Almost 90percent of California parents – no matter their politics, religion, location or level of education – want comprehensive sex education for their children, according to a first-ever statewide survey on the subject.
The results of the poll from the Bay Area’s Public Health Institute, funded by the California Wellness Foundation, and to be released today , show that 89percent of parents support a sex education program that includes information about contraception and protection from sexually transmitted diseases, as well as abstinence.
What’s more, widespread support for such a program crossed all sorts of cultural fault lines. Among evangelical Christians, 86percent said they support comprehensive sex education. The subgroup with the lowest support, at 71percent, were the “very conservative.”
“We are astonished by this support,” said Norman A. Constantine, a senior scientist at the Public Health Institute in Oakland and a clinical professor of public health at the University of California-Berkeley.
A different drummer
California has rejected federal funding for abstinence-only sex education for the past decade, choosing instead a state-funded comprehensive sex education curriculum that includes teachings about abstinence. But even though parents have the right to exclude their children from sex education classes, many school districts across the state, recent surveys indicate, are failing to provide sex education as required by state law, the report said.
“Many school districts can do a better job about sex education,” Constantine said. “We want the local school districts to feel more secure in their ability to implement sex education. And they need to know the law supports comprehensive sex education but parents support it, too.”
In the often controversial and rancorous debate on sex education, he said, the survey’s findings can help ensure that “the vocal minority doesn’t drown out the practical, pragmatic majority of parents who are concerned about the health and safety of their children.”
In the study, Constantine and researchers conducted a telephone survey – in English and Spanish – of 1,284 parents across California during the spring and summer of 2006. The results of the survey and study will be published in the September issue of the scientific journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.
For parent Eileen Sims, the San Jose mother of a 14-year-old daughter who has taken a sex education class in private school, the study was surprising because of the consensus among parents who hold divergent political and religious views. Sims was not a participant in the survey.
“Maybe parents are seeing what trouble kids can get into,” she said. “Maybe parents are finally realizing that whatever their politics or religion is, this is an area of education where they can make a difference in their kids lives.”
Curbing disease
From a public health standpoint, teaching children about sex can help stem the growth of sexually transmitted diseases – like chlamydia among young women, or gonorrhea among young men, Constantine said. Cases of both diseases have risen significantly in the past decade, according to state health figures.
Sims, who manages a Planned Parenthood clinic in San Jose, said she hopes “that people who are in charge of public policy can look at this study and say, `We need to make sure this happens.'”
The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, said he has not read the report. The coalition’s preference on sex education, he said, is still abstinence and sex within a marriage – and strictly heterosexual sex. This is the much-debated but federally funded approach.
“A comprehensive sex education without emphasis on abstinence is a joke,” he said. “We know parents are very concerned that their children have sexual morality. They don’t want their children being promiscuous or being ignorant of internal plumbing.”
Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families in Southern California, denounced “comprehensive sex education” as a euphemism for “teaching children that they are expected to have sex, that they are stupid not to have condoms in their purse and that they can be transported off campus for a secret abortion behind their parents’ backs.
“With all the sexually-transmitted diseases in society, parents should run toward abstinence education,” Thomasson said, “that trains children to say no to pre-marital sexual contact and yes to strong self-worth.”
But a nine-year, federally funded study of the abstinence-only program released in April concluded that the approach does not work. More effective, the federal study said, is a combination method like California’s.
At San Jose Unified, sex education is part of a larger curriculum on health education in a class called “family life,” that includes science lessons on physiology, anatomy and HIV, said Joyce Schornick, a school nurse.
Very few parents in the district, she said, opt out of sex education for their children, and only after they’ve previewed materials for the class lessons.
“The actual sex-ed is really a vehicle,” Schornick said. “It’s better if it’s comprehensive.”
Incorporating lessons about abstinence for students is “a big part of the message,” said Alison Wakefield, director of community services for Planned Parenthood in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
“We’re trying to meet the needs of all the kids,” Wakefield said, “those who are abstinent, and those choosing to have sex.”
Contact Jessie Mangaliman at jmangaliman@mercurynews
.com or (408)920-5794.
