Boosting Teens' Violence Prevention: The Power of Parental Involvement
Publication summarized by Rachel de Barros Oliveira, Ph.D. Candidate McGill University
Source: Edwards et al. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520949153
Teens are exposed to a lot of information on violence prevention. Did you know that even with a lot of information from school, parents and caregivers’ participation increases the effectiveness of violence prevention?
Today I will talk about an interesting study published in 2022 by Katie M. Edwards, Victoria L. Banyard, and Anne Kirkner. In the study, they wanted to see how parents access violence prevention information and the extent to which they discuss this topic with their youth.
They selected 142 parents/caregivers of middle or high-school-age students. The majority of people who responded were female, white (80%), and college-educated. In the study, they divide the questions into the following categories:
Prevention-related topics – How many times have parents and caregivers talked about these important topics in their family within the past 6 months:
sexual harassment, bullying, suicide, sexual assault, dating violence, plans for the future, healthy relationships, dealing with stress, being respectful to others who are different, and values/beliefs/traditions.
Confidence in discussing the prevention-related topic with teens – How confident parents and caregivers felt talking with their teens about: sexual harassment, bullying, healthy relationships, racism, and mental health issues.
Emotion regulation modeling (ERM) – If they helped their teens to improve their emotion regulation skills.
Learning more about prevention topics – If they were interested in learning more about how adults can help prevent sexual assault, bullying, and other forms of aggression and what type of resources they were willing to learn from.
They found some interesting results:
Adults reported speaking more about less sensitive topics of prevention (bullying, plans for the future, healthy relationships, dealing with stress, being respectful, and family values) than more sensitive topics (sexual harassment, suicide, sexual assault, and dating violence).
The higher the emotion regulation modeling was, the higher the confidence in discussing violence prevention with teens.
In their sample, white parents discuss less sensitive topics while American Indians discuss more sensitive topics.
Having more confidence in discussing violence prevention was linked to more discussions about sensitive topics.
Although this study was done with a specific population and does not account for several factors in terms of diversity (socio-economic level, education level or ethnicity), it’s still interesting to see the results. Information is the first step to being more confident talking about something.
Have you ever thought about that? What is your number one source of information for violence prevention?
In your house, how much do you talk about prevention-related topics? Do you feel that you are confident and have enough information to talk with your teen about this? Do you feel that you talked more about the topics that you worried more about? Please comment below on your experiences and questions. We can send your questions to the authors and share the answers with you.