NC State research shows that the most caricatured and dreaded conversation of any young person’s life, the iconic “birds and bees” talk, is worth all the awkwardness and does correlate to safer sexual behaviors.
In 2014 and 2015, Laura Widman, an assistant professor of psychology at NC State, conducted a meta-analysis to decipher existing research on parent to teen communication about sex.
“We’ve been researching the relationship between parent communication with teens and adolescent sexual behavior for a really long time, but we want to say — pulling all that information together — what does the literature tell us?” Widman said. “And how strong is that relationship between parent communication and teen sexual behavior?”
Widman and her team compiled data from 52 different studies spanning more than three decades and including information about 25,314 adolescent participants of average age 15.
The study determined that when parents communicate with their children about sex, they are more likely to use what are generally considered safe sexual practices, such as the use of condoms and contraceptives. The effect isn’t enormous, but it is nonetheless of real significance.
Widman said that across all these studies it seems like a relatively modest effect, but the number of talks between parents and children are significant in terms of public health.
The study found that girls are more likely to respond to parental communication about sex by using condoms and contraceptives and that communication seemed to be more effectual when mothers rather than fathers were talking with their children. Widman speculates that the reason girls are more likely to use condoms and contraceptives is that they may be more exposed to warnings about the potential ramifications of sex than boys.
Maternal communication may also have a greater impact due to the different communication styles that men and women tend to have. For instance, she suggested that mothers might talk at greater length with their children, or be more understanding and less severe, which could resonate better.
Elan Hope, assistant professor of psychology, agreed that the gender-related disparities probably exist due to cultural emphases and male/female differentials in communication styles.
“I think Dr. Widman’s speculations make sense in terms of what we see in adolescent development and the stereotypes and portrayals and just what we see in the history of the relationships between men and women,” Hope said.
While Widman’s study has brought valuable information to light, there is still more research to be done before concrete conclusions can be drawn that inform future decision-making. This meta-analysis was only able to keep a limited set of variables constant, due to the information collected by existing studies.
For instance, there is no record in some of the 52 studies included in the meta-analysis of whether the mother, father or both were communicating with the child, and there was little specific information about what individual conversations resembled and how frequent they were.
“We need to know more about … what these conversations looked like — what was the quality, what was the frequency, what was their relationship with their parents?” Widman said.
Widman and her team have compiled a new resource that illuminates large trends in the existing literature on parent-child communication about sex. With this information in place, the stage is set for a new round of research and study to determine the finer details of the general concepts identified by Widman and her team so that parents and policymakers can make informed future decisions.
