Valuable Lessons on Sex Education We Can Learn from the Dutch

Americans are hung up on sex. Because our actual religion is capitalism, we are fine exploiting sex to sell products. Sex that is not in service to advertising, however, makes us queasy.

This puts us in a muddle when we have adolescents, but the Dutch have a better solution, and we should learn from them.

I had always felt I was progressive. My mom explained to me exactly how babies were produced at an early age, and I did the same with my children. I took it a couple steps farther, too. I chatted with my kids not once, but many times, adding age-appropriate material as they aged.

Sex ed begins at home.

One day, I told my kid I needed assistance piling up brush and limbs a storm had thrown down.

“I can’t,” he stated. “I have to study.”

He undoubtedly felt it was an ironclad excuse, but I needed his strength to help me carry the big things, so I wasn’t going to be discouraged so easily.

“What subject?” I asked him.

“Sex ed.”

“Well, then, come on outside. I’ll tell you all you need to know as we work.”

I ask you to imagine the anguish my poor youngster suffered assisting his mom haul heavy branches while hearing a continuous commentary about contraception.

“So, moving onto the barrier methods, we have condoms, which are good because they help prevent both disease and pregnancy, but keep in mind they won’t always help you with herpes because they don’t cover everything down there, you know? But nevertheless, utilize them. Even if she claims she’s on the pill, always use a condom. Two ways are better than one.”

The yard was cleaned up in record time, and to the best of my knowledge, my kid has never impregnated anybody.

The Dutch way

So I felt I was doing fairly well. I made it obvious to both my children that if they wanted my opinion or support when it came time to acquire contraception, they had only to ask.

My husband is Dutch, and after a talk with one of his cousins, I discovered how backward this mentality is. We were debating this idea, and I think I believed my Dutch in-law would notice exactly how open-minded I am compared to my countrymen, but I was mistaken.

Her approach was different. The onus was not on her kid to inform her she needed contraception—it was on her!

“It is my responsibility as her mother to make sure my daughter is protected,” she stated.

Such a basic change, yet my mind was blown. Why would I wait for a teenager to have The Talk with me?

The Dutch are much ahead of us in sex education.

The American method is to pretend nobody will have sex until they are married. We tend to believe if we educate kids about healthy sexuality, they will instantly go out and have sex.

So we conduct a lot of abstinence-only teaching, which is probably why we are №1 among wealthy countries for adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted illnesses. USA! USA!

The Dutch, however, educate thorough sex education from an early age and often become sexually active later than Americans. We overlook these realities because we do not like them.

A surprising difference

In the U.S., teens frequently have to sneak about to have sex. They have it in vehicles or at older friends’ residences, or they have to wait till the parents are gone. This is typically true even when the parents know their kids are sexually active. Everybody pretends it is not occurring.

This is not how it’s done in the Netherlands.

In the Netherlands, an older teen’s boyfriend or girlfriend may easily sleep over. I know! I was astonished, too. But why should this be so unpleasant for us?

When my daughter was in college, on each visit home, I dutifully put up an inflatable mattress in the living room for the guy she’d been seeing for years and would ultimately marry.

“I don’t see why you don’t just let them both sleep in her room,” my very sensible Dutch husband replied. He’s my children’s stepdad. I attempted to explain why I would not do it, but found I could not think of a single reasonable explanation.

My request that the two of them sleep separately at my residence made absolutely no sense. College students are mature enough to make their own judgments regarding such matters.

It was simply an absurd cultural taboo, and it’s one that the Dutch do not share.

It was unexpectedly tough and awkward for me to confront my daughter and her then-boyfriend and explain to them they could just remain in her room together.

It’s difficult for me to imagine

The entire concept of asking my parents whether my boyfriend could spend the night at our home, or if I could spend the night at his, was unfathomable. I did request once, when I was engaged to my first husband, that we be permitted to sleep in my bedroom. As I predicted, my parents knocked that proposal down. Hard.

Years ago, one of my coworkers told me his parents would not let his wife sleep in his old bedroom with him even after they were married! “My house, my rules,” they were informed.

I just cannot imagine having a male sleep in my bed and then both of us joining my family at the morning table for pancakes. I was aware of a couple of situations in which a family permitted their underage kid to have a boyfriend or girlfriend sleep over, and it was always considered as—excuse me—low-class. “Nice” households didn’t do that.

They should, however. I can see numerous benefits to normalizing this for older teenagers in secure relationships.

When do you believe adolescents are more likelycontraception—whenn – when they’re in their own bedroom and have condoms in a drawer, or when they’re parked in a vehicle or inebriated at a party and didn’t expect sex happening?

What impact does it have on a young person when they welcome their partner’s parents before going off to bed and know they will have breakfast with them the following morning? I bet there’s greater respect.

Sex at home is safer.

Would you prefer your teenage daughter have sex in a spare bedroom during a party, with all sorts of inebriated youngsters walking about the home, or in her own bedroom, with her parents in the house? (I stopped watching Euphoria after becoming triggered by the party scenes.)

Incidentally, European kids frequently learn how to drink safely by drinking wine with dinner at home, too. Their first encounter with alcohol is generally not drinking heavily with similarly naive buddies until they all puke up. But that’s not how it went with a lot of us here in the U.S.

We throw our children to the wolves by claiming they will not drink or have sex, which means they have to figure it all out for themselves.

This means American teens frequently find themselves in absolutely hazardous circumstances—everyone drinking and many people having intoxicated and unplanned, unprotected, and often unwelcome sex.

The Dutch have lower rates of adolescent pregnancy.

Guttmacher Institute numbers demonstrate that adolescent pregnancy is far higher in the U.S., where we merely pretend young people will not have sex, than in the Netherlands, where it’s accepted they surely will.

In the U.S., there are 15 abortions, 34 births, and 8 miscarriages per 1,000 women aged 15–19. Compare it to the Netherlands: 7 abortions, 5 births, 2 miscarriages. Yes, Dutch adolescents had considerably fewer unwanted pregnancies and less than half as many abortions! How could it be otherwise?

We would assume all the sex shaming we do in the U.S. will deter young people from having sex, but it plainly does not. It does, however, seem to be a successful manner of boosting abortions and adolescent births, so if you enjoy that, by all means, let’s keep doing what we’re doing.