Overview
Relationship Smarts PLUS 5.0 helps teens make healthy relationship, dating, and sexual decisions for themselves by focusing on their futures. The curriculum integrates positive youth development, life skills, healthy relationships, dating violence prevention, and pregnancy prevention in a comprehensive healthy relationship skills program. It is designed to help teens learn how to make wise choices about relationships, dating, partners, sex, and more. The curriculum features:
- A realistic, relevant context for learning.
- An appeal to personal aspirations for love, intimacy, and successful relationships.
- New motivations for behavioral change.
- Empowerment through self-awareness, relationship knowledge, and practical skills.
Relevant to today’s young teens!
- Infatuation and attractions
- Love chemicals and how they impact your brain
- Sexual consent
- Online pornography
- Sexual assault
- Drugs and alcohol-and their impact on relationships
- Sex trafficking prevention
- Online sharing, sexting, sextortion, cyberbullying, and digital consent
- Greater depth in discussion of casual sex, “hooking up,” and “hook up culture”
Engaging Content and Teaching Tools
Relationship Smarts PLUS 5.0 is delivered through activities that are informative, fun, and affirmative. This curriculum uses popular media and innovative activities to engage young people in learning. An updated journal helps teens apply curriculum concepts to their own lives. Trusted Adult-Teen activities for each lesson stimulate conversations and connections with caring adults.
Relationship Smarts PLUS 5.0 Core Messages:
Key topics include:
- Self-awareness: Personal strengths/weaknesses, past influences, goal setting, friendship, peer pressure, maturity, clarifying values, self-regulation.
- Developing healthy relationships: Attraction, building blocks of positive relationships, how to assess relationships, realistic love, low-risk dating, “deciding vs. sliding.”
- Problems, warnings, and dangerous relationships: Break-ups and broken hearts, unhealthy and abusive behaviors, ways to exit safely, boundaries, dating violence, sexual assault.
- Communication and conflict: Danger signs, time outs, anger regulation, the Speaker-Listener Technique, problem-solving.
- Intimacy and sexual decisions: Pacing relationships, what intimacy means, sex in the context of relationships, boundaries, myths of pregnancy, risky situations, sexual consent, refusal skills, and the benefits of planning for a child and the future.
- Updates to the Success Sequence: how the order of school, commitment, and babies impacts your future.
- Social media: The impact of “constant connection,” sexting realities and risks, online porn, personal polices on using social media.
