Parental Orientations

Abstract

Parents have different feelings about the best way to raise their children with respect to sexual matters. As noted in chapter one, an implicit assumption of many social scientists conducting research on parent-teen communication in the sexual domain is that parents desire to discourage premarital sexual intercourse on the part of their teenager. But is this true of all parents? We conceptualize parental orientations toward premarital sex as a continuum, with some parents feeling more strongly than others that their teenager should be discouraged from engaging in premarital sexual intercourse. This chapter explores the nature of parental orientations along such a continuum. Our data suggest that, contrary to popular assumption, there may exist a sizable minority of parents who are not adamantly opposed to premarital sexual intercourse on the part of their teenager. We also identify correlates of parental orientations toward teenage sexual intercourse, thereby gaining potential insights into why some parents may be more conservative than others with respect to their teen’s premarital sexual intercourse. We consider the issue of whether parents have talked with their teen to discourage them from engaging in premarital sex, and the reasons why some parents may be reluctant to talk with teens about these matters. We then describe the themes that parents use in their discussions with teens in order to discourage them from engaging in sexual intercourse. Finally, we discuss parental orientations towards birth control.