Posted on: März 18, 2016
The Dutch are, in general, quite open about sexuality. Most countries around the world are conservative when it comes to open conversations about sex. This leads to a lot of our clients asking questions about sex education in Holland.
Three in 10 children (30 percent) in the Netherlands between the ages of nine and twelve years old have never talked about sex at school, at home or with friends. Even subjects like sexual boundaries or bodily changes during puberty aren’t discussed.
The Dutch sexuality research institute Rutgers in cooperation with the NOS (Dutch state broadcasting service) did a study among over a thousand children between the ages of nine and twelve and their parents. The accumulated data made Rutgers conclude that children know too little about sexuality. 48 percent of the questioned children know what making love or sex is and six in ten children know where baby’s come from. The majority of the children indicate that they know what homosexuality is.
Parents know pretty well at what stage their child is when it comes to their sexual development. 71 percent of the parents indicate that they answer their children’s questions about sexuality. Their children however dispute this statement; only 52 percent of the children indicate that their parents answer their questions about sexuality.
To improve the sex education in Holland, Rutgers commands the schools in the Netherlands to give more attention to sexual education and to bring the material in a not too serious manner. They’d rather see that teachers use current events, stories that are in the news, or a coincidental remark to start a conversation about sexuality. Parents themselves could even “accidentally” leave an educational folder out in the open at home
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Source: Gravify News
Entsprechend PBS, Holland has garnered international attention because it boasts some of the beste outcomes when it comes to sexual health. Dutch children don’t have sex at a younger age than their fellow Europeans or children from the US. Among 12 to 25 year olds, most say they had wanted, and fun, first sexual experiences. In the US 66 percent of sexually active teens wished they had waited longer to have sex for the first time.
According to the world bank Dutch teens are among the top users of the birth control pill. Holland’s teen pregnancy rate is, not surprisingly, one of the lowest teen pregnancies in the world. Rates of HIV infection and sexually transmitted diseases are also low.
We published this article about sex education in Holland to give our readers an impression on how Dutch society deals with sexuality in general.
(First picture source: Dailygenius.com)