Teaming up with parents: A step-by-step guide to creating a parent peer education program that helps parents communicate with their children about sexuality

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 community-based parent peer educators and serve over 900 participants annually. 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. Based on this research, four interactive ARM workshops were created to help parents improve their skills and knowledge about parent-child communication, parental monitoring, parent-child connectedness and child sexual development.

After nine years of operational experience and completion of a preliminary, internal evaluation of the program, program staff has finalized ten steps for developing, maintaining and evaluating a parental involvement program that helps parents gain the skills and knowledge needed to become the primary sexuality educators of their children. In this presentation, we will share lessons learned from the ARM program with colleagues planning to start or to strengthen their existing parent peer education activities. Our ten steps and lessons learned will be shared in the context of existing literature on parental involvement and select findings from ongoing ARM program monitoring and evaluation.