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Every year thousands of middle and high school students experiment with some sort of drugs or become sexually active. These actions usually do not get corrected with-in these young adults households. Therefore, every year there is an increase in statistics that provide us with information about what is going on in our schools. When will these numbers decrease? What could we do as a community to educate our youths about the effects of becoming sexually active and using drugs will do to them in the future?
The best way to reach most of our young is to begin teaching students in middle and high school about sexual activity and drug awareness. First, we need to pin-point our students family relationships. Our government still views middle-class families as “Leave it to Beaver” era where most families had one working parent while one stayed home. This is no longer the way most American families function. Thus, in many cases neither Mom nor Dad is as available as she or he used to be to attend to children’s social, intellectual, and moral development.
Coming home to an empty home is now the standard for an estimated four million children in our country. In that case, many of the family problems lead to teens becoming self-destructive. Teens often turn to sex and drugs as a refuge from their everyday lives. Most teens who abuse drugs are more likely to engage in unprotected sexual activity. Therefore, these young people are at a much higher risk to receive STD’s and have four or more sexual partners than youths who do not abuse drugs.
Other than being at risk for STD’s, teens girls are more likely to become pregnant. Each year almost 900,000 American teen girls become pregnant and of those girls around 450,000 give birth to their babies. This number is by far the largest of the world’s developed countries! Teen mothers are more vulnerable to poverty than anyone else, because teen mothers usually do not graduate from high school. In that case, the best way to prevent teenagers from using drugs and becoming sexually active is to educate them to the very best of our abilities.
If teens truly knew where their actions could lead them, many of them would not engage in those activities to begin with. We should upgrade our current sex education classes with a curriculum that is more relatable to young people of today’s lives. All schools should have a highly trained instructor for sex education and drug awareness because these subjects have become just as important as leaning math and English! In a world where STD’s are on the rise, we all need to teach our youth how to protect themselves from receiving and spreading these diseases.
In conclusion, our youths need to be just as educated about drug awareness and sex as every other subject taught in our schools. The number of teenagers under eighteen who are resorting to sex and drugs will continue to rise until we make a working effort to educate them fully on these issues. Since parents do not have as much free time to talk to their children, the responsibility now lies with-in our schools. Let’s all step in to prevent the disadvantages that are now lain at most student’s feet.