Browsing by Author "Kontio, Julia"

Objectives. The aim of this study is to determine if the intervention, done as a part of a sexuality-education project (Keho, tunne ja turva -hanke) organized by the Family Federation of Finland (Väestöliitto), has an impact on the children’s level of knowledge related to sexuality. There has been limited research in the late 20th century about the level of sexual knowledge of under school aged children. Furthermore, no peer-reviewed intervention studies have been done about advancement of children’s level of sexual knowledge. There have been isolated intervention studies in Sweden and Central Europe about the advancement of children’s safety skills and self-protection. Even though the importance of sexuality and the sexual rights has been recognized as an important part of children’s lives, the National core curriculum for Early Childhood Education and Care does not specifically mention sexual education or sexuality. The sexual- and safety skill education of a child under the school age is radically different than the sexual education of teenagers or adults. To help the sensitiveness of the subject of sexuality and children it has been suggested to label the sexual education of children as a body-emotion education. Methods. The intervention was carried out in kindergartens in the Helsinki metropolitan area in 2019-2020. This study involved 205 children. The study involved 134 children from intervention kindergartens, 66 of whom were girls and 68 boys, and 71 children from control kindergartens, 27 of whom were girls and 44 boys. Children were 3-6 years old, mean age was 4,7 years. During the intervention, the kindergartens addressed themes related to body awareness, reproduction, personal safety skills, and sexual rights, and these themes were explored in an age-appropriate manner through games, fairytales, crafts, and music. The implementation was monitored on a weekly basis. The teachers of early childhood education had the freedom to decide how the themes of intervention were addressed with the children. The children were interviewed with the help of a picture-structured questionnaire by their own early childhood education teacher. The interviews were conducted both before the start of the intervention and in the fall of 2020, and this study addresses the results of the interviews in fall 2020, and the changes compared to the earlier study. In the structured interview, an early childhood education teacher familiar with the child showed ten trigger pictures about adults and children, and the child was asked what was going on in the pictures, how the people felt and e.g., what the names of the body parts were. Responses were scored according to the following themes: pregnancy, reproduction and birth, genitals, sexuality between adults, and safety skills. The results were analyzed by variance analysis with SPSS software. Results. According to the study, the intervention did not significantly increase children’s level of knowledge regarding sexuality. There was no detected difference in level of knowledge between the genders and the change in the level of knowledge followed the increasing age. However, when we looked at the cities separately, we found a statistically significant difference in the level of knowledge between Riihimäki and Helsinki after the intervention. One interesting finding was that during the intervention in the control kindergartens in Helsinki the level of knowledge significantly decreased. The biggest kindergarten, which participated in the project underwent extensive organizational changes, which may have affected the results. Moreover, there have been present methodological challenges related to the study of children. Also, the implementation of the intervention has not been systematically monitored and standardized, which may have affected the effectiveness of the intervention. Also, Covid-19-situation in Finland may have affected to the intervention and interviews.