The
study followed changes in parenting skills and children’s
attitudes toward drinking and sex over a seven-month period among 322
rural Georgia
families with an 11-year-old child.
About half of the families enrolled in the study participated in seven
sessions to boost specific parenting skills and to offer strategies that
discourage early alcohol use and sex.
Gene H. Brody, Ph.D., of the University of Georgia and colleagues say
their study is one of the first interventions specifically directed at
rural black families.
Alcohol and drug use and early sexual activity have
been “increasing
more rapidly among rural than urban African American youths,” Brody
says.
Communicative parenting skills and children’s
attitudes about drinking and sex actually grew worse during the study
among families
who did not
participate in the skill-building sessions, the researchers found.
Brody suggests this turn for the worse may mark a natural
point in a child’s
life when parents are struggling to adjust their control over the changing
life of a pre-teen.
For families who participated in the training, the sessions
may have “interrupted
a decline in parenting behaviors pertaining to involvement, control and
communication while teaching new skills at a time when they are most salient
for parents and youths,” he says.
The sessions helped parents learn to be more vigilant
about their children’s
activities, taught them how to communicate their expectations about drinking
and sex and offered suggestions for helping their children deal with
racism.
The researchers found a significant link between improved
parenting and children’s attitudes toward alcohol and sex three
months after the sessions ended.
Brody and colleagues say the training could be improved
by including fathers and other co-caregivers in the sessions. Fathers “rarely participated
in the intervention, though invited to do so,” Brody notes.
The research team will focus next on whether the intervention
affects the children’s actual alcohol use and sexual activity,
he says.
