Romanian Parents’ Use of the Internet: Optimizing Parenting Skills as Sexual Educators

Abstract

There is a growing trend for parents to use the Internet and social media aiming to obtain parenting information and support. We present here an on-line exploration of the beliefs, concerns and needs that Romanian parents express regarding the sexual development and health of their children. Thematic analysis of discussions from social media and internet asynchronous discussion boards (two forums and one Facebook parenting group) is performed. In line with the existent literature, our preliminary data indicate that the major themes of parental discourse in Romania are information and advice seeking, experience and advice sharing and social support seeking. With respect to sexual health and education of children and young people, parents in Romania usually express the following themes in their online interactions with other parents: sex education significance; sexual development and sexual behaviour of children and young people; parenting sexually developing children and young people. It seems that parents do benefit from the social media interactions to a certain extent, especially by creating online support communities and accessing a considerable and diverse amount of information, but there are also concerns about the reliability of the information thus exchanged.

Keywords: Sexual educationparentingsocial mediaInternet use

Introduction

Parents and caregivers are constantly concerned with the well-being of the children they are responsible for and they manifest this concern in various ways and through various means. Besides the everyday direct social interactions the Internet is a medium that allows individuals to express their parental needs and to search for information, resources and support to help them address those needs (Dworkin, Connell & Doty, 2013). The number of people having access to and using the Internet worldwide (via computers or mobile devices) is of billions and is continuously growing (Capurro et al., 2014), although there is still present a “digital divide” (Hargittai, 2003).

There is a growing trend for people to use the Internet for various health-related and/or parenting activities (Korda & Itani, 2013; Dworkin, Connell & Doty, 2013). The last two decades have brought an increase in the quantity and quality of the online educational information and resources, as well as of the websites and applications parents can access to interact with other parents or to obtain help and support from health professionals (Capurro et al., 2014; Clarke & Van Ameron, 2015). As a consequence, a number of studies have lately started to explore the dimensions of the benefits and costs that the Internet and online activity and interactions hold for those directly and indirectly involved in them (for review see, Pendry & Salvatore, 2015).

There are numerous websites, blogs and groups dedicated to parenting and to children’s development and health while other sites are allocating them considerable sections. These are frequently accessed by parents, especially mothers, who are using the Internet in a higher percentage than non-parents (Duggan, Lenhart, Lampe & Ellison, 2015). These blogs, websites and social networking sites (SNSs, or social media) may either only offer information and share resources or, in many cases, they may offer interaction opportunities for members or for the general public. Some of the sites and blogs are created by health professionals (e.g., e-Health platforms) or are enlisting professional help while others are not. As a result, although not developed particularly for that purpose, especially in the case of social media, these SNSs (e.g., Facebook, YouTube) end up sharing health-related information that is sometimes not scientifically validated and incomplete or inaccurate (McRee, Reiter & Brewer, 2011; Ventola, 2014).

A significant number of this type of Internet mediums are entirely or partially dedicated to helping parents improve the sexual health of young people (e.g., government sponsored websites, non-governmental organizations’ websites and professional or amateur blogs). Besides other more traditional means parents are nowadays using these relatively recently available resources to help them improve the skills necessary for raising sexually healthy young people. The exact number of available online mediums and the extent to which parents use these specific mediums is difficult to establish.

Parents’ contribution to the healthy sexual development of their children, as part of their general well-being, is well documented by literature and numerous programs that aim to help parents in their efforts as sexual educators exist (DiIorio, Pluhar & Belcher, 2003; Wight & Fullerton, 2013). Parents are preoccupied with what, when and how to communicate and to behave with their children regarding sexual topics (Dyson & Smith, 2012; Fisher et al., 2015). Researchers and parents themselves have identified a number of barriers that they perceive are making these tasks more difficult, such as parental values and beliefs, negative expectations regarding the outcomes, low self-efficacy, lack of specific knowledge and resources, parents’ perception that their children are too young and too innocent for sex education and not knowing how and when to talk to them, parent’s gender and child’s gender, parent’s embarrassment and fear of judgement or criticism from others etc. (Walker, 2004; Wilson, Dalberth, Koo & Gard, 2010; Stone, Ingham & Gibbins, 2013). However, only a few studies exist regarding the use of social media and of asynchronous discussions boards (or discussion forums) by parents seeking information regarding their children’s health in general or on specific topics (e.g., pregnancy, early parenting, childhood obesity, mental health, congenital heart diseases and other chronic health conditions) (Appleton, Fowler & Brown, 2014; Bussing, Gary, Mills & Garvan, 2007; Goldman & Macpherson, 2006; Bouche & Migeot, 2008).

