Teaching sex education through parents and the learning needs of the children

In Thailand, the ongoing HIV epidemic and unwanted pregnancy are the important public health concern that increasingly affecting young people. Parents can play the important roles in helping their children in deciding the appropriate time for initiating safe sex. Initiating conversations about sex education may be difficult for some parents. Some parents are concerned that teaching sex education arouses curiosity and can lead to unsafe sexual experimentation. This descriptive research aim to explore the levels of sex education provided by parents for their children and the learning needs of children; and to compare sex teaching styles between fathers and mothers; differing needs for sex education between sons and daughters and the sex education taught by parents and sex education learned by children. Four hundred high school students and four hundred parents Southern Thailand were selected to participate. Data were collected using a questionnaire. The content validity for the sex education teaching by parents and the learning needs for their children was tested using Cronbach’s Alpha Coefficient, yielding values of 0.98 and 0.96 respectively. Descriptive statistics and t-test were used for data analysis. It was found that the mean of parents’ sex teaching and children’s learning needs were moderate ( =1.79, SD=0.70 and =1.94, SD=0.52 respectively). The different between the mean score of fathers’ and mothers’ sex teaching and between their sons’ and daughters’ sex learning needs were statistically significant (p 0.01, p 0.001 respectively). The different between the mean score of parents’ sex teaching and their children’s sex learning needs was also statistically significant (p 0.01). The findings suggest that health care team should engage in activities to develop parents’ abilities for providing sex education for their children’s sex education needs. Positive communication between parents and their children can help them make safety and healthy decisions.