The Effect of Sexual Education on Mothers' Knowledge, Attitude and Practice in Responding to their Daughters' Questions

Background and Purpose: Sexual education is a very important educational issue. Mothers' knowledge, attitude, and practice play the most important roles in shaping healthy sexual behaviors in their children. In this regard, the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of the educational intervention on mothers' responding to the sexual questions asked by their sixth grade daughters.      Method: This research was a quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest control group design. The sample consisted of 30 mothers with daughters studying at grade 6 of primary school at Dist. 2 of Karaj in 2016-2017. The participants were assigned randomly to either the experimental or control group (15 individuals per group). Questionnaire of Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Sexual Education (Mostofi et al., 2016) was used to collect the data. The mothers in the experimental group underwent 9 weeks of sexual education (11 hours per week). Univariate and multivariate analysis of covariance were used to analyze the data.   Results: results showed that after statistically controlling the effect of pretest, a significant difference was found between the experimental and control group in terms of knowledge, attitude, and practice (P <0.05).   Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, it can be concluded that mothers' sexual education can empower them in responding to the sexual questions of their adolescent daughters and can improve their knowledge, attitude, and practice it this regard. Therefore, considering the insufficient information of parents, especially mothers, in answering the sexual questions of their adolescents, it seems necessary to provide some strategies and trainings for enhancing the mothers' knowledge and changing their attitude.