Parental Communication Regarding Topics of Sex and Child Sexual Abuse Prevention: Exploring The Intergenerational Impact
Open Access
- Author:
- Schuck, Marygrace
- Area of Honors:
- Human Development and Family Studies
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Jennie G Noll, Thesis Supervisor
Alyssa Ann Gamaldo, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Parental Communication
Parent-Child Communication
Child Sexual Abuse
Prevention
Intervention
Intergenerational - Abstract:
- Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a public health issue affecting one in five women and one in twelve men before age 18 (Stolenborgh et al., 2011). Rather than relying solely on school-based CSA prevention programs to teach children self-protection skills, there is an urgent public health need to develop an universal parent-focused CSA prevention program. Smart Parents was created to answer this need and is designed to provide parents with skills to help them better protect their child(ren) from experiencing CSA. The curriculum, delivered in one session, covers three main topics: healthy sexual development (e.g., typical and atypical sexual development), parent-child communication about sex and sexual abuse (e.g., age-appropriate information), and child safety (e.g., vetting a babysitter). This study was a pre-posttest pilot of the universal curriculum with 23 parents of children under 13. Following the Smart Parents workshop, participants were asked to engage in a semi-structured post interview which covered a variety of topics including their personal experience discussing topics of sex growing up, the impact that those discussions had on their individual parental approach to addressing sex and CSA, and their confidence levels to hold these conversations with their own children. In response to a lack of research on the intergenerational impact of parent-child communication surrounding topics of sex and CSA, the current study examines Smart Parents participants’ perspectives on the impact that their personal experiences discussing topics of sex with their families growing up has on their own individual parental approaches to these subjects. The majority of participants reported that their personal experiences discussing topics of sex and CSA with their families growing up significantly impacted their own parental approach to addressing these topics with their children.