Our systematic search for published studies investigating parents’ use social media for sexual-health-and-education-related information and parenting support returned no results, either for parents in Romania or in other countries. Still, the available data about Romania is indicating that there are a significant number of online resources dedicated to parenting (in Romanian) and an increasing number of Internet and social media users, with over 8 million Facebook users and with over 10 000 active blogs out of approx. 90 000 in March, 2016 (source: www.zelist.ro).

The few existing studies investigating the use of social media and asynchronous online discussion boards by parents seeking child-health information and support are pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of these mediums use for parents. Online discussions forums are a feature of many parenting websites that are able to connect a larger number of “users” (compare to off-line interactions), who could potentially offer encouragement, insight and support with specific issues. Also, they connect a diversity of people from remote locations but with similar particular interests and needs, mostly under a condition of anonymity (only partially true in Facebook’s case), which facilitates sharing of personal experience without fear of judgement or stigma. This aspect is of special relevance in the case of sexual-health-related discussions given the sensitive nature of the topic which is still a taboo in some contexts. Other positive aspects of people using these forums and social media are: the possibility of accessing, when available, professional support and advice and of contributing to a conversation or receiving an answer at any time, the possibility of helping people learn new skills and the fact that they could produce not only individual but societal benefits such as increased involvement in off-line civic activities. There are also negative aspects, such as the lack of credibility and trustworthiness of the information, the possible proliferation of inaccurate and poor-quality information that might have harmful consequences and the risk of exposing people to negative interactions with other users (Appleton, Fowler & Brown, 2014; Dworkin, Connell & Doty, 2013; Nieuwboer, Fukkink & Hermanns, 2013; Pendry & Salvatore, 2015).

Usually, but not always, parents use the Internet to find information on parenting and child health in addition to the information they have already obtained from professionals in off-line settings (Dworkin, Connell & Dotty, 2013). The majority of parents in one study described their experience of using these mediums in terms of being helpful or very helpful (Goldman & Macpherson, 2006). In another study, parents thought the Internet and social media were generally supportive, contributed to the normalization of their experiences, allowed them to feel useful for others and helped them feel less confused about certain issues (Appleton, Fowler & Brown, 2014). Though, some studies revealed that a significant amount of the parents’ experience with these mediums was not so positive and they identified high levels of criticism, judgement, inappropriate or aggressive language and even harassment in the interactions (Appleton, Fowler & Brown, 2014; Dworkin, Connell & Doty, 2013).

Three major themes of parental discourse around child-health and Internet usage were identified by literature: (1) seeking information and advice, (2) sharing information and experience and (3) seeking and creating social support (Appleton, Fowler & Brown, 2014; Dworkin, Connell & Doty, 2013).

The present study aims to contribute to the gap in the knowledge about the needs, beliefs and practices of parents regarding the sexual health and education of their children by identifying these as they appear from parents’ discussions on two Romanian-based discussion forums and one Facebook parenting-themed group. This paper describes preliminary partial findings of this exploratory study, the results of a thematic analysis performed on a data set collected from one of the online discussion forums mentioned above.

2. Method

Thematic analysis is a qualitative analysis method that is widely used in psychological research (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and has been previously used in studies evaluating various parental discourses (Arden, Duxbury & Soltani, 2014) and parental beliefs, expectations and practices regarding the sexual health and education of children as described by parents (Stone, Ingham & Gibbins, 2013). Semantic thematic analysis was chosen for this study because of its flexibility and compatibility with this type of data and because it is well-suited for identifying and reporting patterns or themes across a data set (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Themes or patterns of meaning were searched for across the data set, constituted only of the post of parents on several sexual health issues and parenting discussion threads from the same online forum (the analysis of the rest of the data corpus is still in process).

This site was identified as being one of the most popular parenting websites in Romania, which claims to be the biggest online community of parents in Romania. As a result of a purposive search (with key words such as parent, parenting, sex education, sex health, child, young people, adolescent, communication) of the discussion forum for a period of five month (from December 2015 to April 2016) a total number of 5 discussion threads relevant for the objective of this study were identified and selected. The oldest posts of these threads date back to 2012 while the most recent ones are from April 2016.

