12.23.2008

Parental Influence and Teen Sex

Parental Influence and Teen Sex

Many policymakers, health professionals, and "safe sex" advocates respond to these troubling sta­tistics by demanding more comprehensive sex edu­cation and broader access to contraceptives for minors. They assume that teens are unable to delay their sexual behavior and that a combination of information about and access to contraceptives will effectively lead to protected sex, preventing any form of harm to youngsters. Not only are these assumptions faulty, they tend to disregard impor­tant factors that have been linked to reduced teen sexual activity. A particularly noticeable omission is parental influence.

Parents, as teens themselves reveal, are the ones who have the most influence on their children's decisions about sex. Indeed, two-thirds of all teens share their parents' values on this topic.

When it comes to talking about teen sex, both teens and parents report high levels of communi­cation. Parents, however, tend to perceive a greater level of communication than do teens. Nearly all parents (90 percent) report having had a helpful conversation about delaying sex and avoiding pregnancy with their teenage children, compared to 71 percent of teens who report hav­ing had such a conversation with their parents.[10] Many parents are also unaware of their teens' actual behavior. In a study of 700 teens in Phila­delphia, 58 percent of the teens reported being sexually active, while only one-third of their mothers believed they were.[11]

The empirical evidence on the association between parental influences and adolescents' sexual behavior is strong. Parental factors that appear to offer strong protection against the onset of early sexual activity in­clude an intact family structure; parents' disapproval of adolescent sex; teens' sense of belonging to and sat­isfaction with their families; parental monitoring; and, to a lesser extent, parent-child communication about teen sex and its consequences.

That parents play a role in teen sex points to at least two significant policy implications. First, pro­grams and policies that seek to delay sexual activity or to prevent teen pregnancy or STDs should encourage and strengthen family structure and parental involvement. Doing so may increase these efforts' overall effectiveness. Conversely, programs and policies that implicitly or explicitly discourage parental involvement, such as dispensing contra­ceptives to adolescents without parental consent or notice, contradict the weight of social science evi­dence and may prove to be counterproductive and potentially harmful to teens.

Research Findings

A Research Note. Social scientists are primarily concerned with the question of causality. For exam­ple, does parental disapproval of teen sex indepen­dently cause teens to delay sexual activity? Causality, however, is difficult to establish in social science research. Using statistical methods and appropriate data sources, social scientists infer cer­tain reasonable conclusions from their research. The degree of confidence with which they draw inferred conclusions depends largely on data quality, study design, and statistical method.

The research on parental influences and teen sex­uality is extensive. A substantial portion of the research is based on cross-sectional data, which capture information at one point in time and pro­vide a "snapshot" view. As such, they limit research­ers' ability to draw stronger conclusions. At best, cross-sectional data offer evidence of correlations, e.g., parental disapproval of teen sex is associated with delayed sexual initiation. Longitudinal sur­veys, on the other hand, follow the same group of individuals over time, which allows researchers to infer stronger findings. This paper mostly highlights findings from studies that use longitudinal data, which offer more rigorous conclusions.

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...