The Effects of Parental Practices on Adolescent Sexual Initiation Prior to Age 16
In my dissertation I examine the transmission of family social capital from parent to child, as it impacts adolescent sexual initiation prior to age 16. I extend the application of James Coleman's ideas and borrow from the conclusions of Alejandro Portes to integrate social capital theory with parenting practices and theories of adolescent sexual behavior. Using the 1979-1996 mother, child, and young adult data files from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), I examine parenting factors (i.e.,shared activities as indicators of the parent-child bond, parental support, and parental control) and child and family characteristics (e.g., maternal education, race/ethnicity father presence, maternal aspirations for child's education) that distinguish teens born to young mothers who have "early sex" (initiate prior to age 16), from those who delay their initiation until or past age 16. I also explore how the effects of parenting practices on early sexual initiation differ by gender and by father presence/absence. As hypothesized, children who reported at least monthly church attendance with their parents at age 10 or11 are more likely to delay their first sex until at least age 16. However, contrary to expectations, children whose mothers took them to cultural performances were more likely to have had sex before age 16. This level of analysis suggests that early background characteristics may be more important than parental practices in predicting early sexual initiation. This dissertation concludes by suggesting a need for a moreintensive examination of the relationship between family interaction processes and early sexual initiation than is possible with a large-scale data set such as the NLSY.
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