While the workshop itself was focused on the future of work and how industries are managing the ever-shifting landscape, a lot of what we ended up spending our time on was AI literacy and the impact of AI and technology on the personal lives of the young people in the room.

My goal was never to make them feel one way or another about AI, but it was to arm them with the information and the awareness to be able to critically analyze the messaging they were consuming related to AI and ultimately be able to come forward with their own perspective of it.

Part I: How industries are embracing AI and Technology

I started by laying a little bit of ground work for the group — what exactly was changing around them?

Well, speaking from personal experience, if you think you can’t escape AI in your day-to-day life, try working at a tech company…

Every day is inundated with business presentations decorated with blatant AI imagery, an army of AI notetakers in every conversation, using Claude for that thing, ChatGPT for that other thing, Perplexity for that different thing, and Gemini for something else. Cursor for coders, Notion AI for program managers, Midjourney for marketing, and yet…

I showed this headline:

Every tech company, whether you’re a behemoth like Google, or a Series A startup, is asking the question: is AI providing us tangible business value?

As one of those baby startups, we use AI a lot for our business (although we NEVER provide AI tooling to educators or students). Startups used to put a pitch deck together, make a prototype on Figma if they had a designer on the founding team, start to build a baby MVP if they had engineers, and then they’d try to raise a friends and family or money from private investors to actually hire a team to build out whatever they wanted to build out.

But when I was first building Learn Mobo, I vibe coded the first prototype so that people could respond to it (before my engineering co-founder joined and made it into a real, scalable product). Without having access to a real engineer, I was able to answer the question: Does my product provide value?

But embracing AI tooling is only the tip of the AI-industry iceberg.

Vulture published an article titled, “The Feed Is Fake,” where they talked about all of the AI-generated content tactics that actively take advantage of the trust we put in our human-to-human interactions online.

Think about the last thing you you bought on Amazon. Did you read the reviews?

Think about the last time you were scrolling through Tik Tok or Instagram. Did you listen to a video of an influencer telling you their opinion about something?

The article highlights Floodify, a stealth marketing agency founded by Joe Lim that automates promotion by operating massive fleets of dummy social media accounts using AI and automated editing.

At its peak, Floodify operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, Joe Lim says Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for ordinary users.

Joe Lim estimates that 90% of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise.

So you’re consuming less actually human-made content than ever. AND you’re interacting with humans less than you ever have.

Back in the day (a.k.a. a few years ago), if you had an issue with a business or a product, you would call a number, send a text, an email, and you would be connected with a real person. That real person could be sitting in the office of whatever business you were contacting or it could be one of the thousands of offshore customer service call centers that operate across the world.

But either way, you spoke to a human.

Today, the call center industry is dying because the labor being used to answer those calls and talk to those customers is now being re-allocated to AI solutions.

So, in conclusion, we are using AI in ways we don’t fully understand the value of, companies are outputting content that is indistinguishable to actual human beings, and we are replacing human interactions with automation.

But what does that mean for humankind?

Part II: How is this impacting us?

One of the students made a comment during the workshop about how they think we all embraced AI more than we would’ve because of COVID. Had COVID not happened, we would have been less isolated as a society, and therefore we would have been more skeptical of the consequences AI could have on our inner-relationships and communities.

But alas, I told this young student, while that may be true, we have been talking about the demise of technology on our communities since 1998.

Back in 1998, Robert Kraut and Colleagues discovered that greater internet use was linked to declines in family communication, smaller social circles, and increased loneliness and depression.

They called it a “paradox” because how could something that fostered greater communication also result in increased in isolation and loneliness?

COVID probably exacerbated this in a lot of ways, but our isolation had started a lot time ago, when we touted the internet as an accelerant for human communication without yet reconciling with the consequences that would come alongside them.

The Atlantic published an article called: “Another Symptom of Growing Isolation”.

It reviewed a study on interaction where participants carried around a device that randomly recorded sound bites of their speech throughout the day, comparing patterns from 2005 - 2019.

Let me just throw a bunch of tidbits at you like I did the students:

• Daily conversation declined by 28% between 2005 and 2019, from roughly 16,600 to 11,900 words spoken per day.

• People are spending more free time alone, while daily socializing with friends has also declined.

• Technology has replaced many everyday interactions, from ordering food to booking appointments and making reservations.

• Less face-to-face interaction can become self-reinforcing, increasing social anxiety and making future conversations feel more difficult.

Stanford Report published an article called: “Why AI companions and young people can make for a dangerous mix”.

Here are some more tidbits:

• Private AI companies benefit from higher engagement, which means implementing sycophantic logic that ensures that the user feels good enough that they keep interacting with it.

• These “frictionless” relationships avoid the conflict and compromise of real friendships, which can be damaging to young people who are actively forming how they perceive and understand how to build relationships.

• Rather than reducing loneliness, AI companions may deepen isolation.

Are you starting to see why this has to do with sex education?

Part III: Why Gen Z is different

I’m Gen Z. I grew up with the internet. And until I started building Learn Mobo (and ultimately found the need to increase my personal and professional visibility), I refused to have social media.

I hated the way it made me feel. I hated the feeling of being hyper-connected to people I didn’t care about. I felt like I had para-social relationships with people that at one point in time I had actually known in real life.

That isn’t the same experience for everyone, but that exhaustion of everything being online, of connecting primarily in what can feel like a fake space, is something Gen Z feels more than any other generation.

And all of those young people in the room agreed.

One of the students asked why.

My answer was that what was such an amazing accomplishment to other generations was normal to us. Baby Boomers, Gen X, even older millennials, have a sense of awe when it comes to technology and the internet. This stuff feels special because they’ve witnessed its evolution.

But Gen Z didn’t witness that. So the feeling of “Cell phones didn’t used to exist, and now I can watch my dog at home from my phone,” doesn’t really hit the same for us. Gen Z also has only ever existed in a time of rapid technology acceleration, so tech advancements are also nowhere near as alarming to us.

For example, I witnessed cars go from not-self-driving to self-driving, but even my intrigue of that evolution is significantly less than when my 80-year-old grandpa first rode in a Waymo.

And that critical Gen Z lens translates across the board.

Pew Research Center just completed a massive study on how Americans are adopting and perceiving new types of technology.

• 48% of Gen Z expected AI to have a negative effect on society.

• Only 14% expected a positive effect.

• 37% expected AI to negatively affect them personally.

• Young adults were more likely than older age groups to predict negative effects, even though younger adults were also among the most active AI users.

Gen Z more than ever is pushing for less digital experiences, to the point where companies are rapidly popping up to capture the new market.

• Sweatpals: A social fitness and wellness event platform that “wants to help people get off their phones and to in-real-life (IRL) experiences where they can meet new friends.”

• 222: an IRL marketplace facilitating social experiences at local venues/events through AI recommendations.

• Amata: An AI matchmaker that replaces the initial messaging back and forth and just sets you up on a date right away

• Corner: a social mapping and place-discovery platform designed for users to pin, curate, and share local spots like restaurants, cafes, and shops with friends instead of relying on traditional star-rated review sites

• Clyx: a friendship app built around one idea: getting you in the same room as people you actually want to spend time with.

Part IV: A new path forward (and what this all has to do with Learn Mobo)

We are actively going through a cultural transformation where we are experiencing less human interaction than ever before, exacerbating the isolation that’s been building since the dawn of the internet.

One of the more hopeless students painted an image of the future they felt was inevitable: Stationary, lazy people succumbing to the ease of AI being courted around in a way that stimulated real connection without ever actually talking to one another.

But I told them that they showed up. Hundreds of students showed up to question where AI should fit into their lives. Hundreds of students chose to educate themselves, and understand the difference between what they are told and what they believe to be true.

And that is what true AI literacy is. It’s the ability to sort through the endless AI messaging and ignorant politicians pretending they know more than they do about how AI works, and DECIDING where AI should fit in their lives.

