Investigating knowledge level and attitudes of families with mentally retarded children towards their sexual development and education.

In our country where sexuality is hidden as a secret, not given systematically sex education programs , mentally retardeds? getting real and true information is not possible because of their special features. Before preparing sex education programs for mentally retarded, it is important to determine parents? who are the closest them and primally provide sex education to them level of knowladge and attitudes towards sexuality,sexual developmant and sexual education . In this study, families? who has mentally retarded children, level of knowladge and attitudes towards their children?s sexual development and education was examined in terms of socio-demographic variables.It is revealed that the level of knowledge and attitudes of families who has mentally retarded children about their children?s sexual development and education is different or not in terms of their gender,age,occupation, monthly income,education level,number of children they have and number of mentally retarded children they have ,mentally retarded children?s age, gender and special education period of mentally retarded children. The study that was done to determine the level of knowledge and attitudes of families towards their mentally retarded children was applied to parents of mentally retarded children in special education and rehabilitation centers and special education schools in Aydın. "Parenting Information Collection Form? prepared by the researcher to find the demographic characteristic of the families was applied. "Sexual Health Questionnaire" was applied to determine the parents `level of knowledge towards Sexual development and education of their mentally retarded children. Questionnaire was created in two ways by thinking of differences in sexual developments between the boys and girls. The parents' attitudes towards mentally retarded children?s sexual development and sexual education was determined with "Sexual Education Attitude Scale" developed by Sarı (2005).The data obtained in this surve y were examined whether meaningful or not with Mann Whitney-U and Kruskal Wallis That is one of the non-parametric test. According to the findings, the level of knowledge and attitudes of families towards sexual development and education of their mentally retarded children is meaningful difference in terms of the number of mentally retarded children, gender and the age of the parents who has mentally retarded boys, there is not this difference in terms of other variables. Key words: Mentally retarded, sexual development, sexual education.