While children have been conditioned not to look at parents and teachers for any queries that are sex-related, it is important that parents are open to dialogue regarding this. Parents are not yet at ease discussing sex, and the years-old tradition of leaving ‘the talk’ out of family circles is hard to shed. [break]
A testimony to that is Pramila Ghimire, a mother of one 17-year-old son and one 15-year-old daughter, who despite understanding the relevancy of talking to her children about sex, prefers to leave it alone for the time being.
“Our culture never taught us to sit down with our children and educate them on sex. So while I know that it’s important, I still have reservations when it actually comes to talking to them,” she admits.
A resident of Paknajol in Thamel, Ghimire remembers the time when her daughter actually asked her how babies are born. She laughs, “I told her that people go to the temple to pray and are blessed with children. She believed it until she reached class eight, and was conveyed the actual information in her health class. That day she came home and told me I was wrong. Since then I’ve been telling them to be careful, and not to do anything that will put them in a difficult situation.”
With parents hoping that their children learn about sex through other channels, like the television or books, this leaves teachers as the adults who are responsible for educating children about the same. Teachers get into the finer details of sex education during health and science classes in school. Over time, both students and teachers have started overcoming the barriers of embarrassment to some degree and students even venture to ask questions.
Kamala Sharma, who teaches Environment, Population and Health at Durbar High School, Jamal, speaks about the difference then and now.
“Children are much more frank these days. I’ve been teaching for 30 years and I remember how awkward it used to be even for teachers to talk about such things and pronounce such words in front of the class. Now, children are already much informed through newspapers and the Internet,” she observes.
Sharma teaches classes seven to 10, and says that segregating students based on their gender will have negative impacts. Since they are learning about their own body parts, why should there be any hesitation regarding that?, she questions. Of course, some students will laugh during the class but the right way to teach them is by being practical about it. Different students have different questions; questions on pregnancy and the way it works being the most common ones. Keeping clean, learning about safe sex, diseases and STDs, and being aware and responsible overall are the most important things for the students, she says.
However, she is not beyond hesitation herself and says that she often replaces Nepali words with English when teaching about sex organs and menstruation.
Classrooms have also experienced a different measure in the teaching approach, as told by Khageshwor Giri, Vice Principal of Awareness International Academy located in New Baneshwar.
“The way we teach our students has changed drastically over the years. Earlier, it was just lectures, effectively a one-way method of teaching, but now we encourage involvement and participation in the class. We employ audiovisual medium for efficient learning and also show appropriate clips on sex education,” says Giri who also teaches about mental, physical, emotional and social changes in Adolescent Education to students of classes 9 and 10.
And it is not just the teaching technique that has changed; parents have also come to accept educating their children about sex. In Giri’s experience, it has only been five to six years since parents’ perception on sex education in schools have changed.
“Around 10 years ago, I distributed brochures on family planning in class and I clearly remember that the parents weren’t very pleased,” he reminisces.
Now things are better. “Parents have become positive and students are inquisitive and eager to learn,” he states. The girls in his class, he says, are shy while the boys are more forthcoming and ask questions. “The questions differ from changes in their bodies and menstruation to wet dreams,” he says.
Because the taboo on premarital sex is loosening up, more and more young people are indulging in sexual relations at a younger age. If sitting down with a parent and talking about sex is nothing but embarrassing, and they learn nothing new from it, at least they will feel secure in the knowledge that their parents will always be there for them. Preaching abstinence has never proven to be particularly effective. Parents should make the effort to cross the cultural barrier and be comfortable to provide the right information to their children so that they make sensible choices.
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