Parent's Views about Teaching Contraceptive Methods to Female Adolescent Students

To increase the adolescents’ health, parents are required to share the needed information about reproductive health with them and answer their questions in a timely manner. Ignoring this need due to different reasons leads to getting information from unhealthy sources. This study was performed in the city of Tehran to determine parent's views about teaching contraceptive methods for their female students. It was a descriptive, cross-sectional study. The research population consisted of all Iranian parents of 10-19 years old high school girls living in Tehran in 2013. Cluster sampling was used to select a sample size of 400. Data was gathered using a questionnaire containing three parts of demographic characteristics, parent's views about teaching contraceptive methods and appropriate time, method and sources for teaching contraceptive methods and was analyzed by descriptive statistics and Chi- square test using SPSS-PC (v. 18). According to the findings, 66.7% of parents believed that talking with their daughters has a positive effect on her heath. Chi- square test showed that there is a significant relationship between mothers’ positive perspective about talking with their daughters and mothers’ job (p<0.05). At the meanwhile, 58.2% of parents disagreed on talking with their daughters about contraceptive methods. Chi- square test showed a positive significant relationship between mother ‘education and their positive perspective about contraceptive methods education (p<0.001). A total of 35.3% of the parents believed that the best time for teaching is at the time of marriage. A total of 41.8% of the parents believed that teaching in classroom is the best method and 56.7% mentioned schools as the best source for teaching. Majority of the parents (98%) disagreed with learning this issue by word wide web. According to findings, it seems that the parents are not still prepared to teach the issues related to reproductive health to their daughters and do not easily let other sources such as health centers to talk about these topics. The findings can be used by policy makers of Ministry of Health and Medical Education and other related organizations. It seems that doing similar studies considering viewpoints of adolescents and teachers can be very helpful.