No one smiled when we entered the classroom where a group of 12 high-school girls were holding their lunchtime club. They hardly seemed to notice us at all.
“Who wants to chat about relationships?” my co-facilitator asked everyone. She and I were no more than a few years older than the students themselves.
No one responded. A few girls stared at their hands.
We opened the workshop in awkward silence. By the 30-minute mark, the temperature had changed. The girls had begun laughing and nodding. Soon they were calling out answers to our questions before we could finish asking them.
What does respect really look like to you?
How would you respond if someone you liked said something insulting to you?
What would you do if you went out with someone and it wasn’t going well? Who would you go to for help if your date made you feel uncomfortable or scared?
By the end of the session, the girls were asking us when we’d be coming back.
When I started facilitating healthy-relationship workshops for teens more than 20 years ago through a non-profit organization in Toronto, school discussions about dating weren’t common. It was the teachers, administrators, and counsellors going above and beyond who called us into their classrooms.
They wanted community-based educators to lead conversations that would allow their students to speak their minds and ask questions they couldn’t ask anyone else.
They wanted us to fill gaps in the curricula. Sure, they taught about sexually transmitted infections and how babies are born. But they knew the skills and confidence necessary for building healthy, safe, and respectful relationships involved a lot more than that.
They knew there were ways to address these topics more effective than a traditional approach in which one authority figure lectures 30 silent students.
There are still many improvements to make in our schools, but things have gotten better since then: anti-bullying education is more mainstream, and there’s more acknowledgement that different students learn in different ways. These shifts are welcome.
Listening to the experience of community-based educators running healthy-relationships programs for teens in schools today makes us think we’re now in the midst of another shift.
Holistic healthy-relationship education encompasses a range of topics: sexual and reproductive health, mental health, sexuality and gender identity, consent, bullying, boundaries, anti-discrimination and bias prevention, challenging gender stereotypes, and more.
What topics are not only valid to bring to young minds, but also essential to their growth?
There are those who envision unbridgeable divides between topics students, teachers and administrators, and parents want and need. There are those who declare some topics inappropriate for the classroom. These adversarial stories are what we see covered in the news.
But the teen healthy-relationship programs the Canadian Women’s Foundation funds in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and elsewhere paint a different picture of what’s happening on the grassroots level.
They speak of students struggling with mental health, friendships, and dating in a digital-first, post-pandemic world. They speak of young peoples’ desire to explore who they are and the relationships they have with themselves and others in new ways.
Leaders of these programs speak of parents who are uncertain of how to help their children cope and so ask for support with their parenting — and of teachers longing to do more for students and families with limited resources.
Community-led programs have taken on a strong new role in this context: they listen to what students want in healthy-relationship learning, build it into their own programming, and use it to inform the help they offer parents and school leaders.
One youth-led, in-school program bases its curricula on topics students themselves ask about; past program participants are invited to serve as peer leaders.
Another program creates a safe and welcoming space for gender nonconforming and nonbinary students to find belonging as they learn about healthy relationships. It works alongside local schools so that students who need them can find them, no matter where they live.
Yet another has successfully advocated for the adoption of its healthy-relationship program by middle-school curricula across the province.
These programs do remarkable work: they centre the needs, well-being, and priorities of students in the learning process.
What if we were to apply this approach across school boards in Ontario and Canada? What if students routinely had a greater say in what they learned and how they learned it?
What if healthy-relationships education was not conceptualized as a great divide, but as a powerful partnership with young people at the centre, giving them what they need to thrive?
We wouldn’t call any topic untouchable. Students wouldn’t ever need to keep their questions to themselves or hide any part of who they are to learn. Their safety, curiosity, diversity, and healthy development would come first.
We’d evaluate how well we’re doing, not only through test scores, but also by asking the students themselves whether we’re hitting the mark on healthy relationships throughout their school experience.
Starting in 2025, Ontario’s high-school curricula will be updated to include financial literacy. It’s an effort to modernize and infuse life skills into the curricula and looks like a positive development.
We need this modernizing energy in elementary and secondary curricula for healthy, equal relationships, too, based on lessons learned through community-based healthy relationship programs that do it well.
We need it even more now that Bill 173 moves through the legislature as part of an effort to acknowledge epidemic levels of intimate-partner violence in Ontario. If we aim to end this wholly preventable abuse and drive the rates to zero, we need to start young.
Our students need parents, teachers, boards, and community programs to centre their well-being — and support their health, sense of belonging, and safety in these uncertain times.
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