Increasing communication between parents and their children about sex

doi:10.1136/bmj.a206

Published 10 July 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a206
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a206

Editorials

Increasing communication between parents and their children about sex

Workplaces should offer programmes to improve parents’ability to talk with their children

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In the linked paper, Schuster and colleagues report a randomisedcontrolled trial of a parenting programme that was implementedin the workplace—"Talking Parents, Healthy Teens"—tohelp parents discuss sexual health with their adolescent children.¹

Organisations concerned with adolescent sexuality and reproductivehealth have striven to increase parent-child communication aboutsex for several reasons. Firstly, many people believe that increasingsuch communication is important in itself. Secondly, in somecommunities, it is more widely accepted and less controversialfor parents to express their sexual values and beliefs to theirchildren than for teachers or other educators to talk aboutsex in the classroom. Thirdly, greater parent-child communicationof values about sex and use of contraception is associated undersome conditions with a delay in sex or greater use of contraception.²Professionals concerned about unplanned teenage pregnanciesor sexually transmitted diseases think that increasing suchcommunication can help reduce sexual . . . [Full text of this article]

Douglas Kirby, senior research scientist

¹ ETR Associates, Scotts Valley, CA 95066-4200, USA

dougk@etr.org

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Evaluation of Talking Parents, Healthy Teens, a new worksite based parenting programme to promote parent-adolescent communication about sexual health: randomised controlled trial: Mark A Schuster, Rosalie Corona, Marc N Elliott, David E Kanouse, Karen L Eastman, Annie J Zhou, and David J Klein
BMJ 2008 337: a308. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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