You might not give your parent’s approval much though when choosing your method of birth control, but according to a new study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, you’d be surprised at what they think. Researchers found that parental acceptability is an important factor in birth control method selection for their teenage daughters.
The study was set up to examine how different forms of contraception were viewed by parents, and which factors and motives influenced their attitudes. For the study, researchers recruited 261 parents or guardians, who were taking care of a daughter between the ages of 12 and 17, from a clinical database from San Francisco General Hospital and five Kaiser Northern California clinics where their daughters had been patients.
One discovery the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) researchers made was that parents are far more accepting of their young daughters using the birth control pill than any other form of contraception, even condoms. At the other end of the scale, only a small minority of parents approved of the implant and the IUD, even though these are the most effective contraceptive methods. An implant is a matchstick-sized rod that is inserted in the arm, and the IUD device is implanted into the uterus.
After they were asked questions about their perceptions of their daughters’ likelihood to have sex, their parenting beliefs, the parents’ sexual health during their teen years, and their knowledge of sexually transmitted infections, 59% of respondents presented a high acceptability for oral birth control pills, followed by 51% who found condoms also acceptable. In third place, at 46%, was injectable contraception, followed by emergency contraception (45%), transdermal patches (42%), implants (32%), and the IUD (18%).
If parents believed that their teenage daughter was likely to have sex, they were highly acceptable of condom use, and only with emergency contraception available as a back-up. Parents who regularly attended religious services were typically less accepting of emergency contraception, and across the board there was a diminished interest in the full array of contraception options available.
According to Lauren Hartman, MD, a clinical fellow in the UCSF Department of Paediatrics and lead author of the study, ‘Considering the fact that condoms are our only method that protects these teenagers from sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy, and because the condom seems less invasive than other forms of contraception, we were surprised they weren’t accepted by a larger percentage.’
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