Family Comprehensive Sexuality Education. Experiences and opinions from adolescents and their parents

Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) is defined as a lifelong learning process that begins in childhood and is ideally based on shared educational responsibility, primarily between schools and families. In Italy, there is no law formally introducing CSE in schools as a multidisciplinary and transversal subject, in line with international documents and guidelines. Moreover, in sociocultural and political debates, many Italians advocate for parents’ primary educational role, citing Article 30 of the Italian Constitution, which establishes both the duty and the right of families to educate their children. However, sexual and relational issues are often neglected by parents due to a lack of knowledge, feelings of discomfort and embarrassment, or facing personal, cultural, and social factors. At the same time, adolescents consider CSE crucial and necessary, and affirm accessing information from multiple sources, such as the web and peers. Hence, literature often reports family communication as inadequate or unsatisfactory. The present research aims to explore CSE’s experiences and opinions, as well as family communication experiences, in a triadic perspective, involving Italian adolescents and their parents. The research consists of two phases: 1) a qualitative phase including semi-structured interviews with families, specifically an adolescent, the mother, and the father in each family; and 2) a quantitative phase involving the administration of an online questionnaire to adolescents, mothers, and fathers. The first phase was an exploratory study involving 50 families. The second phase is also characterized as an exploratory study that aims to reach a wider, more heterogeneous sample, enabling the conduct of statistical analysis and comparisons of experiences, opinions, and communication styles between families and Italian contexts. Overall, the present research aims to provide a deeper understanding of how families discuss sexuality and relationship issues, and how adolescents and parents position themselves on CSE topics, with the future goal of designing training and educational programs for both adolescents and parents.