Photo: Beyond the Birds & Bees
New Zealand parents need some help with talking to young people about sex and sexuality, research confirms.
The free platform Beyond the Birds & Bees (Te Puāwaitanga) is a new one-stop shop for reliable information, created by University of Canterbury health education researchers.
Although the content is primarily aimed at teenagers, Beyond the Birds & Bees includes portals for parents & whānau and educators.
It includes advice on topics like porn and gender identity that can be helpful to parents, too, says the director of the project Tracy Clelland.
"The whole site is designed for young people but we're finding parents are saying 'wow, we need this information."
The majority of young people her team spoke to while designing the app said their parents aren't talking to them about sex and sexuality, she says.
"If you've got young people who have no adults to talk to, they just go searching on the internet."
One teenager that the researchers interviewed said that after watching a video about gender pronouns, they taught their father how to correctly use them.
"The whole point of this is to open up the conversation so that parents and whānau and young people start having conversations together."
Tracey encourages parents to check out Beyond the Birds & Bees to see if there's any information they can use to as conversation-starters with their kids.
"We need to do this, we need to work together, we need to open up the conversations," she says.
Listen to the interview