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Making More Humans is a physician-led curriculum covering reproduction, relationships, consent, puberty, and sex education for families — clinically accurate, shame-free, and designed for every age.
So your kids grow up with the knowledge to stay safe, make informed decisions, and understand the body they’ll live in their whole life.
I want to ask you something. When you think about everything a person needs to navigate in their life — puberty, relationships, decisions about sex, decisions about having kids or not, dealing with heartbreak, understanding their own body as it changes decade by decade — how much of that is actually about the act itself? Maybe five percent. On a generous estimate.
Probably less. Now think about how much of sex ed is about the act. Almost all of it. We took a five-percent or less problem and built a hundred-percent curriculum around it.
And then we gave kids the message that they are now educated about human reproduction. Good luck out there. And also stop thinking about sex so much. I'm Dr.
Robin Dickinson. I'm a retired family physician. And today I want to talk about what sex ed gets wrong — not in a political way, not in an agenda way, but in a clinical way. Because I spent decades watching the consequences in exam rooms.
And the pattern was pretty clear. Here is the framework most sex ed is built on, whether it says so explicitly or not. There is a sperm. There is an egg.
There is a tab A slot B mechanism for getting them together. That mechanism has some risks attached to it. Pregnancy, which apparently happens any time you get the tab and slot anywhere near each other. Infections, which are usually illustrated by the most horrifying photos you've ever seen.
And here are some ways to reduce those risks. And stop thinking about sex all the time. Class dismissed. And the abstinence only programs, the ones that Really want you to avoid the act are still hyperfocused on not participating in the act, which still puts the main focus on one Thing.
And even the most comprehensive versions of this curriculum are still organized around that act. The anatomy is taught to support it. The biology is taught to explain it. The warnings are about its consequences.
Everything else — contraception, sti prevention, consent — is framed as things that matter because of it. What this does, quietly and consistently, is turn human beings into carrying cases for genitals. The rest of you — your brain, your emotional life, your capacity for connection, your relationships with your family and your kids and the people you'll love for decades — those are all just a footnote. We are not carrying cases for genitals.
We are whole people. And a curriculum built around one act cannot tell the whole story. Think about what a teenager actually faces in the year after sex ed. Not just pregnancy risk.
Pressure from someone they like. A relationship that feels electric but is making them miserable. A situation that moved faster than they expected and they don't have words for what happened. An internet that is actively trying to rewire their brain for profit.
Maybe a funny itch or mild discharge that's nothing like the photos they saw in class. Or maybe no symptoms at all but they are spreading an infection they didn't know they caught. Sex ed gave them a diagram of sperm and egg and a warning about consequences. It gave them nothing for the rest of that.
The single most useful thing I could teach any teenager — and honestly any adult — is how their brain actually works. You have two systems running at the same time. There's your Smart Brain — your frontal lobe, the part that plans ahead, weighs consequences, makes decisions you're proud of later. And there's your Survival Brain — the ancient, fast-acting system that kept humans alive for thousands of years by responding to threat and reward before there was time to think.
Your Survival Brain is not stupid. When a car comes out of nowhere, you want it in charge. But it has a flaw: it cannot tell the difference between a real threat and a social threat. It cannot tell the difference between real hunger and a craving engineered by a food company.
And it cannot tell the difference between genuine attraction and a pleasure response that has been deliberately triggered. This shows up online and it shows up in day to day life. In normal life, when you are around someone you are intensely attracted to, your Survival Brain takes your Smart Brain partially offline. Not completely — but enough.
The planning, the consequence-weighing, the asking yourself whether this is a good idea — those systems get a bit fuzzy. The feeling of wanting gets louder. It served reproduction for many thousands of years. It is also exactly what bad actors — and a multi-billion dollar pornography industry — know how to exploit.
A teenager who knows this is armed. They know to make certain decisions ahead of time, before the Smart Brain starts going offline. They know to notice when their Survival Brain has taken the wheel. They know that the intensity of wanting something is not the same as that thing being what they actually want.
A teenager who only knows the biology of the act is not armed with any of that. I want to talk about pornography, because not talking about it is not a neutral choice. Most kids today encounter pornography by accident before they encounter any actual sex ed. A couple wrong clicks on the internet and you are somewhere you never intended to be.
And what they see there becomes, by default, their frame of reference. It's also pretty common for kids to seek out porn, not for the thrill, but out of curiosity. They have questions and they are looking for answers and they don't know where else to find that information. Here's the problem.
Pornography is made by companies that hire actors, use specialized lighting, and edit everything to look a certain way. It is a performance built to hijack your Survival Brain. Watching it and expecting real intimacy to work like that is like watching a superhero movie and assuming you can fly. The movie is designed to make flying look real.
The pornography is designed to make that look real. Neither of them is. But kids have enough experience with real life that they know we can't actually fly. They don't have enough experience with sex to know that's just as fake.
This leads to a lot of confusion and disappointment when real life doesn't work out that way. Real life is clumsy and funny and human in a way that something designed for viewing never could be. But there is a deeper problem than just inaccurate expectations. Pornography is engineered to trigger your brain's dopamine system — the same one that makes food taste good and drives you to seek shelter.
It does this by flooding the system with more dopamine than any natural experience provides. And your brain, trying to protect itself, responds by turning down its own pleasure receptors. Which creates two things. First: regular life starts to feel flat.
Hanging out with friends, hobbies you used to love — none of it registers the way it did before. Second: you need more and more extreme content just to feel anything. That is a real, documented, clinical process. And kids who understand it — who understand that pornography is a product designed to capture their Survival Brain and make money off of it — are in a fundamentally different position than kids who just stumble into it with no frame of reference.
