Parent-Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health Communication Is Very Limited and Associated with Adolescent Poor Behavioral Beliefs and Subjective Norms: Evidence from a Community Based Cross-Sectional Study in Eastern Ethiopia

"Curtailing the adolescents’ underlying poor beliefs and norms, and improving adolescent-parent communication quality, self-disclosure, and television co-viewing and discussions are essential to engage the parents in sexual and reproductive health education of the adolescents."

This is the key conclusion of a study conducted in Harar, Eastern Ethiopia to investigate factors that limit or improve parent-adolescent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) communication. Discussed in a PLOS One journal article, this study was conducted because while there is recognition that parental communication helps protects young people from engaging in risky sexual practices, little is known about parental engagement, and how youth perceive communication with their parents.

The article provides an outline of how the research was conducted, which included surveying 4,559 adolescents age 13–18 to assess their own communication experiences through a rating system. Respondents were asked to rate various statements, which sought to gather information about a range of communication factors, such as whether they disclosed their activities to their parents, the extent to which adolescents feel it is easy to communicate about problems/issues they face with their parents, and whether they watched and discussed television programming together.

As outlined in the article, the results showed that HIV/AIDS was reported as the more frequent topic of communication, with reproductive organ growth and development second. Condoms were the least communicated about topic. The article suggests that this is similar to findings of other studies, which have found that communications on HIV/AIDS tends to be focused on the dangerous aspects of the disease, rather than transmission modes and prevention methods. The study also found that young people were more likely to communicate with mothers than fathers.

Overall, it was found that "about one-third (30.91%) of the adolescents were identified as satisfactory communicators, 38.76% as poor communicators, and 30.34% as very poor communicators." Factors that influenced whether adolescents were considered poor-very poor/very poor SRH communicators were adolescent’s sex, age, religious affiliation, living arrangements, schooling status, perception of his or her parents’ RH knowledge, comfort status to communicate on SRH, and underlying beliefs and subjective norms. The factors that were likely to contribute to respondents being ranked as better communicators was adolescent-parent general communication quality, television co-viewing and discussions, parental educational status, and adolescent self-disclosure to their parents.

According to the article, "adolescents who considered their parents’ knowledge of RH as poor were less likely to experience SRH communication with them. This is in concordance with a past research report which confirmed that the level of parental knowledge is largely correlated with the presence of SRH communication..." In terms of programming, this "calls for an urgent need to equip the parents at least with the basic knowledge and skills of sexual and reproductive health. Here, it is important to note that this study addressed the adolescents’ perceived RH knowledge, which may not reflect the actual RH knowledge of the parents." Another finding was that television co-viewing and discussions can contribute to young people's sexual knowledge and attitude. "Such practices can produce a platform environment to communicate on sexual issues and what was televised during the co-viewing might also contain topics on sexual issues that can activate such conversation to occur."

Therefore, the key conclusion of the study is that in order to: engage the parents in the sexual education of adolescents, improve underlying beliefs and norms, and improve adolescent-parent communication, initiatives that encourage self-disclosure and television co-viewing and discussions are essential.