It is acknowledging that AI can make you more isolated, so you make a different choice when you’re feeling lonely. It is deciding that you need to ask for a trusted adult instead of asking AI. It is educating yourself enough to be able to open that door for your kids in the first place. It is knowing the policies that are being passed around across your local politicians’ desks and understanding what child protections are being watered down because of OpenAI lobbying. It is about educating your parents, your grandparents, and everyone who might be consuming fake content online.

So many people feel so out of control when it comes to AI.

But AI is like your own reproductive health. If you don’t understand your own anatomy, how can you make truly informed decisions about what birth control would work best for you?

Control starts with education.

Learn Mobo is actively developing new courses that help young people understand how AI might be impacting how they build relationships with themselves and one another.

To help us with our work, please consider a paid subscription to The Moblog (all proceeds go directly to our building) or donating to our crowdfund.

Support our Kickstarter here

Across all of these different platforms, one thing always reigns true: people respond the most to really upsetting realities.

And to be totally honest with you, there really is no shortage of upsetting realities when it comes to sex education. There is no shortage of bad statistics, of bang-your-head-against-the-wall research, of horrible stories of young people’s experiences, of misinformation online or delivered by some notorious grifter that was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by states across the country.

But there is also no shortage of hopeful stories either. Of times when sex education absolutely worked, when it changed the tides for entire communities, when it turned around fateful odds.

Sometimes I feel like I’m screaming into a dark void: “SEX EDUCATION SAVES LIVES!!”

But sometimes, complete strangers, as they scroll through endless short-form videos, stop and watch mine, and join me in screaming it.

The only this works is hand-in-hand with our community.

My professional background is in Big Tech and startups.

I know a lot of founders, a lot of people who have tried to found, people who have raised millions, who had to shut the doors of their startups, or who sold them for hundreds of millions of dollars.

One thing everyone has a different opinion on is raising money.

Raise as much as possible. But don’t raise too much. If you can, don’t raise at all.

Wait as long as possible. Try grants. What about loans? If you don’t raise real money, how will your company ever take off?

Protect your equity, keep control. Investors are partners, they’ll help open doors you could never on your own.

Did you try grants yet? Friends and family is always a good starting place. But try not to put people on your cap that aren’t real investors.

As the CEO of Learn Mobo, my goal is not fame and endless riches. My goal is sex education. My goal is bettering as many communities as I possibly can. It is about the total rebranding and re-imagining of what sex education culturally means to us at all.

And so what better way to keep the lights on and fund our next chapter than Crowdfunding.

If we can’t raise through our community, than how will we convince them of better sex education?

I have over 100 subscribers on Substack now, and I have to imagine the main reason is because you saw my little Moblog icon and the description of “building better sex education,” and you yourself felt that that was something worth following. That was something worth building.

Sex education is worse than it has been in over 20 years. Besides the national conglomerate non-profits or the cartoonist YouTube videos that have been around for decades, who is building something new in sex education?

Ok now think: who is building something new in AI? In EdTech generally? In finance? In note-taking apps? In program management?

Did you think of 800 million other companies like I did?

Now let me ask again: who is building something new in sex education?

Is it arrogant of me to say, it’s just us?

If you believe in us, in what we’re building, in what our vision is: please consider supporting or sharing our crowdfund to keep us going!

Support our Crowdfund Here

Check out our social media, too!

• Instagram: www.instagram.com/learn_mobo

• Tik Tok: www.tiktok.com/@learnmobo

• YouTube: www.youtube.com/@learnmobo

• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/learnmobo

• Spotify:

Now, tangibly, this means that I grew up with the internet.

I didn’t quite grow up with everyone having an iPhone, we were more of the generation of Razor flip phones, Blackberries, and the Sidekick.

We did, however, have the iPod touch.

I remember my older brother, Nick, teaching me this funny trick where you could download an app that filled the screen with virtual beer, and then it would drain out the top right corner. When you tipped your iPod at just the right moment into your mouth, it looked like you were drinking it. It was hilarious. I have a memory of showing this to my fifth grade friends while we lined up on the playground.

When I was a kid, I was always trying to convince my parents to give me greater access to the internet. I had to do a formal proposal each time, starting with me putting together a presentation requesting an email address, then a Facebook account, and it went on and on.

I loved the internet. And when I reflect on that initial admiration, I realize it all started with Club Penguin.

Now for those unfamiliar, Club Penguin was a paradise. Culturally, ~10-12 year olds rallied behind it like nothing I have ever or will ever seen again. Everyone was a penguin, you could join different servers, and hang out with other penguins. There were games to win coins that you would then spend on your penguin outfits, the furniture in your igloo, or, if you were lucky, your army of Puffles.

Even looking at the screenshot of it just fills me with a sort of nostalgia I can’t even fully put into words.

On Club Penguin, you could be anyone you wanted. You could role play with entire strangers on the internet, or you could meet with your friends on the same server and plan some diabolical schemes (like attempting to rob the pizza parlor). You’d ask other penguins out on dates and dance the night away at the night club.

And no matter what you did, no matter who you played with, you were safe.

Club Penguin was MADE FOR KIDS. So that meant that there were heavy restrictions put in place around what was said or how you acted. You could easily report other penguins. People were getting kicked off Club Penguin all the time (including me at one point), BECAUSE IT WAS MADE FOR KIDS!

To me, at that age, Club Penguin was the exemplification of what was wonderful about the internet. It was a place you could play and feel connected. It could serve as an extension of the relationships you already had. You could be messaging your BFF on iChat playing Club Penguin as the two of you were making friends with an 11-year-old that was across the country. It was beautiful.

And yet, as a Gen Z, I grew up in this very particular period of time when the internet was everywhere. It was being glamorized in every which direction, and yet everyone, and I mean everyone, was experiencing all of this at the same time for the first time. And the truth was, despite everyone talking about it all the time, no one really knew how to talk about it… and that was because no one really knew what was going to happen.

Sound familiar to you?

And so because no one talked to me about the internet, as a malleable, naive child, I assumed that the internet was just an extension of Club Penguin. I viscerally remember believing that because Club Penguin was safe that meant that the internet was safe.

Until it wasn’t.

I saw young people posting on YouTube, like Fred who started posting when he was 13-years-old, Philip DeFranco, and YouTubers that I don’t even remember the names of anymore, but I still have these vivid memories of their faces and the backgrounds of where they filmed from. I built these para-social relationships with them, and I thought I could be one of them.

So I started posting on YouTube.

It got a few views here and there. And then suddenly, I started getting comments from a “fan.” I thought finally, time for me to be a star. I responded in the comments, and then he sent me a DM.

And I genuinely remember in that moment, convincing myself it was okay to respond to him, because I thought, “this is just like Club Penguin.”

He immediately started DM’ing me graphic nudes of himself, a grown man. My mom found them, because the only way I could get around starting a YouTube account as a child was by using her email address to create it. So the nudes were sent to her email.

Can you imagine being my mom? Seeing that her young daughter had started creating silly YouTube videos of herself in a fedora with a high-pitch voice modifier on, and somehow started engaging with a grown man that was trying to groom her? Seeing, in real time, the horrors of the world preying on your little girl who just wanted to watch Hannah Montana every night?

I remember my parents sitting me down at the dark wood dining table in our home. I don’t really remember what they said, but I remember feeling scared that maybe this man was hiding under my bed.

I wasn’t allowed to post on YouTube anymore.

As I got older, my friends and I used to play around on Omegle and Chatroulette, which if you’re unfamiliar with either, they’re basically platforms that connect you with a random stranger on the internet. NOT MADE FOR KIDS. Using those sites introduced me to spam bots, porn, and other random teenagers that were messing around on the internet.

My friend, Natalie, says it perfectly, “We were just little kids with our faces squished up against the window wanting to feel like adults.”

We were just curious.

My generation grew up with absolute trust of the internet and only through the traumatizing experiences of having absolute access to it, did we learn that the internet was not a safe place.

Only after fumbling around and seeing way more than we should’ve at that age did we learn that there was a fundamental difference between products that were MADE FOR KIDS and products that were just BEING USED BY KIDS.

Now what else in our modern world is like that?

The initial idea for Facebook was built to foster the collective voting on which women were more attractive.

