Sex Ed: Innocence Was Never the Shield

Why an older reader pushes back on a popular take about kids and silence.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I got forwarded this story over on Medium by a fellow Medium writer, IslandGirl71, asking me how to write stuff like this without losing days in the process. I gave her some tips, and I hope she finds a way to write something that she is proud of.

But you know me, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I read the article that IslandGirl71 sent me, and I felt the same need to respond that she did.

Why Are We Teaching Kids About Sex So Young? A 90s Kid’s Honest Take
Are we ruining childhood?medium.com

I am old enough to be Melissa Mc.’s mother.

I was in grade school in the 1970s and high school in the 1980s. By the time the kids she writes about were learning to ride bikes, I was already out of college and watching the conversation from a different vantage point. When I read her recent op-ed arguing that elementary sex education should stay out of schools, I recognized the voice. The earnestness. The protective instinct. The certainty that what felt safe back then must have actually been safe.

I wish she were right.

I lived through the decade she romanticizes, and the one before, and the one before that. The silence she remembers fondly is the silence I grew up in. It was not safe. It was the cover story for what was happening to children, which we were not allowed to talk about.

The decade we romanticize was the decade with the highest teen pregnancy rate in modern American history.

The teen birth rate in the United States hit its modern peak in 1991, when the kids Mc. is writing about were learning to ride bikes (CDC, 1991). Sixty-one teenage births for every thousand girls aged fifteen to nineteen. Forty percent of women aged fifteen to nineteen in 1995 reported having had sexual intercourse (Stevens-Simon & Kaplan, 1998). Child sexual abuse cases were being substantiated at roughly 140,000 per year by the mid-90s, the first decade we tried to count them at all (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 1996).

When I was in high school in the 1980s, we did not have those numbers. Nobody was collecting them. The girls who got pregnant in my school disappeared for a semester. The kids who were being hurt at home stayed at home and waited it out. Some of them are still waiting to be heard. We were not just being kids. Some of us were being abused. Some of us got pregnant. We just did not talk about any of it.

That is what the silence brought us. Mc.’s 90s were the end of that era, not its beginning.

We are not arguing about what most people think we are arguing about.

Here is the move that made me want to write this. Mc.’s op-ed never defines elementary sex education. The reader is left free to picture whatever they fear most.

In actual classrooms, kindergarten through third-grade content is social and emotional learning. Managing big feelings. Setting goals. Recognizing safe and unsafe situations. In Washington State, where comprehensive sexual health education is now mandated, that is what K-3 looks like (Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, n.d.).

Fourth and fifth grades introduce anatomy and what to expect from puberty. Franklin Pierce School District’s adopted fifth-grade curriculum is titled “Puberty: The Wonder Years” and covers friendships, anatomy, and hygiene (Franklin Pierce School District, n.d.).

Federal data show that elementary teachers in the United States provide an average of 1.9 hours of human sexuality content per year (Future of Sex Education Initiative, 2020). That is two class periods. Nobody is teaching first graders about intercourse.

A child who has been taught the word vulva is not a child who has been taught about sexual activity. They are a child who has been taught the names of their own body parts.

The thing called innocence is the thing the predator counts on.

This is the part of Mc.’s argument I want to push hardest on, since the cost of getting it wrong is paid by children.

The CDC reports that approximately one in four girls and one in thirteen boys experience child sexual abuse before age eighteen (CDC, 2025). Children aged 7 to 13 are the most vulnerable population (Lawsuit Information Center, 2024). Roughly ninety percent of perpetrators are known to the victim (Lauren’s Kids, 2022).

What does this have to do with elementary sex education? Everything.

When researchers interviewed convicted child sex offenders about how they selected their victims, the answer was consistent. Predators avoided children who knew the proper anatomical names for their genitals, who had been taught about consent, and who had explicit permission to tell a trusted adult about secret touching (Sex Ed Rescue, 2025; Children’s Advocacy Centers of Pennsylvania, 2024).

The “innocent” child Mc. wants to protect is, in the empirical literature, the predator’s preferred target.

