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Adolescent School-Based Sex Education: Using Developmental Neuroscience to Guide New Directions for Policy and Practice

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Abstract

While school-based sex education is one of the key program and policy solutions to improve adolescent sexual health outcomes, new efforts are needed to strengthen its overall impact. The cognitive, hormonal, emotional, and physical changes that accompany the onset of puberty and occur throughout the teenage years play a significant role in aspects of adolescent sexual risk taking. Thus, one approach to advancing current understanding of these complex issues is to leverage emerging knowledge in developmental affective neuroscience over the past 15 years, which suggests some potentially promising innovations that may inform new educational directions to improve adolescent sexual health. Exploring the conceptual and empirical advances in understanding adolescent brain development through the lens of the conceptualization, implementation, and evaluation of sex education, this article provides new perspectives that encourage the testing of innovative approaches to sex education policy and practice.

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Acknowledgments

Dr. Ahna Ballonoff Suleiman was supported in part by the UC Berkeley Center for Child and Youth Policy. Dr. Claire D. Brindis was supported by grants U45MC 00002 & U45MC 00023 of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, Health Services and Resources Administration, US Department of Health and Human Services. The authors would like to thank Ronald Dahl and Juliana Deardorff for their thoughtful feedback on this paper.

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  1. School of Public Health, Community Health and Human Development, University of California Berkeley, 50 University Hall, Berkeley, CA, 94720-7360, USA

    Ahna Ballonoff Suleiman

  2. Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and National Adolescent Health Information and Innovation Center, University of California San Francisco, 3333 California St., Suite 265, San Francisco, CA, 94143-0936, USA

    Claire D. Brindis

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Correspondence to Ahna Ballonoff Suleiman.

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Ballonoff Suleiman, A., Brindis, C.D. Adolescent School-Based Sex Education: Using Developmental Neuroscience to Guide New Directions for Policy and Practice. Sex Res Soc Policy 11, 137–152 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-014-0147-8

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