Snapchat was initially made to make it easier to send nudes without worrying about them being permanent.

What about AI? Was AI made for kids?

The world today is so much different than the world I grew up in.

• AI chatbots are incredibly harmful in shaping how kids are understanding healthy relationships. Its sycophantic nature, where it always tells you exactly what you want to hear so you continue to engage with it, is creating what experts are coining “frictionless relationships".

• Deepfake technology, powered by AI, is being used to create new forms of Child Sexual Abuse Material through deep fake technology…technology that is accessible using Grok or any app store… technology that is being advertised to kids all over social media.

• Sextortion schemes, where people blackmail teenagers with nude images of them to get money, have already taken the lives of young boys.

• AI bots, fake influencers, fake comment sections, medical misinformation… YOU probably consumed something today, like a review on an Amazon product, that YOU didn’t even realize wasn’t real.

• Online forums and subcultures foster unhealthy thought patterns, validating toxicity and exacerbating isolation

• COVID still impacts our young people. We hear all the time from our partnering teachers and caregivers that the kids today are not all right.

Aren’t you overwhelmed?

We have left our kids in a world that we as adults barely even know how to talk about with them.

But being late doesn’t mean you shouldn’t show up at all. It just means it’s time to start running.

It isn’t impossible to fix what we’ve broken.

In fact, I made a whole YouTube video that goes over every single piece of AI technology I laid out above and describes exactly how to curb it. How it is completely within the realm of technical feasibility to protect our kids better from the harms of this technology. And how so much of the narrative that you consume everyday is to convince you that that isn’t true.

All of this has to do with sex education, because it has to do with how we form relationships with ourselves and one another. How we form a foundation that can stand up against social media, misinformation, porn, and AI bots.

Learn Mobo is about taking back the control of what was taken from me as a child. It is the reclamation of self-love, and it is me shouting from the rooftops that, “WE CAN STILL SAVE OUR KIDS!”

That foundation is the shield, it is the protector from the harms you and your children will invariably come across. And if all of us build this foundation, then what power do they have over us?

We’re running a grassroots crowdfunding campaign to support the build out of our upcoming curriculum, which includes digital safety and AI literacy for teens!

Back our campaign here

Back then we called it Intimate, before we ultimately decided that the term “Intimate” insinuated a side of sexuality that didn’t quite fit into the neutral sex education that we ultimately wanted to sell to schools.

At first, we built a silly product called CherryAI (…I know, same problem as “Intimate”) after the OpenAI API was first released. I trained it on a small dataset of public sex education materials that I had collected locally on my computer.

It started with all of the same core ideas: it’s hard to talk about these things, the internet is filled with untrustworthy information, and there are cascading consequences that plague the rest of our lives, because we never built that initial foundation that allowed us to really understand ourselves.

We even applied to YC! At the time, we got into the early startup accelerator, Antler.

But quickly, as OpenAI shifted from being a non-profit to a for-profit, and the AI Race started to take on a new face that none of us had anticipated, it became increasingly clear to me that AI was not the solution here.

If AI was trained on the internet, and the internet was filled with misinformation…then it was baked into the backbone of our product that eventually it would serve bad information.

If AI was trained to be sycophantic, and we were trying to educate young people on how to navigate friction in your relationships…then our product would be fundamentally flawed.

If AI regulation was so far behind, and we were clear about how we wanted to protect child privacy and sensitive data…then we would be hypocrites.

So we pivoted.

And “we” quickly turned into “I”, as my friends moved on with their lives, and I continued to prototype using Canva before eventually vibe-coding.

I started making full lesson plans and courting it around town with sex educators and researchers that I had connected with to get their feedback. I started talking to teachers and schools, trying to answer the question “What was so hard about teaching sex education?”

Well, teaching it, I learned.

And during this period of time, while I continued to build out what was becoming Learn Mobo, I was also working a full-time job at a remote startup.

I originally thought that remote work would give me more flexibility and time to build Learn Mobo. Alas, being young and dumb means thinking joining a startup would be easy.

And so, during this time, I started to feel the way anyone bootstrapping their own passion project while working at a high-growth Series B startup would feel…bad.

At the end of 2024, I wrote this in a journal I kept:

And yet I said this to myself:

At the beginning of 2025, at the top of some Google Doc draft I wrote: "Would I remember these moments?”

And yet I also wrote this:

I kept moving… I kept growing…

I grew my career at this startup as I continued to build Learn Mobo. Beta pilots sign ups started to accelerate, my network continued to grow. I started talking to investors just to see if what I was doing was valid.

I wrote this in the midst of it:

Ashley became one of those people.

Ashley was an engineer I worked with at a Robot Farm that eventually failed (we can talk about that another time), and I had reached out to her because I was hitting a technical wall with Learn Mobo.

And after we talked, a few weeks later, she reached out and she said, of her own free will and expertise, that she wanted to join me.

At first, numbed by rejection and people who said they would help me and then never did, I didn’t hold out a lot of hope. Ashley was moving to go work on a farm for the summer and would be off grid, so I figured she’d come back totally at peace with herself and determine that her life was meant to be one with nature (which didn’t leave any room to be developing a sex education digital platform).

But she went to that farm, she came back, and she said the same thing.

I want to join you.

So she did.

But what if we walked away?

The more we worked on Learn Mobo, the more I thought to myself, "I just want to be able to do this for as long as possible.”

Ashley was already working full-time, and eventually, after saving up a year of personal runway, I decided I would, too.

I started applying for other jobs just to give myself the last piece of validation that I would be fine even if I quit to go do my own thing for a bit.

I got a few great jobs at the end of my tenure at that remote startup, some of them I used to give me an extra salary boost in the months leading up to my departure.

But one of them I got, I almost really took.

It was a company I had admired for a while and had built relationships with over the last year. They offered me a lot of money, and told me I’d have a direct career path to General Manager.

And for a moment, I could see that whole life play out for me.

I could see myself apart of the team that had interviewed me. I could see myself commuting to their nice office in Brooklyn, bringing my dog Champ.

I could see myself growing and learning eventually becoming General Manager. Going to conferences and speaking on panels. I could see myself building a career, growing my finances, my savings, maybe I’d get lucky and my equity would play out for me. I’d probably have kids in the next few years, my husband and I would upgrade to a 2-bedroom in Tribeca. I’d go to the spa, get fancy dinners, never worry about money.

But would I regret leaving behind Learn Mobo? Would I be able to pursue it in the future once I’ve built more financial freedom for myself? Once I’ve had kids? Would I be okay if Learn Mobo ultimately and completely failed, when I could’ve been a 30-year-old GM at a unicorn startup?

And in times of mental unrest like this, there was only one thing I could ever do. I turned to Cheryl Strayed.

And I re-read her Dear Sugar piece that I’ve read probably 20 different times at different decision points in my life: The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us.

And at the very end of her beautiful exploration of the different paths of our lives we’ll never live, she writes:

So, how far can we get?

All throughout the last few years, there have been many times I thought I’d walk away. Many times I struggled through, feeling badly about myself.

And over and over again, I’ve told myself that it would hurt me more to not even try.

And now, I know, that what I chose was the correct decision for me. I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I know that I’m going to try to do this for as long as I possibly can.

I will answer the question: how far can we get?

And in 6 months from now, Learn Mobo will be different. I’ll be different. And that alone is one of the most exciting feelings I’ve ever felt in my life.

I don’t believe Learn Mobo will fail because it isn’t trying to solve a real problem… because people don’t agree that sex education matters, that people aren’t willing to pay for it, that parents and teachers don’t struggle with this, and actually we were wrong sex education IS super easy and convenient and everyone ALREADY KNOWS everything they need to about their bodies and anatomy, navigating AI and social media’s impact on how they form relationships ,understanding consent, what all of the different STIs are, what the difference between a diaphragm and a female condom is, and how pregnancy works!

See how ludicrous that sounds?

Learn Mobo will fail only because we give up on it. Only because we run out of runway, and we don’t have any more steam left. Because it was too hard.

But I will only give up on it if I have given absolutely all of myself to it. If I have truly, from the bottom of my soul, felt that I have tried the hardest I possibly can.

