Policies related to children’s mental health and sex education

At present, my country's relevant policies for children's mental health and sex education have completed the basic top-level design and established the core principles of "stratified adaptation, home-school-social collaboration, and health priority." However, there are still three core blocking points in the implementation: vague content standards, unclear implementation boundaries, and large cognitive differences among different groups. Nationally unified and directly reusable implementation details have not yet been formed.

When I was doing policy implementation research at a county-level central primary school in Lishui, Zhejiang last spring, I happened to encounter the dean scratching his head over the "School Protection Regulations for Minors" issued in 2021. The document clearly requires schools to "carry out sex education appropriate for the age of minors." However, he looked through the supporting documents at the provincial and municipal levels and could not find the specific standards for "suitability": Will parents say that "teaching the boundaries of body privacy in third grade is too early"? When fifth grade students mention physiological changes during puberty, should they send notification letters to all parents in advance? If someone does complain, who will be held responsible?

In fact, after reviewing the national policy documents of the past seven years, we can find that relevant requirements never appear suddenly. As early as 2016, in the "Healthy China 2030" Planning Outline, children's mental health and sexual health education have been included in the construction of the national education system. ； The 2021 "Regulations on the Protection of Minors in Schools" clearly places the obligation of sex education on the main body of the school for the first time. ； In 2023, the "Special Action Plan to Comprehensively Strengthen and Improve Student Mental Health in the New Era (2023-2025)" jointly issued by the Ministry of Education and other 17 departments directly incorporated sexual cognitive guidance into the core content of student mental health intervention. There are also many explorations at the local level. In 2022, Shanghai included sex education as a compulsory subject in nine-year compulsory education, requiring no less than 4 class hours per semester. Jiangsu, Guangdong and other places have also issued local versions of implementation guidelines, but most of them remain at the level of "encourage development" and there is no mandatory content scale.

Regarding whether the policy should be further refined into specific teaching content, the differences between the academic community and the grassroots are actually quite obvious. Many researchers who are deeply involved in child development psychology believe that the policy must be "harder" and directly clarify the syllabus for different age groups - for example, in kindergarten, it only teaches "the areas covered by vests and shorts should not be touched by others", in elementary and middle grades, it teaches the normal differences between male and female bodies, and in senior grades, it teaches physiological changes during puberty and how to prevent sexual assault. Clear boundaries can reduce unwarranted suspicions of schools and parents. I know an associate professor at the Institute of Child Development of Beijing Normal University who visited 37 pilot schools in 12 provinces across the country in the past two years. The statistical data is: schools with clear syllabus and publicized teaching content in advance have a 62% lower parent complaint rate than schools that only give vague lectures and dare not say the specific content. To put it bluntly, what everyone is afraid of is not sex education, but sex education where "you don't know what is being taught."

But from the perspective of grassroots education and legal workers, this cannot be said. When I participated in a grassroots education policy seminar last year, a principal from a town in eastern Guangdong said very truthfully: “If you force down the requirement that the scientific names of reproductive organs must be taught in first and second grade, our school will be blocked by parents the next day. ”The town where he lives has a strong clan concept, and many parents' understanding of sex education is still at the stage of "teaching bad children." If we really want to establish national unified content standards, it will directly strangle the sex education that can be slowly promoted in many places. In their view, instead of blocking the content, the policy should first block the bottom line of "must be carried out", and leave the content formulation power to the local government and school parent committees for joint discussion, first solve the problem of "is there any", and then slowly refine the standard of "is it good or not". His school now packages sex education, anti-bullying, and anti-drowning content into short animated films in Hakka, which are shown twice a semester, and a content description is sent to parents. After more than a year, even the old people who were most opposed to it came to the teacher and said, "It turns out that the teacher is teaching how to protect my grandchildren, and that's good."

What many people have not noticed is that current policies no longer promote sex education as an independent content, but are completely tied to children’s mental health screening and intervention. In the "Mental Health Screening and Intervention Standards for Minors" just released in 2024, "emotional abnormalities caused by sexual cognitive confusion, sexual assault, and physical development anxiety" have been included in key screening items. When I was working as a volunteer at the Municipal Youth Psychological Assistance Center, I met an 11-year-old girl. Because her breasts developed earlier than her peers, she was nicknamed by the boys in her class. She refused to go to school for three months. She went to the hospital to be diagnosed with moderate depression. If the school had taken relevant classes in accordance with the policy requirements and told her that her development is normal sooner or later, and how to seek help when she encounters ridicule, she might not have come to this point at all.

After nearly five years of assisting policy implementation, my biggest feeling is that the “policies that are too weak” that everyone complains about now are actually not all problems at the formulation level, but more of a problem at the popularization level. Last month, when I was doing parent science popularization for the community, a father heard that the country now requires sex education. He slammed the table and said, "Whose idea was this? Isn't this a bad idea to educate children?" I read to him one by one the contents clearly required in the policy: sexual assault prevention, body boundary awareness, adolescent psychological counseling, and gender equality education. After listening to it, he was stunned for a long time and said, "Oh, it turns out it's not what I thought, that's okay." You see, many conflicts are originally caused by information gaps.

All in all, the promotion of this type of policy, which is deeply tied to public opinion, is inherently a balancing act. While we must keep the bottom line of protecting children, we cannot forcefully advance it regardless of the differences in understanding between different regions and groups. It doesn't matter if the pace is a little slower, as long as the direction is right, you can always slowly find the most suitable rhythm - after all, in the final analysis, the core purpose of these policies has never been to achieve any KPI, but to enable every child to grow up happily and healthily.