“Age Appropriate”
Comprehensive Sex Ed standards & curriculum do not genuinely engage with the question of what information, in what form, is appropriate for children at what developmental stage.
Planned Parenthood says its sex-ed for kids is age appropriate.
The truth is, teaching pre-adolescent kids about diverse romantic and/or sexual relationships is NOT age appropriate. Such lessons are the delivery of adult romantic and emotional content to children who are developmentally years away from the stage at which such content becomes relevant to their own experience.
“Comprehensive” sex education lessons are agenda-first, not kids-first.
Evaluated against the developmental literature rather than against its own stated claims, comprehensive sex-ed is the delivery of adult identity frameworks to children who are developmentally unable to evaluate them, through institutional channels that bypass the family systems developmental science identifies as primary, without an evidence base that would satisfy the standards any other area of child education would be required to meet.
Curricula promoted to America’s school districts by Planned Parenthood and SIECUS deliver adult lgbt-“inclusive” instruction to kids. In their effort to liberate children from oppressive heteronormativity, comprehensive sex-ed lessons actually disrupt the developmental process of gender constancy in kids.
In no way is it “age-appropriate” to discuss adult romantic or sexual relationships with pre-adolescent children in the classroom context.
Rather than opening children’s minds to accept diverse sexual orientations, identities and relationships, curriculum which satisfies the National Sex Education Standards imposes an adult framework onto a developmental stage that has entirely different priorities. When asked what feels good in a relationship, a 7-year old child will have no answer, because 7-year olds are not in, and should not be expected to be forming judgments about, adult romantic relationships.
But comprehensive sex-ed is developmentally appropriate for adolescents, right?
Child development theorist Erik Erikson would say no.
Erikson argues that identity formation is not something that happens to an adolescent child. It is something a child has to achieve, through a process that is genuinely uncomfortable, genuinely open-ended, and genuinely necessary.
Erikson called this process “moratorium,” in which different possibilities are held open and explored, commitments are “tried on” provisionally, and a state of uncertainty is endured long enough for something REAL to emerge from it.
Comprehensive sex ed does not support moratorium. It installs a framework before the youth has the developmental equipment to discover it or question it. It induces “foreclosure by prior instruction.” In other words, the adolescent who has absorbed, from the earliest years of schooling, a particular understanding of the myriad “gender identities” that are out there is robbed of the chance to enter her developmentally essential moratorium with an open field.
Rather, she enters it with a pre-installed map.
The fact is, Comprehensive Sex Ed standards and curriculum do not genuinely engage with the question of what information, in what form, is appropriate for children at what developmental stage.
Due to the graphic nature of the lessons alone, comprehensive sex-ed risks harming kids.
Decades of research shows that sexualization of children is VERY DAMAGING. Exposing kids to sexual themes leads to depression, anxiety, anger, confusion, aggressive sexual behaviors, desensitization, low self-esteem, and increased mental health crisis. Not to mention, early exposure to sexually explicit content increases the risk of EXPLOITATION BY ADULTS due to normalization of sexual concepts to children too young to understand the consequences.
These findings on the harms of exposure to sexual content come from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), the American Professional Society of the Abuse of Children (APSAC), the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), and the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP).
Open the links to learn more about the harms of sexual content:
Sexual Media and Childhood Well-being and Health
Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls
Policy Statement on the Impact of Social Media on Youth Mental Health
The Impact Of Pornography On Children
APSAC Statement on the Harm to Child Pornography Victims
Comprehensive sex-ed harms. Get it OUT of our schools.
KIDS FIRST.
KIDS FIRST is both a mindset and a call to action. Kids’ needs must come before adult agendas, in every aspect of life. Our K12 schools exist for the benefit of America’s children and teens, but over time, they have become agenda-serving systems. It’s time for a reset.
Absolutely agree.
Elected officials, school personnel, therapists, academics, medical professionals all threw away years of slowly built child welfare protections in the name of agreeing with transgender activists. Literally the only question is did someone hear a child say even once they might have gender confusion. That is all it takes to have the requirement to affirm, and affirm without informing parents if someone can claim the child also said they are worried for whatever reason. No guardrails, no assessments, no requirement of qualified personnel reviewing the processes, no monitoring except to ensure the school is affirming.
A civil rights framework that ignores child welfare doesn’t ask basic questions: what is the child’s emotional status, development abilities, intellectual capacities, family life, social life - nothing. Turns out for activists it is not only irrelevant it is biased and harmful to ask any questions.
The positions many activists seem to have embraced include: long agreed upon developmental constraints in sex education must be thrown out because we must acquiesce to the expertise of those with “lived experience”, the only people allowed to speak are the most vulnerable/victimized, any questions or concerns are by definition transphobic and hateful to be shouted down or prosecuted if possible. And finally most mind numbing of all: expressing unwanted opinions is “harm” worthy of undermining free speech, democratic processes, and fines.
To Democrats, everything is age-appropriate. For example: "Family-Friendly Drag Queens come to Main Street": https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/family-friendly-drag-queens-come