NationalPost.com
Sarah Boesveld | February 20, 2015

As she hears tidbits about Ontario’s new sexual education curriculum, Sarah Carlyon-Baker admits to being a “little wary.”

Children will learn about homosexuality and same-sex marriage in Grade 3. In Grade 6, they’ll talk about puberty — a chat that will cover masturbation. When they get to the subject of sexually transmitted diseases in Grade 7, they’ll learn just how they’re contracted, including through oral and anal sex.

The new curriculum, expected to be released on Monday, is a far cry from the sex-ed the Jasper, Ont., mother remembers getting as a student — brief talk of menstruation in Grade 5, with everything else gleaned from “the schoolyard” or from a book wordlessly slipped to her by her mother.

“I am wary,” Ms. Carlyon-Baker says, “because I don’t want my kids to grow up — I want them to stay innocent and sweet and continue to think that unicorns are real and that all people are good.”

She wants Annabelle, 5, Eamonn, 3, and one-year-old Bobby to be prepared when they enter a world in which the media seem consumed by sex and technology makes records of sexual activity both permanent and widely shareable. But that doesn’t make it any easier to discuss sex.

Ms. Carlyon-Baker’s struggle is shared by parents all across Canada who are dealing with a rapidly changing landscape when it comes to sexual education and who are trying to tackle those perennial questions of how much information is too much information? How young is too young?

Ontario’s Minister of Education, Liz Sandals, said the new curriculum — the first update since 1998 — will look a lot like the controversial plan the government scrapped in 2010. This one, however, will include more focus on consent and healthy relationships.

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