Even after more than a decade of studying sex in animals, my own attempts to teach my children about the “birds and the bees” were fraught with embarrassment, mostly for them. I wish I’d been as clever as medical educator Danielle Teller.
In a recent article on Quartz, she describes a sugar-fuelled game that got her four school-aged kids to really engage in sex ed.
From the article:
We bought coloured index cards and used each colour for a different category: Anatomy, Physiology, Sexually Transmitted Infections, Pregnancy, and Sex & Society. We then came up with a range of questions, some multiple choice, some true/false, some open-ended, and wrote them on the cards. We tried to guess how hard each question would be for the kids to answer, and we assigned a point value from one to three. Candies were given corresponding point values depending on size and perceived desirability.
As the kids filed in for the family meeting, they eyed the sweets with interest. The announcement that we were going to talk about sex again elicited protests and groans, but their ears perked up when we explained the point system. Every child loves a game, particularly one that involves sugar. We started by putting sheets of paper in front of them with diagrams of male and female reproductive organs and asked them to label them for three points each. They went eagerly to work.
Read the rest on Quartz.
Picture: Luci Correia via Flickr