���� �� Navigating Toward Abstinence Navigator: Finding Your Way to a Healthy and Successful Future is the final workbook to be featured in this series about abstinence and helping young people make healthy choices. Some who teach “comprehensive sex education” may do so with good intentions. But our children don’t need exposure to graphic sexual content. They see enough of that on television, in the movies, and all too often on their own cell phones. The truth is that teens don’t need to learn how to have sex; they need to be taught how to not have sex outside of marriage. It is dangerous to their physical, psychological, and emotional wellbeing. The CCAP program works because it focuses on healthy living and helps students to set and achieve positive goals. The program doesn’t rely on religious tenets. Vision: Goals and dreams Chapter One of Navigator tells about a football coach at Georgia Tech who was offered a “high paying, high profile” job as head football coach at the University of Notre Dame. Just four days after he had accepted the job, the coach held a humiliating press conference during which he resigned after it was discovered that thirty years prior, he’d lied on his resume. This true story teaches that mistakes made early in life can come back to haunt in later life. One of a series of questions students are asked to answer in the workbook is: “Do you suppose he ever considered that the false statements on his resume would one day be reported in newspapers and on television around the world?” From the start, Navigator helps students begin to connect making choices and achieving goals. Clarity: Seeing Media Clearly The second chapter of Navigator helps students evaluate images that bombard them. It says, “Young people today live media-saturated lives, spending an average of 6-1/2 hours a day with media.” An exercise asks students to name actors, musicians, movies, video games, and magazines. Then the workbook asks students to provide facts about the “real world,” such as listing which states border their own; naming their Congressional Representative and one of their U.S. Senators; estimating the U.S. population; and identifying the location of Washington, D.C. The Teacher’s Guide says this exercise isn’t designed to “stump” students but to point out that they might know more about the world of entertainment than they know about the real world. Media images are often damaging to students. It explains the concept of incrementalism: “...the cumulative building, over time, of themes and imagines in which media norms are gradually but drastically changed.” The workbook says that sex scenes common to television today are as explicit as those published in pornographic magazines in 1974. The result of this media incrementalism is that “today’s generation is exposed to the most graphic and explicit sexual imagery that has ever been seen.” Students should be aware of this if they are to protect themselves and control their environment. In addition to what is on television, today’s teens have access to pornography on their cell phones and other electronic devices. The workbook explains that viewing such content has an impact on the human body and the development of the brain, which are reasons for teens to avoid it. One parent question in this section is, “How has media changed since when you were a kid?” Direction: Sexual Decision Making Chapter Three says that abstinence isn’t about the past but instead is about the future. It is possible for every student to make the decision to save sex for marriage, regardless of past decisions. The workbook says, “Abstinence is the only 100% effective protection from the possible physical, emotional, mental, and social consequences of sex before marriage.” Many things are good when they are put in the right context; that includes sex. Marriage is the right context for sex, and waiting until marriage develops the situation in which a marriage is most likely to succeed. Navigator says that each day 1,700 American teenaged girls become pregnant and that 82% of those pregnancies are unplanned. Pregnancy makes it harder for a teen to get an education. Research shows that “most teen mothers are still unmarried 10 years after the birth of their child.” A real-life story in this chapter of Navigator is that of Pam, a young woman who is grateful that her teenaged mother gave her up for adoption because she knew that would be best for her child. Safety: Avoiding STDs Chapter Four tries to help students avoid the obstacles they would face if they contracted a sexually transmitted disease (STD). Approximately 17,000 new cases of STDs occur in Americans between 15-24 each day. Those who become sexually active in high school are likely to have more than one sex partner. One in four sexually active teens will contract an STD. As former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said, “When you have sex with someone, you are having sex with everyone they have had sex with for the last ten years, and everyone they and their partners have had sex with for the last ten years.” Approximately 32% of people in America have an incurable, viral STD such as human papillomavirus (HPV) or genital herpes. A suggested class activity is to look at a website for the medication needed to treat such diseases. Students can see the side effects, which include headache, vomiting, nausea, abdominal pain, and dizziness; estimate the cost of the
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