Italian students in 2000 and in 2017 between health risk behaviors and family communication

Abstract

Sex remains too often a taboo in the dialogue between parents and children. And this is a problem because kids know little or nothing about sexually transmitted diseases, which, according to the Higher Institute of Health, are growing. Moreover, adolescents are not even concerned about HIV risk. On the other hand, the age of the first relationship seems to be decreasing, increasingly promiscuous and anaffective: Adolescents seek pleasure but not falling in love. Even the school does little to provide information on the subject and therefore often, as indeed happened in the past generations, the source of (scarce) knowledge is friends, and social media. In this paper, we intend to analyze the relationship between sexual behavior of university students, risk behavior related to sexuality and the role of parents. Data derive from two surveys carried out in 2000 and 2017 and methods used is logistic regression. The aim of this paper consist therefore into verifying the following two hypotheses, also controlling the change over time in the behavior of young people: (i) The more the parents communicate with their children, the less are the risks for the adolescents; (ii) the more the risk behavior in the domains of alcohol, drug and driving, the more are the sexual risks for the adolescents.