Browsing by Subject "turvataitokasvatus"

Objectives. The aim of the study was to find out what kind of perceptions parents have about the sexual and safety skills education offered by the school and what effect they have on their safe use of social media. More and more younger children have their own smartphones. The commonness of smartphones and smart devices means that children may have free access to the Internet and through it to social media. It would be absolutely essential that some party will teach to children how to act on social media. Children should understand dangers of social media, so it will be able to prevent, for example, child abuse and mistreatment in the virtual world. The content and amount of sexual and safety skills education is not defined in the Curriculum for Basic Education (2014), but the implementation of education depends completely about the school and the teacher. Essential questions are do parents know how sexual and safety education is implemented in their children’s school and what contents are conversed on the education. Research methods. The target group here were the parents with a child in primary school (N = 75). The study was carried out as a mixed methods study, where the research data came from both quantitative and qualitative orientation. The data was collected a questionnaire by social media, so the answering based on voluntary. The qualitative section of the data was analyzed using content analysis. The quantitative part of the data was analyzed using the Mann-Whitney U-test and the Kruskal-Wallis’ H-test. Results and conclusions. The results showed that parents are somewhat concerned about children’s use of social media. Parents felt that sexual and safety skills education organized by the school was not enough. The co-operation between the school and the home on issues related to sexual and safety skills education was also dissatisfied, as the parents consider it to be low or non-existent. Parents felt that sexual and safety skills education was important and it should start early enough, even before school age. Parents also felt that having conversation about sexuality and safety skills is easy with their own children even though they didn’t always know how and when things should be discussed. Even though the discussion may seem easy to parents, they think it would be nice to have some additional information on how they can implement sexual and safety skills education themselves at home. Based on the results, it can be concluded that there should be a little more sexual and safety skills education in school so children can prevent dangers on social media.