Parental Communication

Research findings of parental communication about sex were mixed and inconclusive. The attempts to synthesise findings is complicated by different research methods, wide varied measurements of parent- adolescent communication, and differing perceptions of various groups. The inconsistent and contradictory findings might result from a lack of standard measurements across studies.

Existing studies on parent-child communication about sex have several limitations. First, a number of studies have been undertaken with white teenagers. Further, the findings of the few studies which focused on the ethnic groups found inconsistent findings. Hovell et al. (1994) and Hutchinson (2002) compared the amount of parent-child communication about sex in ethnic groups and found that Latino families communicate less in general and in sex-specific issues than families from other ethnic groups.

In addition, a number of studies of parent-child communication about sex have focused not only on specific sexual topics, but also on global communication (Feldman & Rosenthal, 2000). When specific sexual topics were addressed, however the rates of discussion of each individual topic varied widely (Jaccard et al., 1998).

Moreover, parent-child communication often has been examined from self-reports generally from the teenagers’ perspective only. Even when the research has focused on pairs or parental perspectives, agreement or disagreement between reports of such communication has rarely been addressed. Many papers that focused on how teenagers’ and parents’ report conversations, found that most mothers believed that they discussed sex more than their teenagers perceived (Chung et al., 2007).

Finally, a number of studies have focused on the freque...

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...Wamoyi et al. (2010), Tanzanian parents demonstrated that HIV/AIDS was the only thing that they often talked about with their children because it was considered as shameful and was a disease associated with extreme suffering.

Two studies of attitudes and perceptions of parents about the content of discussions on sex found that Greek parents perceived the most important topic for parental sex education to their teenagers was AIDS and STIs (37%), the second priority was contraception, and the third was relationships. The topic of abortion was the fourth priority (Kirana et al., 2007). Nigerian parents perceived that the most important topic that parents should provide to their children was life and relationship skills, the second priority was sexual health such as sexually transmitted infections, and the third priority was personal hygiene (Akinwale et al.,2009).