But at that point… why would it fail?

If this resonated, please consider helping us with the next phase of Learn Mobo by backing or sharing our crowdfunding campaign. Everything we do, we do to better sex education for everyone.

Back us on Kickstarter

A national survey found persistent confusion among U.S. adults about what actually counts as consent and what counts as sexual assault.

The CDC’s 2023 youth data states plainly that significant gaps in knowledge about sexual consent are prominent, especially among adolescents. Among high schoolers who had been sexually active, roughly 1 in 5 did not verbally ask for consent at their most recent sexual contact.

More and more, I wonder how many non-consensual experiences were caused simply by ignorance? By never learning the nuance of body language, recognition of conflicting circumstances, by focusing too much on your own eagerness than stopping to consider your partner’s?

And the consequences are real, tangible, and felt by everyone I’ve ever met.

The CDC’s most recent national survey finds that more than 1 in 5 women and 1 in 31 men have experienced completed or attempted rape in their lifetimes.

More than four in five female survivors were first assaulted before age 25, and almost half before age 18.

The years when consent education could reach a young person are the same years when the risk is highest.

A lot of what we absorbed about consent is outdated.

Many of us learned some version of “no means no,” and later, “look for an enthusiastic yes.” Health educators have actually moved past both. The current standard is affirmative consent: agreement that is actively communicated, ongoing throughout, and able to be withdrawn at any point. Illinois wrote this into law, specifying that consent must be freely given, can be withdrawn, and is never implied by having agreed to something earlier.

That shift matters, because it turns consent from a vibe you’re supposed to read into a skill with teachable parts. And skills can be taught, practiced, and gotten better at.

And consent education can be taught early and have absolutely nothing to do with romantic or sexual relationships. It can simply be lessons around sharing like always asking to play with someone’s toys before you assume you can. It can be lessons around boundaries like being able to communicate you don’t want to be poked or you don’t feel like hugging today.

But most students aren’t set up to ever learn any of these skills at all.

Only a small number of states require sex education to cover consent, and just 11 states plus the District of Columbia so much as mention “consent,” “sexual assault,” or “healthy relationships” in their standards.

Even where sex ed is required, quality is incredibly inconsistent. We’ve seen students getting widely different sex education at the same school just because it was taught by different teachers.

A 2025 Boston University study found that while 42 states require some sex education, only 19 mandate that it be medically accurate. For most students, whether they learn what consent actually means comes down to their zip code.

But more people are talking about consent education than ever before

Consent has moved from the margins to the center of the conversation.

Guttmacher found that most state consent requirements on the books were passed in 2016 or later, and states like Washington have gone as far as requiring instruction on affirmative consent.

Australia mandated it across the board. Parents support it. Schools are moving toward it. We like to believe that the culture is beginning to shift.

What we built

Our new Consent and Healthy Relationships program gives educators and families a medically accurate, age-appropriate way to teach consent as what it actually is: a concrete, learnable skill. It’s built for schools that need a curriculum they can stand behind in front of a board, and for parents who want to have these conversations at home without winging it.

Consent education works best when it’s early, accurate, and consistent. The research is clear on the need. We built the tool for the response.

The Consent and Healthy Relationships program is available now. If you’re a school, a district, or a family who wants to see it, we’d love to show you.

Sign up for Learn Mobo today

Here is a sneak peak of some of the material:

Sex education has never really reflected that idea. Historically, it’s been siloed: either something schools handle (and parents offload it entirely), or something families are expected to manage entirely on their own. The result is that kids often get incomplete information from one direction, nothing from the other, and nobody quite knows what landed, until that child grows up and (optimistically) realizes it on their own.

Learn Mobo is built on a different assumption: that it works best when everyone who cares about a child is connected.

That’s why we just launched comprehension tracking across the platform, for students, educators, and parents.

Here’s how it works.

An educator uses Learn Mobo’s ready-to-go sex education programs to teach a classroom of students.

Afterwards (or sometimes beforehand), they can assign more material that includes quizzes, misinformation-vs.-facts games, and interactive exercises that test comprehension.

They can see, across their entire classroom, which concepts students grasped and which ones didn’t stick. That means they can make a real decision: do I need to revisit this with the class? Is there a group of students who needs more support? What do I do differently next time? Or if beforehand, what do I focus on for this lesson?

At the same time, a parent has their own view of their child specifically.

They can see the curriculum their child is being taught (full transparency into what’s covered and how), and they can see how their individual kid is doing. If their child is struggling with a particular topic, the parent doesn’t have to wait for a teacher conference or a concerning conversation to find out. They can see it, and they can decide what to do with that information, whether that’s starting a conversation at home, asking a follow-up question, or simply staying informed.

It means that when a concept doesn't land in the classroom, it doesn't just disappear into a gap. It can be reinforced by a teacher who now has the data to prioritize it. It can be followed up on by a parent who now has the visibility to act on it.

This matters more in sex education than almost anywhere else. This is the subject that gets cut, rushed, skipped, or handled so awkwardly that kids come away with more confusion than clarity. It's also the subject where the gaps show up in the most consequential ways… in decisions kids make about their bodies, their boundaries, and their relationships.

The “it takes a village” idea isn’t just a nice sentiment. It’s a design principle.

Sex education works when the adults in a child’s life are connected around it. Comprehension tracking is one piece of that. It’s the infrastructure that makes the village actually functional.

See it at learnmobo.com.

Learn Mobo transforms K–12 sex education and human development from awkward and time intensive lectures into engaging, interactive experiences built for schools, families, and the communities that want to get this right.

And there was one big common theme that popped up over and over and over again that I’m sure no one is surprised about: AI.

Everywhere I turned, someone was building an AI companion. Or an AI tool for children. Or both.

But I left with something I can only describe as clarity. Sometimes, when you walk through those sorts of rooms, you start to become self-conscious about what you’re building.

Are we not going fast enough? Is it not innovative enough? Are we not AI enough?

But it made it clear how critical and important it is that at Learn Mobo we 1) build a solution that helps people navigate this new world, 2) that that solution is an extension of what human beings are capable of, and 3) that it can’t be AI.

The people deciding what’s safe for children in the age of AI are, right now, entirely the companies building AI products. Those companies are for-profit entities backed by investors, and they are legally obligated to make decisions based on what is most financially lucrative for their shareholders.

Which means that when they’re determining where the ethics line is, what level of emotional dependency is acceptable, what counts as too sexually explicit, they’re making those decisions inside a profit motive.

That’s the system we built and are deliberating investing in, with the impact most felt with our kids.

And that sort of system ensures that any sort of legislation that tries to guardrail protections for our CHILDREN has faced nothing but scrutiny, millions of lobbied dollars against them, and veto after veto after veto.

The California bill that should have passed

In 2025, California passed Assembly Bill 1064. It was authored by Assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan and sponsored by Common Sense Media, one of the most trusted names in children’s media and technology safety. The bill was described at the time as the only legislation in the country that protected kids from the risks of AI companion chatbots while still allowing the industry to continue to innovate.

It passed the California legislature with bipartisan support.

The guardrails were specific and, frankly, not radical.

No encouraging self-harm or eating disorders.

No erotic or sexually explicit interactions with minors.

No posing as a mental health provider.

And there would be civil penalties for companies that violated those standards.

But then OpenAI, the broader tech lobby, and even literal celebrities spent millions fighting it, resulting in Governor Newsom vetoing it in October 2025.

After the veto, Common Sense Media launched a ballot initiative to bring the same protections directly to California voters. OpenAI put out a competing ballot measure. They eventually agreed to merge the two… but the version that came out the other side quietly dropped the provision that had been the centerpiece of Common Sense Media’s original effort: an explicit ban on chatbots engaging in sexual content with minors.

So New York picked it up

This month, New York passed its own version: the Prohibition of Unsafe Chatbot Features for Minors, sponsored by Senator Kristen Gonzalez and Assembly member Alex Bores, developed in partnership with Attorney General Letitia James and Common Sense Media. It prohibits AI chatbot operators from offering their products to minors when the product contains features that simulate a personal relationship, store psychological and behavioral data on a child across sessions, or engage in sexually explicit interactions.

