| Abstract |
Parent-child communication and parental monitoring may delay the onset of sexual behavior among young teens. However, parents with psychiatric disorders may be less effective in their monitoring strategies whereby increasing the likelihood that their adolescents engage in sexual risk behavior early on. This project will develop an intervention to improve parental monitoring of young adolescents (ages 11-13), among parents with a history of psychiatric disorders, and reduce the occurrence of youth being present in high-risk situations (sexual possibility situations). Additionally, we will pilot the developed intervention to examine its feasibility and acceptability. The developed intervention and preliminary pilot data funded by the CFAR mechanism will lead to submission of an R01 application which will examine the efficacy of the parental monitoring intervention on delaying the onset of sex among a larger sample and over a longer follow-up period. Parents in mental health treatment with an adolescent between 11-13 years will be recruited for participation in this study from inpatient and outpatient mental health facilities in Rhode Island. The study will be organized into two phases. Phase 1 will comprise the focus group and intervention development phase and Phase II will include piloting of the intervention and 2 and 6-week follow-ups. Phase I focus groups will target the barriers and strategies to effective parental monitoring of early adolescents for parents with psychiatric disorders. Data obtained from the focus groups will be used to develop the parental monitoring HIV prevention intervention. The developed parental monitoring intervention for parents with psychiatric disorders will pair education with monitoring skills tailored to an individual teen's developmental level and account for parent's unique psychopathology and family dysfunction.
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