I can’t remember the details of the Sex Ed I had in high school. I remember it was taught by a gym teacher, and the materials we used were videos that looked like they were shot in the 90s. Maybe there were some print outs of an old text book.
I don’t remember the details, but I remember the way it made me feel.
Bad.
I’m not sure everyone else felt the way I did, but it was different than what I personally was familiar with.
I remember when I was young, my mom said we could ask her anything we were curious about. It could be anything we had heard about through school, she would clarify. If we felt something in our bodies, she would explain.
I have this distinct memory of sitting with my two older brothers and my mom eating spaghetti when I was maybe 8, and my middle brother brought up about how he learned about pregnancy. I remember him sitting up straight and saying it all of a sudden. I remember how the last thing I had heard about pregnancy was that it was like putting uncooked dough in the oven, and over the course of 9 months it would bake to perfection. But I realized in that moment, I didn’t quite understand how the dough got into the oven.
He started to explain something that didn’t make much sense to me– something about lots of sperm and eggs, and how they find each other in the belly. He was using his hands a lot as I hunched over my spaghetti.
My oldest brother huffed a bit. In retrospect, I’m not sure he totally understood either
We all looked at my mom.
She nodded. She corrected my brother, “It’s not quite that, but it’s close.”
I would ask a follow up. My middle brother would ask much more provocative follow ups. And my oldest brother just listened.
Over the years, we’d ask more questions, and she’d have more answers. My mom studied human sexuality in college, so there was a comfort that I never saw in other adults who talked about these sorts of topics.
I never thought twice about the questions I had, because I knew my mom would never judge me.
As we got older, I would tell my friends everything I learned, all the questions they had, too. Slowly but surely, my group of teenage girl friends would start come over and start to ask my mom all types of questions.
What if I had sex without birth control?
Why are my cramps so horrible?
Why if I don’t want the same things my boyfriend does?
Some of my friends were first-generation and had immigrant parents where any topics related to intimacy were entirely avoided. Some of my friends had parents who just didn’t have the verbiage, because they, too, had never learned it.
Except for my mom, it felt like everyone around us was hiding important information from us. Things they didn’t want us to know. Or even worse, things they didn’t care if we knew or didn’t know.
And it manifested in all sorts of ways that I always look back on and always believe could’ve been avoided.
When I look back on myself as a teenager, I’m grateful for my mom having always answered the questions I had. But she wasn’t accessible enough, she didn’t have the range, to change a culture that fundamentally lacked the knowledge to protect our health.
I always think the one thing I wish I understood better was my own boundaries. I wish I thought more about what I wanted, what I didn’t want, and that the pressure to do something I didn’t want always came from someone who would never be good for me.
I wish I knew how to communicate that something hurt. I wish I knew that the experiences I experienced weren’t okay.
And I look back at my friends, when we were just young girls, and I wish it would’ve been different for us. I wish that the way we learned didn’t have to be through bad experiences.
At the time, I tried to change it for us. I met with my AP Government teacher and our student council supervisor because I wanted to build a formal proposal to revamp our school’s sexual education. Over the course of months, I built a reformed curriculum proposal.
Ultimately, after all that, I was stood up and shut out by the human development organization.
At the time, I remember feeling so angry. How could something so fundamental to our happiness, confidence, and safety be so back of mind for our school?
It’s about love.
It’s about our relationships with ourselves and with each other. It’s about consent and understanding our bodies and our boundaries.
It’s about healthy and happy kids. Across state lines, across politics, I know that fundamentally, this is what we all want.
We want our kids to thrive. We don’t want our kids to experience so much pain or illness. We want them to be able to build lives and careers, not become a parent when they’re too young to understand how it might have even happened.
Education is freedom.
Every young person deserves the knowledge to protect their health, understand their bodies, and build meaningful relationships.
When I went to college, I studied human sexuality and computer science. I learned fairly quickly that my experience in high school was even more common than I thought. Everyone I knew who grew up in the United States had some funny (although, sad) story about how their school taught sex ed.
I think the best one I heard was a classroom who made water balloons out of condoms to show how stretchy they were.
I think the worst, and most common, one I heard was one that shamed every student for even thinking about sex.
I heard about kids that were suicidal after a herpes diagnosis, and adult women who still didn’t know what endometriosis was.
What I always found even more confusing was that after the AIDs epidemic, there was a surge in funding available for sex education. At the federal level, there are millions of dollars invested in sex education related programming. Additionally, even if you aren’t a private school, a lot of schools have budget for health & wellness initiatives or educator professional development. There are billions of dollars available in certain states slotted for Education Technology innovation.
And yet, Sex Ed today is worse than it was 20 years ago.
So…why?
Today, there’s a teacher shortage. Teacher’s are burnt out. I’ve spoken to them, and they don’t have the capacity to learn an entirely new, additional curriculum. They don’t have the capacity to put together new materials, or to make sense of the endless white papers that exist out there.
Today, kids are struggling more than ever in the classroom post-COVID. Any teacher would tell you that kids are more disruptive, and they’re less likely to engage. Any kid would tell you that they’re having a hard time connecting.
Today, parents are more vocal than ever, particularly for sensitive topics like sex education.
Today, states, districts, and schools are more polarized than ever on what good sex education should actually include.
So how can you be surprised that what everyone needs is different? But the materials that exist today don’t adapt. They’re 600-page text books that break down every single thing you need to know about sex education. Can you imagine trying to break that down as a teacher or parent? Can you imagine just trying to understand the sheer amount of information that exists in those materials? And then trying to adapt it to your schools, your parents, and the needs of your kids?
So, I’m not surprised that as a result, schools either opt out entirely or rely on those same outdated materials that my gym teacher used. I’m not surprised that some private schools lean heavily on costly, manual presenters to come in, and that knowledge about our kids’ physical safety and wellbeing is becoming a luxury good, not a fundamental right for everyone.
What schools are lacking is something easy. What they’re missing is something built for them and their needs. And what they need is something their kids love.
I’m not a disrupter. I’m not building AI. I’m not inventing something new.
I don’t believe it’s my job to tell you what I think your kids should learn. And I don’t believe that there’s a one-size-fits-all approach to sex education.
I don’t want to replace schools or teachers or parents, and I most definitely do not want to sell a product that goes straight to your kids.
I want to give YOU the tools to make those decisions.
Mobo is about control. It’s about compliance. It’s about supporting every single part of the change of command, from the state to district to school to teacher to parent.
Mobo turns existing funding into effective, modern sex ed that educators actually deliver by making it exceptionally easy and completely customizable.
We are not changing the rules. We are finally making it easy to follow them.
—Jenna Scherma
Founder of Mobo