It passed both chambers unanimously. It now sits on Governor Hochul’s desk.

A woman named Maria Raine testified in support of the bill because her son Adam died after being coached by a chatbot. Common Sense Media CEO James Steyer called it nation-leading legislation. He said it’s time to stop tech companies from using our children as guinea pigs.

I think the fact that we’re here, that New York had to pass what California should have signed a year ago, that this protection has been vetoed, watered down, and resurrected across state lines while the technology accelerated, tells us something important about the gap between where policy is and where it needs to be.

What I keep coming back to from Tech Week

At Tech Week, nobody in those rooms was talking about that gap. Not because they didn’t care, but because the incentive structure doesn’t require them to.

You can build an AI companion product, raise a seed round, demo it at Tech Week, and never once be required to answer the question: what happens when your intervention comes too late?

And right now, the legislation that was supposed to make the external accountability structure that would require companies to answer for what their products do to children is losing. Slowly, state by state, lobby dollar by lobby dollar, veto by veto.

I’m not cynical about technology. I built a technology company, and I went to Tech Week because I believe in what’s possible.

But I walked out of those rooms with something clarified that I’d been circling for a while: the reason Learn Mobo doesn’t put AI in front of kids isn’t a technical limitation. It’s a choice we made about who should be in the room when a child is learning about their body, their relationships, their safety.

Our answer is: a trusted adult. A parent. An educator. Someone who has no financial incentive in how that conversation goes, someone whose only obligation is to the child in front of them.

What this requires from all of us

Governor Hochul should sign the New York bill.

But beyond that signature, what this moment requires is for more people, parents, educators, school administrators, pediatricians, school nurses, anyone who works with children, to understand that the regulatory infrastructure meant to protect kids from AI is incomplete, actively contested, and moving much slower than the technology it’s supposed to govern.

That gap doesn’t get filled by legislation alone. It gets filled by education and by adults who understand what these tools actually do, who can have honest conversations with children about what they’re encountering online, and who are equipped to be the trusted source of accurate information before a chatbot gets there first.

That’s the work. That’s why we exist.

And watching the bill move from California to New York to Governor Hochul’s desk, watching it get vetoed and watered down and resurrected, and seeing the endless supply of AI companions being sold to kid, has only made that clearer to me.

The technology is not going to wait for the law to catch up. So we can’t either.

Jenna Scherma is the co-founder and CEO of Learn Mobo, a modern K-12 sex education and human development platform. Learn Mobo transforms sex education from awkward lectures into engaging experiences that meet teens, parents, and educators where they are.

Follow along at learnmobo.com or subscribe to this free Substack for more.

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Two things stood out to me.

1. The consent requirement almost got cut.

The bill’s author, Sen. Gary Byrne, signaled two days before the final vote that he’d strip the consent requirement from the bill, citing “different thoughts in different communities.” His preferred approach was to let school boards decide locally whether consent should be part of any sex education curriculum.

Within 48 hours, after public pushback, he reversed course. The final bill kept the consent language. It now requires “age appropriate instruction concerning the importance of consent to sexual activity between two individuals” in any sex education curriculum taught in Indiana schools. The House approved the change 72-20.

When even a politically conservative state legislature can’t quietly remove consent education without immediate backlash, that’s a huge signal about public appetite.

Teaching consent is no longer a partisan flashpoint. It’s a baseline expectation.

2. The part of the bill nobody really fought was transparency.

The headline requirement of SB 442 is that any human sexuality curriculum has to be approved by the local school board and posted publicly online. Parents can see exactly what’s being taught.

This is the part of the bill nobody seriously contested.

Across the political spectrum, the appetite for transparency in sex education is overwhelming. The contention in sex education is almost never about whether parents should be able to see what’s being taught.

Building for a new baseline

Indiana doesn’t actually require sex education in schools. It only mandates lessons on HIV and AIDS. Where sex education is taught, schools are expected to focus on abstinence. The current floor is essentially zero, and “local control” has often functioned less as a principle and more as cover for keeping that floor low.

I think there’s a version of this conversation that takes local autonomy seriously while still acknowledging that progress requires a new baseline.

Every kid in this country deserves access to medically accurate, age-appropriate education on consent, anatomy, healthy relationships, and human development. That’s not a political position. Comprehensive sex education reduces teen pregnancy. It reduces STI transmission. It reduces sexual violence. It improves the likelihood that young people recognize abuse, seek help, and grow into adults who can navigate intimate relationships with skill and care.

This is what I think the Indiana fight was actually about. The 48-hour reversal wasn’t really about one provision in one state’s bill. It was a small surfacing of something much bigger: the gap between what the public actually wants for kids and the systems we currently have to deliver it.

People want transparency. People want consent taught. People want this done well. The systems we have just haven’t caught up.

Where Learn Mobo fits

This is the gap we’re building Learn Mobo to close.

We’re a K-12 sex education and human development platform that’s medically accurate, age-appropriate, and modular by design. Schools, districts, and homeschool families can use it on their own terms. Educators choose how to teach. Parents and administrators see exactly what’s being covered, top to bottom. Communities keep their voice in how the material is delivered.

What we do is provide the floor. The accurate, modern, age-appropriate baseline that every kid deserves access to, regardless of which zip code they’re born into or which legislature happens to be debating their education that year.

Our job is to give schools and families the tools to do this well, with confidence and transparency, so the conversation can finally move past whether kids deserve real information and toward the much more interesting question of how to deliver it well.

The Indiana bill is a small step in the right direction. The fact that consent stayed in is a win. The fact that transparency is now required is a win. But it shouldn’t take 48 hours of public pressure to keep one sentence about consent in a state’s sex education law.

We can do better than this. We have to. And the public, as Indiana just demonstrated, is already there.

Read more about the Indiana bill here.

Are you a parent, teacher, or student who is interested in learning more about Learn Mobo?

Check out Learn Mobo now!

Or reach out to partnerships@learnmobo.com if you want to get in touch.

But one thing we keep noticing while reading legislation across states is that there are still a lot of shared underlying concerns.

Alabama’s proposed SB209 includes instruction around:

• cyberbullying

• sexting

• pornography

• online predators

• the legal implications of sharing sexual content online

The broader standards also include medically accurate HIV/STI instruction, parent opt-out rights, and content around identifying unhealthy relationships and abuse.

And regardless of whether someone thinks those standards go too far or not far enough, I think it points to something important: The baseline has changed.

As someone who grew up with everything from Club Penguin to Chatroulette, I cannot overstate how important it is that sex education is actually relevant to the world young people live in today.

You cannot talk about healthy relationships without talking about Snapchat.

You cannot talk about body development and self-esteem without talking about social media’s impact on body image.

You cannot talk about STIs and birth control without talking about online misinformation.

You cannot talk about sexual harassment without talking about deepfakes.

A huge amount of how young people experience relationships, sexuality, peer pressure, harassment, and identity formation now happens online.

And schools across the country are trying to figure out what the new baseline should actually be.

That’s a huge part of how we think about building Learn Mobo.

Not one-size-fits-all.

Not forcing the same implementation everywhere.

But building a new baseline.

A modern platform that allows schools and communities to adapt sex education to their own standards and values, while still making sure students have access to medically accurate, age-appropriate information about relationships, safety, and health.

Check out Learn Mobo now

In one study, 91% of patients reported never once being asked about their sexual health by a provider.

More than half of primary care doctors say they don’t bring it up regularly.

And that isn’t an accident.

The average medical student receives fewer than 10 hours of sexual health education across all four years of training. There is no standardized curriculum for this. No national guidelines on what to teach or how to teach it. Future physicians are walking out of residency having never learned how to have this conversation…not because they don’t want to, but because no one ever taught them.

So what happens? You end up sitting across from your doctor, the one person who is credentialed, obligated, and positioned to give you accurate, judgment-free information about your own body ,and they’re just as uncomfortable as you are. Maybe more!

