Texas: Survey -- Parents Overestimate Role in Teens' Sex Education

Parents in Austin are not as important in the sexual education of their children as they think they are. That is the conclusion researchers are drawing from a survey of teens and parents sponsored by abstinence-based sexual education curriculum provider Austin LifeGuard. While more than 40 percent of surveyed parents said sex was regularly discussed at home, only 7 percent of teens ages 14 to 17 said it was.

"Parents think they are having these conversations a lot more often than teenagers report. So we hope that parents will actually have these conversations more often," said Amanda Brown, program director for Austin LifeGuard, whose school-based instruction includes information on STD and pregnancy prevention.

The phone survey of 223 high school students and 142 parents of teens was funded by a federal grant and conducted by Customer Research International. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Another disconnect between teens and parents appeared in the report of teens' sexual behavior. Some 41 percent of boys and 29 percent of girls reported they were sexually active, while only about 20 percent of parents believed their teens had had sex. Mothers were more likely than fathers to believe their children were virgins.

The sexual activity reported by teens in the Austin LifeGuard survey is actually lower than that in other comparable research. According to a 2007 CDC study, 51 percent of Texas girls and almost 55 percent of Texas boys were sexually active.

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