Background: Talking about sexual issues with children is a difficult task for most
parents. This is because most parents are not trained to talk to their children about
sexual issues. Many parents also lack the knowledge and skills to talk to their children
about sexual issues. Evidence shows that intervention studies that trained parents on
how to communicate with their children about sexuality have shown positive results.
Training parents to talk to their adolescents about sexual issues will reduce sexual risk
behaviours among adolescents and young people.
Objective: To assess the effects of training parents on parent-adolescent
communication about sexuality in the Accra Metropolis, Ghana.
Methods: An intervention study which consisted of 138 parent-adolescent pairs from
12 public Junior High Schools in two sub-metropolises in the Accra Metropolis
answered baseline survey on parent-adolescent communication on sexual topics and
were put into intervention and control groups (intervention group, 73 parentadolescent
pairs in 6 schools; control group, 72 parent-adolescent pairs in 6 schools).
Parents and adolescents completed a follow up survey of questionnaires on parentadolescent
discussion about sexual topics three months after the programme.
Results: The proportion of parents with very good knowledge increased more in the
intervention group (37.0% to 60.0%) than the control group (27.7% to 34.7%). After
the training, the parents in the intervention group (30.1% to 82.9%) had better
attitudes towards adolescents’ use of reproductive health services than the control
group. The proportion of parents in the intervention group who ever discussed sexual
topics with their sons increased (60.3% to 88.6%) after the training. Most parents in
both in the intervention (54.4%) and control (51.4%) groups would like to start
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talking to their children about sexual issues when the child is between 10 and 12 years
old after the intervention. Mothers discussed more sexual topics with adolescents on
all the categories of sexual topics than fathers. Sexual discussions focused mostly on
sexual risk protection and risky sexual topics.
Conclusion: The training increased the parents’ knowledge about sexuality, their
ability and frequency of discussing sexual topics with their children. The training also
improved the parents’ attitudes towards adolescent sexual issues.