When sexual health conversations don’t happen in clinical settings, people lose access to timely screenings, don’t ask about symptoms they’ve been quietly worried about, and continue to domino misinformation across the board.

One nurse even told us that they were handed out brochures to recommend “wearing two condoms at once.”

We tend to treat this as a cultural problem. It’s squeamishness about the topic that we just have to live with. But at it’s core, it’s a curriculum problem. It starts in medical education. It continues through K-12. It compounds across every institution that decided this topic was too uncomfortable to address head-on.

At Learn Mobo, we are building tools that help educators, whether you are at home, in a school, or at a doctor’s office, actually teach this content well, at the right ages, with the kind of rigor the subject deserves.

Right now, we’re actively reaching out to physician offices and medical schools who want to think through this differently. If you’re working in healthcare and you’re frustrated by this same gap, or if you’re involved in medical education and trying to build something better, we want to hear from you.

Reach out directly at partnerships@learnmobo.com.

Follow Learn Mobo for more on what’s missing from sex ed!

Sign Up Now

Sources: CDC Guide to Taking a Sexual History · ACOG Committee Opinion on Comprehensive Sexuality Education · AAFP Policy on Adolescent Sexuality and Contraception · Boston University SPH, 2023 · PMC: Medical and Health Care Professionals’ Sexuality Education · PubMed: Patients’ and Providers’ Perspectives on Sexual Health Discussion in the US

At some point the conversation turned to compliance, specifically the legal requirements for delivering sex education in different states and jurisdictions. It’s a question that comes up more than you’d think when you’re building something in this space.

So I told them: fewer than half of U.S. states even mandate that sex education be taught at all. And of the states that do require it, only 19 require that the content be medically accurate.

One of them gasped.

“There’s no way.”

I showed them the data. A peer-reviewed study published in 2025 in the American Journal of Public Health: 19 states require medical accuracy in sex ed. 9 states require any mention of consent. And across the country, what a young person learns about their own body, their health, and their relationships is almost entirely determined by which side of a state line they were born on.

I’ve had this reaction before. Smart, educated, engaged people who care deeply about kids and education are genuinely shocked when they learn how little protection exists around the accuracy of what gets taught. They assumed there was a floor, but in most places… there just isn’t.

This is the thing that keeps us building Learn Mobo.

It’s not about politics. We are deliberately, intentionally neutral. We’re not in the business of telling families what to believe about sexuality, gender, or relationships. We think parents and educators deserve the right to make those calls for themselves. But the baseline of medical accuracy shouldn’t be a policy debate. Knowing how your body works shouldn’t be a privilege determined by geography.

The data is stark:

• 19 out of 50 states require sex ed to be medically accurate

• 26 states don’t require sex ed to be taught at all

• 41 states have no requirement to discuss consent

What we’re building at Learn Mobo is a resource for the families and schools who don’t want to leave this to chance, wherever they are, whatever they believe, whatever their circumstances. A curriculum that is accurate, age-appropriate, and actually designed to be used by real people navigating a complicated topic.

Check out Learn Mobo now

Sources: The State of Sexual Education, AJPH (2025) | SIECUS 2025 State Report Cards | The 74 Million

And yet, the debate that followed was anything but quiet.

Over 100 people signed up to comment at the State Board of Education meeting, with supporters arguing the updates were long overdue and opponents raising concerns about parental visibility and religious freedoms. (Bridge Michigan)

The vote passed 6-2, along party lines.

Then, just a few months later, the pressure escalated further. The Department of Justice opened investigations into three Michigan school districts to determine whether they had included sexual orientation and gender identity content in any pre-K through 12th grade class, and whether parents had been properly notified of their right to opt out. (U.S. Department of Justice)

Whatever your read on the politics, this moment points to something schools across the country are grappling with: sex education has become one of the most contested spaces in K-12, and the stakes for getting it wrong have never been higher.

The real issue underneath the noise

Strip away the headlines and you find a few consistent concerns on all sides: Parents want to know what their children are being taught, and they want a real say in it. Educators want to do right by their students without getting caught in the crossfire. Districts want to stay compliant with evolving requirements without alienating their communities.

These aren’t actually incompatible goals. But most sex education infrastructure was not built to serve all of them at once.

Traditional curriculum approaches tend to be rigid. One district adopts a standard package, rolls it out uniformly, and hopes it holds up to scrutiny from every corner of the community. That worked when the landscape was quieter. It doesn’t work now.

What a different approach looks like with Learn Mobo

At Learn Mobo, we built our platform around the reality that sex education cannot be one-size-fits-all, and that trust between schools, parents, and students has to be built proactively, not defended reactively.

Here’s what that means in practice:

Districts get accountability and oversight built in, not bolted on afterward. Everything is documented, trackable, and aligned to the standards that matter in their state.

Teachers walk in with ready-to-teach curriculum that saves hours of prep and doesn’t require them to become the face of a controversy they didn’t ask for.

Parents have full visibility into what their children are learning before it enters the classroom. They can review content, understand the approach, and exercise their rights with full information rather than half-heard rumors.

And students get accurate, engaging content in formats that actually hold their attention, because a curriculum that kids tune out helps no one.

Why this matters beyond Michigan

Michigan is not an outlier. It’s a preview. States and districts everywhere are being asked to update outdated guidance, navigate new federal scrutiny, and deliver sex education that works for families with genuinely different values and expectations.

The path forward isn’t to water everything down until it offends no one and helps no one. It’s to build infrastructure that centers transparency, flexibility, and trust from the start.

That’s the problem we’re solving. And if what’s happening in Michigan tells us anything, it’s that the window for getting ahead of this is narrowing.

Check out Learn Mobo now to learn more.

That was a deliberate choice. We wanted to be close to our early users, understand what they needed, and make sure they got real support from day one.

We’re still going to do that for schools and organizations. The high-touch pilot experience isn’t going anywhere.

But we’ve also heard from educators, parents, and school nurses who just want to get started. They don’t need us to hold their hand. They have a class to teach next week, or a teen who’s asking questions, or a curriculum gap they need to fill. They need access now.

So we built it.

As of today, you can sign up for Learn Mobo directly. No waitlist. No back-and-forth. You create your account, you get access, you start.

Here’s what you get:

• 3 full sex ed curriculum plans: personal hygiene, reproductive health, STI prevention, with more on the way

• A library of 100+ resources and activities: games, mini-lessons, quizzes, and interactive slides

• Progress tracking for students

• Content developed with educators, health professionals, and parents

Everything is designed to be taught with zero prep. You don’t need to be a sex ed expert. You just need to show up.

We built Learn Mobo for the educator who’s been handed sex ed as an afterthought. For the parent who wants to have this conversation but doesn’t know where to start. For the school nurse who’s the only person in the building anyone will actually talk to about this stuff.

If that’s you…the door is open.

Get Started with Learn Mobo Now

Into this patchwork, one organization has spent decades trying to establish a coherent foundation: SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

What SIECUS is

SIECUS was founded in 1964 by Dr. Mary Calderone, the former medical director of Planned Parenthood, with a simple premise: that sexual health is a fundamental component of human health, and that people deserve accurate information about it. Six decades later, SIECUS remains the most prominent national voice for comprehensive sex education. They have published standards, tracked state policy, and advocated for evidence-based approaches in schools.

Their most significant contribution to the field is the National Sex Education Standards (NSES), now in its second edition (updated in 2020). These standards define what comprehensive, developmentally appropriate sex education should look like from kindergarten through 12th grade.

These were the standards we initially used to guide the design of our Learn Mobo curriculum.

What the standards cover

The NSES organizes sex education into seven core topic areas:

• Anatomy & Physiology

• Puberty & Adolescent Development

• Identity

• Pregnancy & Reproduction

• Sexually Transmitted Infections & HIV

• Healthy Relationships

• Personal Safety.

Each topic is mapped to grade bands (K–2, 3–5, 6–8, and 9–12) with specific learning goals at each level. The standards are designed to be cumulative: what kids learn in elementary school lays the foundation for what they’ll engage with in middle and high school.

