Teaching parents about sexuality communication with their children: Findings from a multi-method evaluation

Planned Parenthood of New York City's Adult Role Models (ARM) program conducts skills-based workshops about sexuality and how parents and other caring adults can communicate more comfortably and effectively about sexuality with their children. Workshops are conducted by parent peer educators and serve over 900 participants annually. An internal multi-method evaluation was conducted during 2006 and 2007, including focus groups with workshop facilitators and workshop participants, pre- and post-workshop knowledge, attitude and behavior surveys (N = 400), workshop observations (N = 30), and post-workshop participant interviews (N = 30). In addition, parent peer educators maintained logs to document informal social networking encounters. Attitude, knowledge and behavioral intent changes measured by participant survey responses were assessed with non-parametric statistics; other results were analyzed using qualitative methods. Research shows when parents monitor their children, foster a strong emotional bond and communicate openly with their children about sexuality, children delay sexual activity and use contraception more effectively when they become sexually active. However, few parent-child communication interventions have been sufficiently evaluated to indicate the best ways to help parents improve these behaviors. Preliminary results from the ARM program evaluation indicate notable improvement in knowledge, attitude, and behavior regarding communication with their children. Our complete results will be presented in the context of existing literature on parent-child communication about sexuality and will help to fill a research gap, as well as provide multi-method tools to evaluate similar parent peer education programs.