If parents are serious about wanting effective Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) Programmes for their children, they must be prepared to face reality and acknowledge the problems faced by teachers who are dealing with sexually precocious children from six years of age upwards.

There is no denying that the innocence of children has been taken away from them by television - the new and often unsupervised sex educator. A significant number of girls and boys are allowed watch videos that have crude and vulgar language and show explicit and often violent sex.

One result of this exposure can be heard in many school playgrounds. The growing problem of the foul language youngsters are picking up from videos and using in school is seldom publicly acknowledged. Many teacher simply do not know how to deal with abusive language that has unsavoury sexual connotations.

There are serious questions to be considered by the teacher who decides to correct young children who use sexual insults. Even six- and seven-year-old boys call each other "gay" and "faggot". The natural question for children who are forbidden to use these words is "why, what's wrong with them?"

Among the children's parents in any class there will be some who think that the teacher should give a simple explanation. And there will be others who would consider that this is age-inappropriate information and should not be mentioned. Sexual orientation is not on the curriculum for primary schools.

If a teacher explains that "faggot" is a very hurtful term that is used as an insult, she may be effective in getting the namecalling to stop. Or she may equally find that precocious pupils will want to show off and ask questions about gay people in a way that could shock less sexually aware children.

Teachers are between a rock and a hard place. If they overlook the crude language used in the playground, children will continue to use it and there is a strong possibility that it will creep into the classroom. I suspect that few parents are aware of the nasty name-calling that is so insidious in many schools.

The reality for many teachers who overhear pupils saying things like "go shag your mother" or "what kind of motherfucker are you?" is they simply do not know what to do for the best. Younger children who use these expression have either picked them up from older children or heard them in their own homes.

The dilemma for the teacher who knows a pupil is using the language he has heard at home is how to alert other parents to the problem. A note explaining that bad language in the playground is a problem fails to alert parents to the real issue. Yet the vulgar words commonly used are not suitable for a letter that pupils will bring home.

AN ADDED difficulty for both teachers and parents is the jargon adolescents use that adults do not understand. I doubt if many parents would be too worried if their teenager said they were "fooling around". This seemingly innocuous expression was translated from teen-speak for me recently by Transition Year students who were discussing what is acceptable behaviour when dating.

"On the first night, nothing, just shifting. After one month, still nothing much, just fooling around (oral sex). Definitely not sex (yet). After a month, still getting to know each other. Maybe more intimacy but still no sex, not for a long time."

This is typical of the distorted and confused views many teenagers have regarding what is acceptable. Most post-primary students do not consider they are sexually active unless they are having intercourse. Intimate kissing, oral sex and mutual masturbation are dismissed by many as "fooling around".

Surveys show that one in three teenagers has engaged in oral sex by the age of 15 and a approximately a quarter of sexually active 16- to 18-year-olds have engaged in genital intimacy with three or more partners. This is high-risk behaviour that can lead to potentially very serious and even fatal consequences for the person who contracts HIV.

It raises legal questions and shows the need for a clear policy regarding what schools plan to do about sexually active underage students. RSE programmes will not be effective in changing the attitudes or behaviour of precocious sexually active students if teachers ignore their family backgrounds. The real issue is that the parents of many of these children are a major part of the problem.

Carmel Wynne teaches RSE to primary and post-primary students.