What’s notable about the NSES is what they’re not: they’re not a curriculum. They’re a map of what students should know and be able to do, not a script for how to teach it. This matters for schools. Adopting the NSES doesn’t mean signing onto any particular political perspective. It means committing to the principle that students should leave school with accurate, age-appropriate information about their own bodies, health, and relationships.

Why this matters right now

41 states and D.C. require sex education, HIV education, or both. Of those, just 26 require that the content be medically accurate. SIECUS tracks this policy landscape in detail, and the picture is uneven at best.

Meanwhile, the research on outcomes is remarkably consistent. Comprehensive sex education, the kind the NSES describes, is associated with delayed sexual initiation, lower rates of sexually transmitted infections, reduced teen pregnancy, and better outcomes around consent and healthy relationships. These aren’t ideological claims. They’re public health findings replicated across decades of study.

Schools that avoid the topic don’t protect students from it. They just leave students less equipped.

What this means for schools trying to do it right

The challenge most schools face isn’t a lack of will, it’s a lack of infrastructure. There’s no shortage of administrators and health staff who understand the importance of this content. The barrier is practical: finding curriculum that’s credible, age-appropriate, flexible enough to work in their community, and defensible to a school board or skeptical parent.

The SIECUS standards give schools a roadmap. What they need alongside that roadmap are tools that make the journey manageable.

That’s the gap we’re working to close at Learn Mobo. We build curriculum tools and frameworks designed to help schools actually deliver sex education that meets the NSES bar, without requiring every school to start from scratch or navigate the politics alone.

If you’re a school administrator, health professional, or educator thinking through how to approach sex ed in your community, the NSES is a good place to start. You can access the full standards at siecus.org.

Learn Mobo is a sex education enabler. We build tools that help schools, charter networks, and families deliver high-quality, evidence-based sex education: age-appropriate, politically neutral, and ready to use.

Sign up for Learn Mobo now

13.9 births per 1,000 teens in the US. Compare that to the UK at 8.2, France at 5.1, Canada at 4.9, and Sweden at 2.5.

So what are they doing that we’re not?

Countries with the lowest teen pregnancy rates share one thing in common: they actually talk to their kids about relationships, their bodies, and sex. They provide comprehensive sex education, real access to sexual health services, and none of the shame that makes this conversation feel impossible in the US.

Meanwhile, 82% of teen pregnancies in the US are unintended. And we’re still debating whether schools should be allowed to teach comprehensive sex ed at all.

A study out of the University of Washington found that teens who received comprehensive sex education were 60% less likely to report becoming pregnant or impregnating someone compared to those who received abstinence-only or no sex education. Sixty percent.

Comprehensive sex ed might be one of the most under-leveraged teen pregnancy prevention tools we have, and we’re treating it like a culture war flashpoint instead of a solvable public health problem.

That’s why we built Learn Mobo, a modern, neutral sex education platform for schools, parents, and students.

Not another pamphlet. Not another outdated sex ed curriculum that skips the parts that actually matter. Something built for how teens actually learn today.

Right now, we’re opening up a small group of early partners to shape what it becomes before we launch. If you’re a teacher, school administrator, or parent who’s tired of waiting for the education system to catch up on sexual health, we want to hear from you. Early partners work directly with us in a feedback loop. You get access, we get people who actually care about getting this right.

Join the pilot now!

Sources: Congressional Research Service (R45184), Guttmacher Institute, University of Washington study

This isn’t a political issue. It isn’t a values issue. It’s a delivery problem. And the data makes that very clear.

The Demand for Sex Education Is Overwhelming

96% of parents support sex education being taught in high school. Support cuts across party lines in ways that almost nothing else does right now. 93% of adults AND 87% of teens say young people should receive information about both abstinence and contraception. Not one or the other. Both.

Comprehensive sex education is one of the most broadly supported public health positions in the country. Which makes what’s actually happening in schools all the more striking.

What Sex Education Looks Like in Schools Today

Only 38% of high schools and 14% of middle schools teach all 19 topics the CDC identifies as critical components of sex education. The number of schools providing comprehensive sex education has actually declined over the last two decades.

Sex education guidelines vary enormously by state, and the resources that currently exist simply weren’t built to adapt to that variability. Most curricula are one-size-fits-all in a landscape that is anything but. The result is that what a student learns about their body, their health, and their relationships depends almost entirely on their zip code.

Parents Aren’t Filling the Gap

One assumption people make is that even if schools aren’t covering everything, parents are picking up the slack at home. The data says otherwise.

57% of parents feel uncomfortable talking to their kids about sex. 50% of teens feel uncomfortable bringing it up in the other direction. And more than 60% of kids have never talked to their parents about consent at all.

The reason most parents struggle isn’t because they don’t care. It’s because they weren’t taught either. 6 in 10 American parents say they grew up in households where sex was considered taboo. You can’t easily pass on what you never received. And so the cycle continues, with each generation of kids piecing together their understanding of sex, relationships, bodies, and consent from friends, social media, and whatever a gym teacher managed to fit into two class periods.

Teachers Aren’t Equipped to Fix It Either

So if parents are uncomfortable and schools aren’t mandating comprehensive content, surely the teachers assigned to cover sex ed are at least well-trained?

In a study of 335 sex ed teachers in Illinois, 50% lacked confidence teaching about condoms and birth control. 30% had received no special training in sex education at all.

These are not bad teachers. They are teachers who were handed one of the most sensitive topics in education, given little to no preparation, and asked to navigate it in a classroom while managing parents who might complain, administrators who might push back, and state guidelines that vary widely in what they allow.

The Gap Is Real. And It’s Solvable.

The demand for comprehensive sex education is there. The research on why it matters is unambiguous. What’s missing is delivery, and that’s exactly what Learn Mobo was built to address.

Learn Mobo is a gamified sex education platform designed for the way kids actually learn, built to work within the variability of state guidelines, and designed to support students, parents, and schools so no one has to navigate this alone.

Because every kid deserves access to accurate, age-appropriate sex education, regardless of where they live, what their school covers, or how comfortable their parents feel having the conversation.

Learn more at www.learnmobo.com

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After working with our early partners (schools, youth organizations, teachers, and parents), we kept hearing the same thing: students learn differently, and teachers teach differently. Some kids want to dive deep into topics that resonate with them. Others just need quick, clear answers to specific questions. And everyone moves at their own pace.

On the educator side, we heard similar needs. Some teachers want to present material to their whole class. Others prefer letting students work independently. Many want something they can use to supplement their existing curriculum without overhauling everything they’re already doing.

The problem? Most comprehensive sex education programs force you to pick one approach. You either get a rigid, sequential curriculum or scattered resources with no structure.

We wanted to build something better.

Introducing Learn Mobo’s Resource Library and Micro-Lessons

Today, we’re excited to announce that our new Resource Library is live on learnmobo.com.

The Resource Library gives students, educators, and parents access to standalone micro-lessons on specific topics. Think of them as bite-sized modules that cover everything from quick introductions (like “What does intersex mean?”) to more detailed explorations (like reproductive anatomy and sexual health basics).

Every micro-lesson still has the interactive visuals, games, and hands-on activities that make Learn Mobo engaging. We didn’t strip anything down or make them less comprehensive. We just made them modular.

How to Use Micro-Lessons in Your Classroom or at Home

The beauty of micro-lessons is flexibility. Here are just a few ways educators and parents are already using them:

For teachers:

• Add specific lessons to supplement your existing health curriculum

• Let students choose topics they want to explore independently

• Highlight the most important concepts for your classroom without teaching the full curriculum

• Assign micro-lessons as homework or independent study

For parents:

• Answer specific questions your kids have in the moment

• Explore topics together at your own pace

• Fill in gaps from what they’re learning (or not learning) at school

• Create teachable moments without needing a full curriculum

For students:

• Learn about topics you’re curious about

• Go deeper on subjects that matter to you

• Move at your own pace

• Get clear, accurate answers to questions you might not feel comfortable asking out loud

What Makes Learn Mobo’s Micro-Lessons Different

Unlike other sex education resources, our micro-lessons aren’t just text and videos. Every lesson includes:

• Interactive visuals that help students understand complex concepts

• Games and activities that reinforce learning

• Medically accurate, age-appropriate information

• Inclusive content that reflects diverse identities and experiences

• Flexibility to use as standalone lessons or as part of our full curriculum

Whether you’re a teacher looking to supplement your health class, a parent wanting to support your child’s education at home, or a student curious about topics your school hasn’t covered yet, the Resource Library gives you what you need, when you need it.

