Sexual Health Education for Parents of Mild and Moderate Intellectually Challenged Children: Influence of Intervention Programme

Venkat Lakshmi H.; Navya S.

Volume : IV, Issue : VIII, August - 2014

Sexual Health Education for Parents of Mild and Moderate Intellectually Challenged Children: Influence of Intervention Programme

Venkat Lakshmi H. , Navya S.

Abstract :

Sexuality education is the core component in influencing the psychosocial development and social identity of children both the non–disabled and the disabled children. The non–disabled children receive information about sexuality education either form their parents, teachers, peers, friends and media. But the disabled children have to rely upon their parents alone for such information as their often perceived as asexual in nature. The intellectually challenged children because of their deficits in cognitive abilities take very long to perceive and comprehend the concept, find hard to differentiate between the good touch and bad touch, appropriate and inappropriate social behaviour etc. Therefore the onus of imparting sexuality education lies in the hands of the parents of these challenged children in order to help their children to become self– reliant. This will enable their challenged children to develop a social identity in the society. Thus the influence of intervention program on the practices of the parents of mild and moderate intellectually challenged children towards imparting sexual health education formed the focus of this study. A self–structured tool consisting of thirty two items with a five point rating was used. A purposive sampling technique was used in selecting the sample which consisted of 318 parents of the intellectually challenged children who were grouped into two 159 from experimental and 159 from control group. The study revealed that the parents of experimental group were clear, confident, and comfortable in imparting sexual health education to their children after undergoing an intervention programme.