An innovative new teaching tool designed to educate parents and inspire conversations about sexualities between adults and their children has been developed in Brooklyn, NY communities. Community input used to create a set of three audio cds, which were distributed in neighbourhoods where youth were considered at risk to engage in early sexual activity. These communities were identified primarily through ethnicity; statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2000 suggest that 16% of African American youth, 8% of Hispanic youth and 5% of White youth reported having sex before age thirteen. Researchers in the study described here conducted extensive focus groups in the schools and community (38 focus groups involving 109 youth and 64 parents) and from this input the intervention ,“Saving sex for later” was developed, featuring professionally scripted and produced cds that tried to build on realistic ‘natural opportunities’ that could translate into teachable moments between parent and child. (i.e. events that could happen at school or to friends, television shows, song lyrics, etc. )
Strategies that aim to delay sexual initiation need to target pre-adolescent youth, which often resulting in controversy and worries that interventions aimed at youth of this age can actually have the opposite intended effect. With this in mind, and building on community feedback from an advisory board of parents and teachers, a parental education program was thought to be a potentially important project. The schools in which the intervention took place were in Brooklyn New York, where 90% of the student population were Black or Hispanic. 133 cds were randomly to parents in the community, and roughly half of them returned feedback, which was overwhelmingly positive and suggests that this kind of parental teaching innovation is highly welcomed. On average, about 90% of the parents who received the cd listened to it and would (or did) recommend it to other parents. Around 80% listened to it with their child, and more than 85% of the parents who responded said it initiated conversations with their child.
Interestingly, in parental feedback, the terms “caring and concerned” were used several times in the feedback, as can be seen below:
“As a caring and concerned parent, the CD’s I listened to were very helpful and useful. It taught me a lot, as well as my son. For the first time, I can really say while listening to the cds (Saving Sex for Later), it made it much easier and [more] comfortable to talk with my son about sex and its consequences, as well as safe sex…His feedback was amazing. I would like to take this time to thank you for your help and support in doing this, because it is very hard sometimes to talk to your children about these things”
“Let me first say thank you very much for your care and concern about all teens and the language of sex. There should be more programs such as yours reaching out to our children…Thank you! You have been most respect[ful] to me and my daughters.”
Incorporating an ethics of care into sexualities education may require that we consider the impact we could have as educators if we were to incorporate innovative strategies such as this to include parents and give them tools with which they can gain a level of comfort in discussing sexualities with their children.
(source: O'Donnell, L., Wilson-Simmons, R., Dash, K., Jeanbaptiste, V., Myint-U, A., Moss, J., et al. (2007). Saving sex for later: developing a parent-child communication intervention to delay sexual initiation among young adolescenets. Sex Education, 7(2), 107-125.)
