If you’re a parent of a teen or preteen, we’re guessing that there are some tricky conversations about sexuality that you’re trying to figure out how to muddle through without completely screwing your kid up. Or maybe that’s just us. Regardless, parents could always use a little extra help finding informative, relatable ways to communicate with their kids about important issues. A new series of videos aims to do just that.
Amaze — which has the fantastic tagline “More info, less weird” — offers a set of animated videos aimed at kids between the ages of 10 and 14. The videos, which are each under two minutes long, are designed to “take the awkward out of sex ed.”
Amaze has videos on everything from puberty to healthy relationships to the myths perpetrated by pornography, and they manage to do it in a way that will not only make sense to kids, but won’t make them want to dig a hole and make a home in it, as most sex-ed videos will do. (“Patty has some strange and unusual feelings about her body….”) Parents can also create a login for their child and pick which videos they can see. It’s kind of perfect.
One of our favorites is their video about consent, which shows how important sexual consent is and what it means. For example, the video says, “Imagine that you and a friend are invited to a horror movie. You call to your friend in the other room and ask if she likes horror movies, but you don’t hear an answer. Is it reasonable to say, ‘Well, she didn’t say no, so count us in.’ No. Of course not. Or if you ask a friend to play catch, and they say yes, and then you start hurling Frisbees at them, it’s OK for them to say that they only wanted to play ball and not Frisbee.”
See? How much sense does that make?! We love it.
Lucinda Holt, sexual health expert and content manager for Amaze, broke down the importance of these kinds of videos in an interview with the Huffington Post, saying: “There’s a clear payoff to open, honest and frequent dialogues about sex. Young people need access to factual, age-appropriate information that answers the questions they actually have. Otherwise, they’ll be left with misinformation from unreliable sources.”
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