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Parental Monitoring, Parent–Adolescent Communication About Sex, and Sexual Risk Among Young Men Who Have Sex with Men

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Abstract

Parental monitoring and parent–adolescent communication about sex protect against HIV-related sexual risk behaviors among heterosexual adolescents, but it is unknown if these findings generalize to young men who have sex with men (YMSM). Sexual orientation-specific stressors, including “coming out” to parents, complicate the family context of YMSM. We examined associations between parental monitoring, communication about sex, outness to cohabitating parents, and sexual behaviors. Ethnically diverse YMSM ages 14–19 provided cross-sectional data (n = 257). Monitoring and outness to parents interacted to predict recent same-sex unprotected anal intercourse (UAI). For YMSM who reported mixed or uncertain outness to parents, higher levels of perceived parental monitoring were associated with greater risk of UAI. Higher levels of communication about sex were associated with greater risk of UAI for YMSM out to parents. Parental monitoring and communication about sex might not protect YMSM against sexual risk in the same way they protect heterosexual youth. Future research should examine whether adapted forms of family factors could protect YMSM, and family-based HIV risk-reduction interventions for YMSM should be attuned to the unique ways family factors function within this group.

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Notes

  1. To ensure it was appropriate to collapse YMSM who reported uncertain parent knowledge (i.e., parents who probably, but did not definitely, know) with YMSM who reported mixed parent knowledge into one group, we conducted analyses to determine if these groups differed significantly, and to examine whether primary study effects differed between these groups. To do this, we selected participants falling into these groups and dichotomized parental knowledge as mixed knowledge (n = 24) versus uncertain knowledge (n = 35). No significant differences were found among these two outness groups on mean levels of primary study variables or in estimating the associations between those variables.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grants MH098739 and MH072381 from the National Institute of Mental Health. The authors would like to acknowledge Jordan Rullo, Jennifer Pritchard, and Karen Wohlleiter for their efforts in study coordination, as well as Laura Vaughn, Lida Rogers, Trevor Wright, and William Brown for their assistance with data collection. We are grateful to the Attic Youth Center, BAGLY, Indiana Youth Group, and SMAAC for their cooperation in housing the project. In addition, the authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Cynthia Berg to the manuscript. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Utah.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Utah, 380 South 1530 East, Room 502, Salt Lake City, UT, 84112-0251, USA

    Brian C. Thoma & David M. Huebner

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Correspondence to Brian C. Thoma.

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Thoma, B.C., Huebner, D.M. Parental Monitoring, Parent–Adolescent Communication About Sex, and Sexual Risk Among Young Men Who Have Sex with Men. AIDS Behav 18, 1604–1614 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-014-0717-z

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