Parents and issues of sexuality education in the Nigerian secondary schools

Abstract

A cross-sectional survey was conducted to explore parents’ perspectives on sexuality education among 800 parents in Southwestern Nigeria. The data were collected via a validated questionnaire. The results showed that 82.9% of the parents supported sexuality education for both male and female children. The majority (82.3%) would have encouraged teachers to openly discuss sexuality education in the school with their children, while 17.8% opposed it. Parents expressed sexuality education to be handled by Health Education teachers (41.6%), Biology teachers (41.0%), and school guidance/counsellors (35.8%) than any other teachers in the schools. While gender ( = 8.577, p<.05) and location ( = 10.941, p<.05) significantly influenced parents’ perspectives of children’s sexual education, level of education did not. The study concludes that parents are increasingly embracing school-based sexuality education as appropriate for both male and female children but preferred it to be exclusively handled by relevant teachers within the school setting.