Adolescents and healthy sexual attitudes

Young people today are bombarded with messages about sex from the media, advertising and their peers. Unfortunately, one message they're often not hearing is how to make their own healthy decisions about sex. Researchers at APA's Annual Convention shared some of the latest research on what affects those messages and how parents and teachers can do more to help adolescents make better decisions.

Christopher Houck, PhD, at Rhode Island Hospital, ran a study looking into whether mentally disordered teens' "affect regulation" skills -- their ability to make good decisions in the face of strong emotions -- played a part in their attitudes toward and knowledge about sex. "If you don't have good affect regulation skills, then if someone's pressuring you to smoke pot or have sex, you're more likely to engage in those behaviors," he said. In a study, Houck used questionnaires to find out about the emotional awareness, affect management skills and attitudes toward sex of 138 seventh-graders in Rhode Island who had been identified as having, or as suspected of having, mental health problems. He then ran an after-school intervention program that taught teens how to identify their own emotions and strategies for dealing with them. When Houck tested those teens again a few weeks later, they reported better emotional awareness and increased use of strategies to get out of situations they didn't want to be in.

But teens can't do it alone. Parents are also key to healthy sexual attitudes and behavior, said Wendy Hadley, PhD, at Brown University. She ran a study looking into what kinds of parental involvement helped or harmed kids' attitudes toward sex. "We know the more parents talk about sex, the more likely [their kids] are to use condoms and to negotiate and communicate with their partners, to be able to say 'no,'" Hadley said. She looked at the characteristics of 893 mother-teen groups where the teens (average age of 15) had received some type of mental health treatment. Parents who have psychological disorders themselves were more likely to criticize teens for their sexual decisions, be aggressive with their teens, and engage in intrusive behaviors like snooping in their rooms. Children of those parents were more likely than those of mentally healthy parents to have engaged in sexual activity in the last 90 days. That illustrates the need for parents with psychological disorders to receive interventions to teach them how to monitor their kids' sexual attitudes in a more healthy way.

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