Want to try out our mini-lessons? Sign up now at: https://www.learnmobo.com/#signup

Because comprehensive sex education should be just that: comprehensive, accessible, and flexible enough to meet students where they are.

Here’s what happened over the last twelve months building a sex education platform for K-12 schools:

We started by asking parents what they actually thought about their kids’ sex education. 200 of them told us the truth: 82% said it was inadequate. That number still hits me hard every time I say it out loud.

In the spring, we went through Bryony Cole’s no-equity accelerator. Six weeks of figuring out how to build this sex ed tech startup without giving away equity we couldn’t afford to lose. She featured us in her newsletter, which meant more people started paying attention.

We built our first Learn Mobo prototype and convinced 50 researchers and sex educators to join our waitlist and test it. Their feedback was honest, sometimes brutal, and exactly what we needed to hear. So we went back to the drawing board and started building the actual pilot curriculum.

Then Ashley joined as co-founder and CTO of Learn Mobo. Having a technical co-founder changed everything about what we could build and how fast we could move.

I pitched Learn Mobo publicly six times this year. One of those times, I got absolutely roasted. It was humbling and clarifying in equal measure. The other five went better.

We rebuilt our website from scratch. We finalized three different sex education curriculum versions to meet schools where they are. We cold emailed and called over 300 people and organizations, most of whom never responded.

But some did. We got over 25 pilot sign ups for our comprehensive sex education platform and more than 50 newsletter subscribers. District Administration featured Learn Mobo, which gave us credibility we desperately needed. We hit 200 followers across our social platforms, which doesn’t sound like much until you remember we started at zero.

None of this was easy. Most days felt like pushing a boulder uphill. But we’re ending 2025 with real pilots in schools, real partners, and real momentum going into our commercial launch next quarter.

If you’re part of the 200 followers, 50 newsletter subscribers, or 25 pilot schools using Learn Mobo’s sex education curriculum, thank you. You’re the reason we keep going.

Here’s to 2026.

When we teach about STIs through a lens of fear and judgment, we inadvertently create barriers to the very behaviors we’re trying to encourage—testing, treatment, and honest communication with partners. Students who associate STIs with shame are less likely to seek testing, disclose their status, or access care when they need it.

According to the National Sex Education Standards (NSES), effective sexual health education should be grounded in principles of reproductive justice, racial justice, and equity—recognizing that stigma disproportionately affects marginalized communities and creates real barriers to healthcare access.

Shifting the Framework: From Fear to Empowerment

By 8th grade, the National Sex Education Standards (NSES) recommends students should be able to:

• Define STDs, including HIV, and clarify common myths about transmission (SH.8.CC.3)

• Identify medically accurate sources of information about STD prevention, testing, and treatment (SH.8.AI.1)

• Demonstrate ways to communicate decisions about reducing or eliminating risk for STDs (SH.8.IC.1)

By 10th grade, students should:

• Demonstrate the ability to determine whether a resource or service is medically accurate or credible (SH.10.AI.1)

• Describe common symptoms—or lack thereof—and treatments for STDs, including HIV (SH.10.CC.3)

• Identify medically accurate sources and local services that provide prevention, testing, care, and treatment (SH.10.AI.3)

By 12th grade, the focus shifts to addressing systemic barriers:

• Analyze the impact of stigma and conscious and unconscious biases on STD prevention, testing, and treatment (SH.12.INF.3)

• Assess individuals’ responsibility to test for and inform partners about STD status (SH.12.SM.1)

Practical Strategies for De-Stigmatizing STI Education

1. Normalize Testing as Routine Healthcare

Just as we don’t shame people for getting their blood pressure checked or visiting the dentist, STI testing should be framed as a normal part of taking care of your body. Emphasize that:

• Many STIs have no symptoms, making regular testing essential

• Testing is a sign of responsibility and self-care, not promiscuity

• Healthcare providers are trained to provide confidential, nonjudgmental care

2. Use Neutral, Medical Language

Replace stigmatizing terms with accurate, clinical language:

• Say “a person living with HIV” rather than “HIV-positive person” or “infected”

• Use “STI” (sexually transmitted infection) rather than “STD” (disease) when appropriate, emphasizing that many infections are treatable

• Avoid language that assigns blame or suggests moral failing

3. Challenge Myths with Facts

Address common misconceptions directly:

• You cannot tell if someone has an STI by looking at them

• STIs affect people of all genders, orientations, and backgrounds

• Many STIs are easily treatable, and even those that aren’t can be managed effectively

• Having an STI doesn’t define your worth or character

4. Model Open Communication

Teach students specific skills for discussing sexual health:

• How to bring up testing with a partner

• What to say when disclosing STI status

• How to access confidential healthcare services

• Ways to support friends or partners who are navigating STI diagnosis or treatment

5. Address Systemic Barriers

Help students understand how racism, classism, and other forms of oppression create disparities in sexual health outcomes (as emphasized in NSES standards SH.8.CC.11 and SH.12.INF.5). Discuss:

• How lack of healthcare access affects different communities

• The role of medical racism in creating distrust of healthcare systems

• Why comprehensive sex education itself is a matter of equity

The Role of Comprehensive Education

The NSES emphasizes that effective STI education must be:

• Medically accurate and evidence-based

• Trauma-informed, recognizing that many students may have experienced sexual violence or coercion

• Inclusive of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and family structures

• Skills-based, not just knowledge-focused

Our newest Learn Mobo lesson on STI Prevention & Sexual Health puts these principles into practice, providing interactive scenarios where students practice communication skills, evaluate information sources, and make informed decisions about their sexual health—all within a framework that prioritizes dignity, autonomy, and access to care.

Moving Forward

When we teach about STIs from a place of compassion rather than judgment, we give students permission to be honest—with themselves, with their partners, and with healthcare providers. We create a foundation for lifelong sexual health that’s rooted in self-respect, communication, and informed decision-making.

The goal isn’t just to prevent STIs (though that’s certainly important). It’s to raise a generation that understands sexual health as an integral part of overall wellbeing, deserving of the same care, attention, and open conversation as any other aspect of health.

Resources for Educators:

• CDC’s STI Treatment Guidelines

• Planned Parenthood Educator Resources

• SIECUS Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education

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What Students Will Learn

Our comprehensive curriculum covers the essential foundations of reproductive and prenatal health:

Understanding the Basics

• How conception and fetal development actually work

• The science behind different contraceptive options and their effectiveness rates

• What family planning really means in practice

Making Informed Decisions

• Navigating healthcare conversations with confidence

• Recognizing prenatal risks and warning signs early

• Finding trusted healthcare providers and support services in their community

Real-World Skills

• How to have productive conversations with healthcare providers

• Where to turn for reliable information and support

• Building agency over their own health decisions

Learning Through Play

Here’s what makes this different: we’ve gamified the learning experience. Instead of endless slides and quizzes that stress students out, we’ve created interactive games that make learning feel natural and low-pressure. Students engage with the material in a way that actually sticks—because they’re enjoying the process.

Education That Meets Students Where They Are

We built this module with inclusivity at its core. Every student deserves access to accurate, shame-free health information, regardless of their background or circumstances. This curriculum respects the diverse experiences and perspectives students bring to the classroom while ensuring everyone leaves with the knowledge they need.

What’s Next

This is just the beginning. As our pilots expand and new lessons roll out, we’re committed to continuing this mission: making education safer, smarter, and more supportive for every student who walks through the door.

We’re grateful you’re part of this movement with us. Together, we’re filling critical gaps in health education and giving students the tools they need to make informed decisions about their futures.

Want to learn more about our approach or bring this module to your school? We’d love to hear from you.