Has your child started daycare this year? If so, they may have been chosen to take part in a new sex education pilot project.

Last November, the Marie Vincent Foundation launched a new project in which approximately 1,200 daycare-aged children would be taught about “gender equality and how to protect themselves from sexual abuse,” according to the CBC.

The project “aims at empowering these children in their psychosocial development so that one day when they're older and when they’re ready to engage in more sexual relationships, it's done properly,” Laura El-Hachem, a social worker with Marie Vincent, told the CBC.

The goal of the sex education pilot project is also to teach young children that they must respect their own, as well as other’s, boundaries and when and how to tell an adult if they feel like someone isn’t respecting their boundaries. The project will also teach children about gender equality.

Dr. Christine Grou, a psychologist and the president of the Order of Psychologists of Quebec, believes that this is the perfect age to introduce these subjects. “Young children [go through] sexual developmental phases,” Grou explains. “We know that between three and five years old, they like to be touched. There is no difference between abuse and affection for them.”

Dr. Grou adds that although she believes this pilot project will benefit the children, educators need to remember to answer the children’s questions in the measure of what they’re asking and what they need to know. “If a child who is four is asking, ‘how do you make babies?’ they’re not asking for a complete class of anatomy,” Dr. Grou explains. “[The educators] could just answer, ‘well, it takes a mom and it takes a dad and they have to love each other.’ That could be enough of an answer [for a four-year-old]. You have to wait and follow the curiosity of the children.”

For a project like this to work, as Bruna Rover, a daycare educator and mother of two explains, educators need to be more qualified to teach this in their daycares. “Educators must also be better versed on psychosocial matters to be a reinforcing figure in their development through their sexual journal from zero to five years old,” she says. “Right now, educators, in my view, do not have the skills necessary to assist children. It could be helpful to provide sex education beginning in daycare providing it is with more qualified educators.”

Both Rover and Dr. Grou agree that a project like this could challenge some parents’ values or worry them in regards to how the subject is approached. “All parents are different but they are all the same. Whether you have a boy or girl, no parent wants sexual assault on their children,” Rover states. “All parents want the same thing for their child.”