even if he has it, don't take it to heart. Reading picture books every day is a wonderful time.
Older children are more sensitive to sexual topics. You can't be too formal when you talk about sex with children. Being too formal will make children feel embarrassed. Talking about sex is not easy. Parents and children will feel anxious if they choose a particularly serious way. When you are doing something, you'd better not make too much eye contact. For example, when you are cooking in the kitchen, the children are helping you wash the dishes. Talking about sex at this time will make you more relaxed and easier to talk to your children.
What preparations should parents make for sex education?
We didn't receive sex education when we were young, so we will encounter many difficulties in doing it. But it doesn't matter, as long as we make up lessons and supplement the missing knowledge, we can do a good job in sex education. We don't need to be experts in sex education, because sex education itself is a comprehensive subject, and it is an intertwined field of medicine, physiology, psychology and society. Just like a child will get sick when he grows up, but you will never want to be a pediatrician. Moreover, pediatricians have to be classified, and it is impossible to learn them all. We just need to be able to simply judge the child's situation. Choose whether to take medicine at home, go to the hospital or seek professionals.
So is sex education. Answer some questions for children, discuss some problems with children at key nodes, and seek professional help when necessary. There is some knowledge that parents must prepare, such as understanding the laws of children's sexual development. If you don't know, you can't judge whether some children's behaviors are normal or abnormal. Basic theoretical knowledge includes sexual development, psychological development and cognitive development. And the principles to be observed in communication, the sexual behavior of children in life, and how to discuss and solve sexual problems with children.
Parents should have the ability to talk about sex and keep practicing in life. In the next series of courses, we will teach you some methods. If you can't tell the difference between vagina and penis. And I feel anxious when I say it, so can children. Therefore, even if parents reserve a lot of knowledge, they may not be able to do a good job in sex education, because sex education needs constant practice and accumulation.
At the same time, personal experience also has an impact on sex education. Adults and children have many different views on sex. Adults' values will affect the effect of talking to children about sex. If you have a lot of ideas in the process of talking to your child about sex, the child will think that you don't understand him very well, leading to communication failure.