Parents Matter: The Role of Parents in Teens' Decisions About Sex

This brief looks at whether parental involvement in adolescence reduces the chances of adolescents being sexually active at a young age. It reports key findings from an analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth -- 1997 cohort to explore how parenting practices that occur before adolescents become sexually active are associated with the probability of having had sexual experience by age 16. The authors highlight several dimensions of parental involvement in adolescents' lives, including parent-adolescent relationship quality, parental awareness and monitoring of whom their adolescents spend time with, and frequency of eating dinner together as a family.