Parenting styles, generation and risk of first sex among Latino adolescents

Latinas have the highest teen fertility rate. This study examines generational patterns of parenting styles, defined by parental support and monitoring, the relationship between generation and the odds of first sexual intercourse among adolescent Latinas, and how this relationship varies by parenting style. The study uses two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Parenting styles change with generation; the U.S.-born parents of third generation Latina teens are more likely to be permissive (high support, low monitoring) and less likely to be authoritative (high support, high monitoring) than the immigrant parents of first and second generation teens. The proportion of teens with disengaged parents (low support, low monitoring) rises steadily with generation while the percent with authoritarian parents (low support, high monitoring) declines linearly with generation. At the bivariate level, Latina teens with authoritative parents are less likely to have sex than teens whose parents practice any other parenting style; teens with low parental support are the most likely to have had sex. Net of SES, first generation teens are about half as likely to have sex as both second and third generation Latinas. Multivariate logistic regression models predicting the odds of first sex show that this pattern holds only for teens with permissive parents. Teens with authoritative parents had uniformly low odds of first sex across generations whereas those with disengaged parents had uniformly high odds. The high rate among Latinas with authoritarian parents is due to third generation teens.