ADOLESCENTS-
HEALTH PROTECTS LOVE!

Nowadays, parents are not the only source from which the young people can receive information on important issues that interest them; they can also receive information in their schools (from the psychologist, the pedagogue or the teacher), as well as in health lectures or in the adolescent counseling cabinets in health centers.

The topics such as sex education, contraception or sexually transmitted diseases are more and more present in media - television, radio and the press.

Still, it is not rare that the young people today have certain prejudices regarding sexual behavior:

It is not true that you can not get pregnant during the first sexual relation or if you shower after the intercourse.

It is not true that the boy will love the girl more if she gets pregnant, nor that he will become real man if his girlfriend gets pregnant.

Family planning and having children is the most beautiful life experience. One should be prepared for a role of the parent, because that means the responsibility and possibility to give new family member all the care he/she deserves.

Doc. Dr. Sladjana Jovic
The Chief of the Health Improvement Center,
The Institute for Health Care, Serbia

The Sex Education
a poem by Dr. Grozdanko Grbesa, psychologist

When you want to be close to someone and you can not say it in words, then you use the signs that only this person will understand, if he/she feels the same way that you do.
If one day you face mutual problem and still remain together, then it is not only affection any more. It is love. It means that you have chosen to take care of each other. Then you don't speak about the affection any more, but of understanding.
Your capability to talk depends on whether you want to understand the needs of your partner.
Do you want to understand fears, indecisiveness, dilemmas and mistakes that every person is entitled to?
Have you always known how to speak to others, even if those are the things rarely spoken about in public?
Who taught you how to speak about them?
Your parents, teachers, friends?
Or you have only seen it in odious B-production sex and violence films?
How are you going to love somebody if you don't know anything to say about whether it is too early for something you intend to do or it could affect your health? Should love end at the gynecology table, or at the venereal disease doctor's office.
Off course, you wouldn't like it to happen.
That is why you need to know how to talk about this - not too soon, nor too late.
And that's it - and it is called sex education.
It is not hard to get this education and it doesn't interfere with love - it only protects love. If you think that you won't need this, then you should hear a story about a bird that took off only once from the nest and her song was only once heard when a thorn of misfortune love broke her heart.
The thorns are growing in weeds, but you are growing among people that care about you.