As someone who is about to turn 60, I feel a bit like an old curmudgeon when I say this, but I think it's true - the culture as a whole has failed our children. We probably couldn't have prevented hook-up culture, ubiquitous porn and the fact that kids spend all day on their phones and apparently don't know how to actually talk to each other - but, we could have done things to try to mitigate those influences, and to have provided alternatives. The sex education in the Netherlands starts at 4 and begins with really basic stuff, a lot of it about how to interact with people you like with respect and kindness. We could teach kids that the only two choices aren't the relationship escalator leading to marriage and treating the other person like a sex toy. Kids could learn what used to be called etiquette and social graces and that porn is not what real sex looks or feels like. They could learn emotional self-regulation.
Some schools have tried to implement "social-emotional learning" and have gotten shit for it as being too "woke." It's considered "liberal indoctrination" by some parents and some teachers want to only teach their subject and not have to add this in. It does have a good track record in the places where it's been in place for some time though. We need more of that, and then adding real sex-ed in too.
"Students who participated in SEL programs that addressed the five core social and emotional skills it aims to teach — self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making — improved their academic performance by 11 percentage points compared to students who did not participate in SEL, according to a2011 meta-analysis. The academic impacts have long-term effects: In follow-up assessments years after students participated in SEL, their academic performance was an average of 13 percentile points higher than students who didn’t participate, according to a 2017 meta-analysis.
There’s economic value, too. A 2015 study from Columbia University found that SEL programs produce $11 for every $1 spent on them by lowering crime, increasing wages, and producing better health outcomes for students who learned SEL skills. Nationally, spending on social-emotional learning has grown 45 percent to $765 million between November 2019 and April 2021, according to a 2021 study."