Due to ethical considerations, the name of the website will not be revealed even though members’ identity and personal information is protected by website policy and the anonymity provided by usernames. The content of these public posts is made available to the public by the website and accessing, observing and retrieving it was not dependent on member status and could be done by the authors without breaching the policy of the site. When processing the data, any details that could help identify users, including usernames, were removed and new numerical codes were attributed to posts. An inductive approach was used to develop codes for the data, followed by the identification of sub-themes, themes and main themes.

3. Results

The data set analysed consists of a total of 5 discussion threads composed of 422 posts written by a total of 80 different users. Approx. 10 of them posted just once on these threads while a similar number of them posted between ten and thirty times. After completing the six phases of thematic analysis (see Braun & Clarke, 2006) we were able to identify a multitude of (sub-)themes that were later grouped, based on their interpretation, into other themes and main themes. Three major themes were identified: 1) sex education significance ; 2) sexual development and sexual behaviour of children and young people and 3) parenting sexually developing children and young people . A fourth theme, miscellaneous , was created for all the sub-themes that did not fit into any of the previous three categories.

4. Discussion

The aim of this study was to explore how parents and potential parents on a Romanian-based online discussion forum reported their needs, beliefs and practices regarding the sexual health and education of their children or of children and young people in general.

As presented above, Romanian parents had very different responses regarding sex education information and advice seeking and this points towards the strong possibility of parents not attributing the same meaning to sexual education and of them forging and expressing attitudes towards it based on their personal definitions. Previous studies have pointed out the fact that parents have very different skills, beliefs, attitudes and personal values regarding the sexuality and sexual education of children and sometimes these might act as barriers to sexual education (Dyson & Smith, 2012). Also, the reliability of recommended sources and resources for sex education is a point of debate, many parents preferring personal experience to scientific knowledge and usually not indicating the source of their information. Nevertheless, the posts reveal that there is a strong desire on the part of parents to gain information and advice mostly from other parents but also from professional sources.

A significant proportion of the posts pointed towards the fact that Romanian parents considered it a successful practice in terms of sexual health of their children to address the topic of sex only when asked or only when children reached a certain age parents deemed appropriate for a “sex talk” and, as presented above, that usually meant late teens. Similar findings about the parent-child open communication about sex were reported by previous studies (Kirkland, Rosenthal & Feldman, 2005). This aspect could also be worth taking into account by health professionals and educational experts in tailoring their approaches and interventions accordingly. That in itself might constitute an issue since some of the parents disagree with professionals’ involvement in their children’s sex education.

Parents’ definitions of sexual health and well-being might be very different, many of them referring to it in terms of the absence of negative consequences, such as sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies or abortions and very few mentioning the possibility of positive aspects related to sexual life. Parents also shared misconceptions and scientifically inaccurate beliefs with other parents, especially about the physical changes (not due to puberty or pregnancy) that are supposedly evident on the bodies of sexually active adolescent girls and about the safety of using some forms of contraception in the detriment of others (e.g., birth control pill instead of condoms).

The underlying theme of all the posts was the difficulty of parenting. The majority of parents mentioned it and attributed an external locus of control for it, but the anxiety about their parenting and children’s well-being was frequently mentioned and the requests for advice and the sharing of own experiences and of information suggested the belief that they could still influence the outcomes.

Parents usually responded to other discussion-participants’ requests for advice and information by being most of the time supportive although the amount of negative interactions was not negligible. They made intergenerational and intercultural comparisons and often generalized their conclusions, many times expressing a “one fits all” view when asking or giving advice.

5. Conclusion

The conclusions of this study are limited by the choice of data, the fact that it was collected from a single online parenting discussion forum and in one period of time. These are though, as was mentioned earlier, the results of a preliminary analysis of a limited data set from the entire available data corpus, the analysis of which is being still in progress.

The results of our thematic analysis of the partial data sampled from a Romanian-based online parenting asynchronous discussion board show that parents are frequently using this medium in interactions with other parents. Romanian parents use it to seek and share information, advice and experience and to receive and offer support related to their expressed needs and concerns about the sexual health of their children and about their parenting skills relevant for it. It seems that parents do benefit from these interactions to a certain extent, especially by creating online support communities and accessing a considerable and diverse amount of information but there are also concerns about the effects of the negative interactions that they might be exposed to and about the reliability of the information thus exchanged. It is yet unclear how this could affect their parenting practices and skills. This could though constitute a further line of research on this topic.

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