Sexuality Explained

Sexuality Explained: a guide for parents and children underpins parents in their role as first educators of their children. It draws on the latest knowledge of the human body to show how mind, heart and body interplay in our sexual makeup, and how the life-giving and love-making aspects of the sexual act are each designed for permanence. The Guide works at many levels. By drawing the reader into a succession of conversations between a mother and her daughter, her father and her brother, a full picture of the biology of reproduction is created in a friendly way. The stories give parents ideas on how they might converse with their own children. The text is necessarily comprehensive, to answer possible questions, and to make sure that the parents know more than what is now taught in school biology, which can be checked for accuracy. Children vary enormously in their maturity, which is one reason why it is best that they are taught about sex and sexuality individually and, if possible, by members of their own family who know and love them. The age range set against each chapter is for guidance only. Parents may use the Guide in a variety of ways. They can let the Guide do most of the work for them, reading it out loud with their children. They can give a chapter to older children to read on their own, being ready for questions. Or they can absorb ideas to speak in their own words as occasion arises. To aid discussion and to give a framework for homemade lessons, each chapter ends with a glossary and a list of points to remember. The hand-drawn biological drawings, all of which have been specially commissioned, have been reproduced at the back of the book to be cut out and arranged in any order. The Guide is principally designed for parents, but it can also be read by young people on their own, and later chapters might be used by teachers and youth leaders for student workshops. There is no religious teaching but the Guide starts from the premise that all human life is of equal dignity and worthy of respect.