A child who can say “he touched my vulva” can give a forensic interviewer information that is investigatively useful. A child who can only say “he touched my cookie” cannot. Cases of child sexual abuse have been dropped, dismissed, or misinterpreted, in part, where children lacked the language to describe what happened.

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The behavioral data does not say what Mc. says it says.

Mc. concedes that the research on early sex education is “mixed,” then leans on this concession to argue against it. The actual literature is more lopsided than the essay suggests.

A 2020 systematic review in the Journal of Adolescent Health examined 80 studies over three decades that met the inclusion criteria. Comprehensive sex education produced positive outcomes across appreciation of sexual diversity, dating violence prevention, healthy relationships, child sexual abuse prevention, social-emotional learning, and media literacy (Goldfarb & Lieberman, 2021). The review concluded that the research supports sex education beginning in elementary school when scaffolded appropriately.

UNESCO’s 2018 international review, prepared with the World Health Organization and four other UN bodies, found that comprehensive sexuality education delays first sexual debut, improves contraceptive use when adolescents do become sexually active, and reduces risk-taking (UNESCO et al., 2018). Abstinence-only programs were ineffective on every metric.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and the National Education Association all endorse comprehensive sexuality education (Breuner & Mattson, 2016).

Knowledge does not corrupt children. Ignorance leaves them at the mercy of the next person who wants to fill in the blanks.

The window we are arguing over has already closed.

Two trends Mc.’s essay does not engage have moved the timing question.

The median age of first menstruation in the United States is now 11.9 years, down from 12.5 in the 1950s and 60s (Wang et al., 2024). Breast development now begins six to twelve months earlier than in previous generations.

The average age of first pornography exposure in the United States is also twelve. 15% of teens report their first exposure at age 10 or younger. Most of the first content kids encounter includes depictions of violence, choking, or someone in pain (Robb & Mann, 2023).

A child whose body is physically maturing at ten or eleven, and who is encountering violent sexual material on a shared screen at the same age, is not being protected by adult silence. She is being abandoned to interpret what is happening to her on her own.

The introduction has already happened. The question is who gets to frame it.

What about the parents?

Mc. argues that parents should have the main say. I am sympathetic. I have my own quiet anxieties about state overreach in family life, and I know not every family teaches the same values.

But the parents-versus-schools framing is a false choice. Research consistently finds that parental involvement is one of the strongest predictors of program success in school-based programs (Goldfarb & Lieberman, 2021). Parents and teachers work as partners. They always have.

Here is the harder truth. The parental-primacy framing assumes that all households are equipped to have these conversations and that all parents are safe people to have them with. The CDC data on perpetrator relationships are blunt: ninety percent of victims know the perpetrator, and many of those perpetrators are family members.

For some children, the only adult who will ever tell them that their body belongs to them is a teacher. Removing that single source of safety in the name of parental rights leaves the most exposed children with no one.

That is not a hypothetical cost. That is a real child.

Where Mc. is right

Mc. is right that not every program is age-appropriate. Quality varies. Some children process this material better than others. Parents are central. Schools cannot replace healthy household conversation.

These are the things sex education researchers themselves have been saying for forty years. The question, Mc. raises is the right question.

Her answer, that we should remove elementary instruction and let parents handle it, is the wrong answer. The right answer is to improve the curricula, train teachers to deliver them effectively, involve parents in advance, and scaffold content across grade bands so that no one is asking a first grader to process what a sixth grader needs to know.

What we are actually choosing between

Mc. ends her essay by saying that childhood is short and innocence cannot be recovered. The first part is true.

The second part rests on a definition of innocence that confuses ignorance with safety. A child who knows the names of her body parts, who has been told that her body belongs to her, and who has been taught that she can ask for help when something feels wrong is no less innocent. She is more protected. She is the child who has the language and the standing to defend herself when a predator approaches.

The 1990s did not protect children by being silent. They were a period of high teen pregnancy, high abuse rates, and high secrecy, and the public health record of those years is part of why the medical and educational consensus shifted toward comprehensive sexuality education in the first place.

The choice is not between sex education and innocence. It is between giving children the language and the framework to interpret a world that is already reaching them, and refusing to do so on the assumption that silence is the same thing as protection.

It is not. It never was.