Parent and child sex-initiation values and their relationship to child sex

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Authors

Meg Jankovich¹ , Corinne Archibald¹ , Laura Padilla-Walker¹

1. BYU

Conference / event

2023 SRCD, March 2023 (Salt Lake City, United States)

Poster summary

We wanted to investigate how parents socialize their sexual values, if their children are adopting those values, and whether that translates into the child’s sexual behavior. Research has already shown that parent-child sex communication about various topics matters to children’s sexual health development, and we are so happy to have found that parents longitudinally influence their children’s values about when they should first have sex as well. If parents teach that it’s okay to have casual sex, their kids are more likely to agree with this one year later and are more likely to be participating in sexual behaviors a year after that. If parents teach that kids should wait until they are married to have sex, their kids are more likely to agree with this one year later and are less likely to be participating in sexual behaviors a year after that.

Keywords

Sex socialization, Parent-child socialization, Sex behavior, Sex beliefs

Research areas

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences

References

No data provided

Funding

No data provided

Supplemental files

No data provided

Additional information

Competing interests

No competing interests were disclosed.

Data availability statement

Data sharing not applicable to this poster as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 Jankovich et al. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.