Patterns of sexual behavior and degree of communication between parents and students of 12-15 years old about contraceptive and condom use in a US-Mexico border city

Objective: Determining degree of communication between parents and their teens about contraception and condom use and identify adolescent sexual behavior. Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed in second grade students at four public junior high schools in Tijuana, Mexico. We applied self-administrated questionnaires exploring parent-adolescent communication about sex, adolescent sexual behavior, condom-use self-efficacy and contraceptive methods knowledge. These results are part of an ongoing educational intervention project with adolescent parents about how to increase self-efficacy in communication about sex. Results: We examined baseline data of 500 students of 12 to 15 years old. Among male respondents 17.7% and among females 7.1% (p=0.001) accepted to have started having sex. 81.9% said they had a boyfriend or girlfriend. 9% said that their father had ever given a condom and 14.4% said their mother had given it. Only 28.8% of fathers and 37.0% of mothers had told their children that condoms protected them against pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. When we asked them how often they had discussed specific issues with their parents, 39.8% of fathers and 31.8% of mothers had never talked about HIV / AIDS, 45.4% of fathers and 38.0% of mothers had never talked about condoms and 61.4% of fathers and 50.8% of mothers have never spoken about Emergency Contraceptive Pills. Conclusions: As we can see, communication parents-adolescents is poor, there is an urgent need to work in more strategies to empower parents to early talk these issues with their children.