Sex ed that ignores this is not keeping kids safe. It is not keeping up with the world they live in. The focus on one specific act also creates a dangerous gap around consent. If all sex ed teaches is the biology of one type of intercourse, kids leave with the impression that everything else is somehow in a different category.
Not the real thing. Not something the rules apply to. I saw this in my practice so many times. There was a church youth group in my city where multiple girls had been persuaded that because it wasn't intercourse, the same rules didn't apply.
They thought they'd found a loophole. One of them came in to see me because of a sore throat that was more severe than any she'd had before. She had gonorrhea. In her throat.
She was completely horrified. And to be honest, so was I. Because this never should have happened. She had just never been given the information that would have let her protect herself from someone who was manipulating and lying to her.
Her parents had also never gotten her the hpv vaccine because they were adamant that was only for girls who slept around. So she could have also caught a cancer-causing virus in her throat that could lead to cancer decades later. The clinical truth is: consent applies to everything. Infection risk applies to everything.
The same rules apply to every form of sexual contact. Teaching only one act does not protect kids from everything else — it just leaves them undefended. There is another problem with building everything around one act. It makes some kids invisible.
By treating one type of intercourse as the default — the main event, the thing everything else is organized around — sex ed implicitly says: this is how human beings are made and families are formed. If your family was made differently, that's an aberration from the norm. But it's not. It's common and normal.
Some kids were adopted. Some were conceived through ivf or embryo adoption or iui. Some have two moms or two dads. Some came from circumstances that are complicated and that nobody ever put on a diagram in health class.
When we teach reproduction as if there is one standard pathway and everything else is an exception, those kids sit in class and feel like exceptions. Their existence is the asterisk. Clinical truth says: there is one biological starting point — a single cell with a full set of instructions — and the ways humans get to that starting point, and the families they form around it, come in every shape. Not one right shape with variations.
Just the full range of how humans actually live. The same is true for kids who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, or transgender. Simply pretending they don't exist in the curriculum doesn't make them go away. It just means they sit through an education that was designed for someone else and walk out of it with less information than everyone else — about their own bodies, their own health risks, and their own experiences — at exactly the moment they need it most.
From a clinical perspective, this is not a values question. There have always been people across the full range of human sexuality. That is documented across cultures and recorded history. Teaching the clinical reality of human variation is not advocacy.
It is accuracy. And every person deserves the information they need to have healthy relationships and make good decisions. So if not the act, what? Relationships.
Neuroscience. Consent. Preventive healthcare. Every teenager should know the difference between limerence and love before they experience either.
They should know that limerence — that overwhelming, obsessive, can't-stop-thinking-about-them feeling — is a neurochemical state, not a reliable signal about whether someone is right for them. It is your Survival Brain running a gambling loop, not your Smart Brain making a decision. Real love is quieter. It's more boring.
It feels stable rather than electric. And because we have told teenagers for generations that love is supposed to feel like a lightning bolt, they regularly walk away from solid, compatible people because something stable doesn't feel intense enough. Then they stay in volatile, painful relationships because intensity gets mistaken for depth. Kids should know this before it happens to them.
They should know it the way they know that sugar tastes so good and leads to craving more because it's triggering a survival system that was designed for a world where sugar was scarce. Knowing the mechanism does not ruin the experience. It gives you the tools to be in charge of yourself. They should know about consent in its full scope.
Not just one definition applied to one act — but the ongoing, checkable, revocable reality of consent that applies to every form of physical and emotional intimacy. They should know how to say what they want and what they don't. They should know how to hear no without making it a negotiation. They should know the difference between a yellow flag and a red flag in a relationship, and what to do when they see one.
They should know about families — all the shapes they come in, all the ways people come to exist in them, all the ways love forms around all kinds of starting points. So that no kid grows up thinking their family is the footnote. They should know that their brain has different parts that are there for different reasons and what that means for the decisions they make right now. Not as a reason not to make decisions — but as a reason to think them through ahead of time, before the Survival Brain gets loud.
They should know their bodies as systems, not just as mechanisms for one act. They should know what happens at puberty, what happens in their twenties and thirties, what happens at menopause, what the lifespan of a human body actually looks like. I want to tell you what I saw when people had this information. I had patients who, because someone had finally explained the brain chemistry of early attraction, were able to make better decisions about who they stayed with.
Not because they stopped feeling things — but because they had a framework that let them ask: is this limerence or is this something real? Is my Survival Brain in charge right now, or am I actually thinking clearly? I had parents who came to me after their kids had gotten hurt in situations they didn't have words for — and what they kept saying was: if someone had just told them that this counted, they would have known they could say no. They would have known they could tell someone.
They would have known it wasn't their fault. I had adults — actual adults, in my exam room — who were learning things about their own bodies for the first time at forty-five. Not because they didn't want to know. Because they didn't know there was anything to know.
Because nobody had ever just told them plainly how it worked. And I watched people relax, visibly, in the middle of an appointment, when they finally had a clinical explanation for something they had been confused or ashamed about for decades. That is what good education does. It does not make things more complicated.
It makes things make sense. We are not carrying cases for genitals. We are whole people, with brains that are still being built, in relationships that require navigation, in bodies that will change for our entire lives. The curriculum should reflect that.
And for families who want one that does, that is exactly what Making More Humans is built on. Physician-led, clinically accurate, for every age and every body. You can explore the sample classroom at docrobinschool.com/truth. I'll see you next time.
Take good care.