Adolescence and sex education: Socio-cultural and psycho-theoretical perspectives

Abstract

Sex education has become an important issue in human development and attracts a lot of debates day in and day out. This article situated itself on the socio-cultural perspective of adolescent sex education espousing permissive and restrictive social-cultural dimensions. The article again confined itself to psycho-theoretical perspectives by dwelling on Freud’s psychosexual theory, Eriksson’s psychosocial theory, Skinner’s operant conditioning, as well as Bandura’s social learning theory. All theories are comprehensively reviewed based on their views on adolescence and sex education. Psychosexual theory views sex education as a construct that can be nurtured in the early years of life, psychosocial theory views sex education as a construct that can occur through societal interactions, operant conditioning considers sex education as capable based on behavioral consequences, and social learning views sex education as something that can be modeled.