Parents-Adolescents’ Communication on Sex: Which Role on the Age at the First Sexual Intercourse of Young People?

Silvana Salvini , University of Florence

Parents-Adolescents’ Communication on Sex: Which Role on the Age at the First Sexual Intercourse of Young People? Silvana Salvini, Università di Firenze mariasilvana.salvini@unifi.it Sex remains too often a taboo in the dialogue between parents and children. And this is a problem because kids know little or nothing about sexually transmitted diseases, which, according to the Higher Institute of Health, are growing. Moreover, adolescents are not even concerned about HIV risk. On the other hand, the age of the first relationship seems to be decreasing, increasingly promiscuous and anaffective: Adolescents seek pleasure but not falling in love. Even the school does little to provide information on the subject and therefore often, as indeed happened in the past generations, the source of (scarce) knowledge is friends, and social media. In this paper, we intend to analyze the relationship between age at the first sexual intercourse and parents-adolescents communication about sex. Data at the base of this study derive from two surveys characterized by a similar questionnaire and carried out in 2000 and in 2017, collecting sexual behavior of young people enrolled at the university courses. We consider the questions inherent the dialogue parents-children on love life and sex and parents’ attitudes on sexual freedom, together with some control, explicative variables and risk factors. The method is OLS regression where the dependent variables is represented by the age at the first sexual intercourse.

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 Presented in Session P1. Poster Session Fertility, Family and the Life Course