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What constitutes a “safe and healthy choice” regarding your child’s sexual health? If you think that means explaining condoms to six-year-olds, you can imagine that’s what they intend. If you think abstinence is the only safe and healthy choice until you marry someone of the opposite sex, that’s covered, too.

It’s a statement that’s practically impossible to disagree with unless you know what the ministry officials think a safe and healthy choice is, and they didn’t tell the respondents that. They had to guess. Although most of the respondents (59 per cent) still strongly agreed with the statement, it was the least-supported one of the set, suggesting some of the people taking the survey were a bit uneasy with what the government was up to.

The survey wasn’t detailed, didn’t dig into the touchiest parts of the curriculum, and confirmed the curriculum planners’ view that they were doing the right thing. They got no answers that would have told them they were going too far, and no answers that would have told them they weren’t going far enough.

One other tidbit: The survey asks whether parents would like resources that explain what’s in the curriculum, provide tips for parents to discuss the subjects with their kids, and explain why children will learn particular things in particular grades. Yes, please! the respondents said, in large numbers.

The government hasn’t done a fabulous job providing such things, though, outside the 245-page document itself. There are parent-oriented companion materials but you have to dig for them and even then they don’t go into a ton of detail about what the curriculum people were thinking about introducing particular subjects in particular grades. Such things would not necessarily have helped convince parents who simply do not want sex-education in schools, or have strong moral views that they believe are compromised by even having their kids hear about, say, homosexuality. But they might have been useful for the rest of us, and parents surveyed clearly wanted them.

dreevely@ottawacitizen.com

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