At a tender age of 9, a primary 3 girl was already pregnant, after she tried to “experiment with sex” when her parents were at work. This incident sparked debates whether sexual education should be implemented earlier in the educational system to educate younger students about sexual issues and raise their awareness on their sexuality. In my opinion, I support the idea to teach sexual education earlier in school, as it would prevent children from “experimenting” sex.
Quoting Ms Tan, head of the Students Service Hub, she said “Children need to be taught to take responsibility for their own actions, but this should be accompanied by providing them with the right information. I agree strongly with what she said, as we should not blame the children for “trying out” sex, if they were not taught about its consequences and why it was wrong. In the article, the “young couple” was reported to the police as a case of underage sex. I feel that it was not the girl’s fault for “experimenting with sex” out of curiosity, but her parents’ for allowing her to stay home alone at such a young age, and not teaching her about her sexuality.
However, her parents had felt that she was “too young to know at her age”. In our society, many parents also feel awkward at teaching “the birds and the bees” to their kids, and usually leave it to sexual educators and biology teachers to explain the process to their children when they are matured enough. But, through their peers in school and the World Wide Web, young students actually know much more about sex than what their parents thought they would know.
There is no such thing as being too young to know about sex. In fact, parents should take the initiative to educate their children about sex, instead of waiting for their teachers to do that, allowing the kids to find out about it themselves through pornography websites or by “experimenting” with it. According to statistics in the article, there were 1341 teen abortions in year 2004 and 1279 in year 2005. The article also stated that the youngest girl to give birth so far (before this incident) was only 12 years old. From these results, we can see that sexual education should also be taught earlier so the students can be mentally aware about their sex.
Therefore, from these reasons, I think that sexual education should be taught earlier in school so that such incidents would not happen again, and teen abortions will also decrease.
