Illustration: Lu Ting/GT

It is common to see young girls and boys in kindergartens using the same bathroom, but this is something that worries me. It seems that many parents and teachers aren't paying enough attention to the personal privacy of the children in their care.

A friend of mine, who sends her 4-year-old daughter to a kindergarten in Yangpu district, told me that about 20 girls and boys use the same 10-square-meter bathroom there. They can see each other using the toilets and there is no segregation between the genders. Although it does concern my friend, it seems most of the other parents are unfazed by this.

A headmaster at another kindergarten explained that they don't have separate facilities for boys and girls because of a lack of space, according to a story in the Shanghai Morning Post last month. Also, teachers are required to accompany children to the bathroom for safety reasons, and they simply don't have enough teachers to do this for two bathrooms.

But from my point of view, this ignores the most important issue, that of respecting children's bodies. This is a crucial aspect of sex education and should start in childhood.

A father of a 4-year-old kindergarten girl once told me that it was too early to give his daughter any sex education, even to the point of telling her about body parts and their functions. He feared that such knowledge might stimulate her to become curious about sex, which may lead to sexual experimentation at an early age.

But experts believe children's desire to know about their sexual organs begins soon after they are born. And if parents don't provide correct guidance, the curiosity will be there anyway, meaning that children will have little understanding of the importance of protecting their bodies.

According to a report in the Shanghai Law Journal, the head of a government hotline (6587-6866) set up to provide help to pregnant women under the age of 18 said that they had received more than 50,000 calls in the past five years, nearly all of which were from people who displayed a high level of ignorance of their body parts and of sexual behavior in general. Most, he said, had little awareness about taking measures to protect themselves.

Speaking in May, Gu Xiaoming, a professor of sociology at Fudan University even went as far as to say that youngsters with more awareness of sex and protective measures, are less likely to commit sex crimes.

I am pleased to see that local education authorities are beginning to attach importance to children's sex education. According to local media, the controversial sex education textbooks for primary school students were finally re-released in October after being temporarily removed from bookshops in August. They will be used in primary schools across Yangpu district from this semester.

I am also happy to see that many more new kindergartens are building separate bathrooms for boys and girls. For the older kindergartens, I think it would be a good idea to consider building a partition wall in the bathroom, which will at least afford the boys and girls some degree of privacy.