Relationship between discussion of sex with parents and social outcomes in LGBTQ+ adults

• In Event: Poster Session 05
  In Poster Session: PS 05 Topic - Sex, Gender

Abstract

Sex education standards within the United States vary greatly by state, with some providing a wide array of information for their students, and others focusing largely on reproducding heteronormative ideas about sexuality and encouraging absenance (Shapiro & Brown, 2018). All too often however, the concerns of sexual minority students are left out of the conversation, leaving many non-heterosexual young people to figure it out for themselves (McCarty-Caplan, 2013). Even when information about non-heterosexual relationships is provided, these relationships can be portrayed as “other” or somehow lesser than heterosexual relationships (Estes, 2017). While these structural inequalities in sex education are well documented (Gegenfurter & Gebardt, 2017), there has been comparatively little research on how parent-child discussions about sex are handled with sexual minority adolescents. The present study seeks to examine, from a primarily qualitative lens, what sexual minority adults recall about how their parents discussed sex with them during adolescence, what the participants wish had been covered, and how these factors may be related to participants’ current feelings about their own sexual minority identity.
Participants consisted of 433 sexual minority individuals, a majority of whom were bisexual (n = 176), followed by smaller but substantial numbers of gay (n = 80), lesbian (n=67), pansexual (n = 44), aesexual (n = 35) and queer (n = 28) participants.These individuals were contacted through the MTurk survey platform as part of a larger study about the experiences of LGBTQ+ adults. Each participant was asked wether or not their parents talked to them about sex at any point during their adolesence. Those who answered in the affirmative were asked a series of questions clarifying these interactions (ex. “What kinds of topics did you talk about with your parents regarding sex?”). Those who answered in the negative were provided with an altered set of questions, primarily asking about what topics they would have liked to have discussed with their parents (ex. “Do you know why your parents did not talk to you about sex?”). All participants also completed a series of measures related to their feelings about future parenthood, identity comfort and overall psychological well being. Coding of qualitative data is ongoing, but some of our preliminary results have revealed interesting trends. Approximately half of our sample reported having conversations about sex with their parents (n = 239, 55.1%). These conversations began occurring in late childhood on average (M = 11.28 years, SD = 2.85), and primarily with mothers (n = 150, 62.8% of the “talk” group), with a smaller portion of the sample having these conversations with both of their parents (n = 52, 21.7%) or just their fathers (n = 26, 10.9%). Qualitative coding is currently about halfway complete. We anticipate that our full data will allow us to determine if there are differences in participants’ feelings about their own sexual identities based on whether or not they had identity-relevant discussions about sex with their parents. This could ultimately point towards the need for a broadening of how we think about sex when we discuss it with children.

Authors

• Samuel Bruun, University of Kentucky
  Presenting Author

• Chelsea Bass, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cassandra Vázquez, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kay Simon, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rachel H. Farr, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Author