“If I Shut My Eyes,I Cannot Hear You”: The Regulation of Parent and Adolescent Communication about Sexual Practices and Identities in the Family Context

This paper examines parent-adolescent communication about sexuality in the family context. Of central concern is how parents and their adolescent children interact and communicate about sexual identities and practices. The paper focuses on kinship and familial relations between parents and adolescents, family dynamics and the processes impacting on young people's emergent sexual development and informal sex education in the home. The data is drawn from interviews with 38 young people aged 15-21 years with another 31 participating in focus-groups. The paper argues that mutual and open dialogue about sexuality between parents and adolescents remains highly circumscribed due to how sexuality is relational and regulated in the family context. The data reveals that despite strong family relationships, complex patterns of surveillance and negotiation mean that parents and children monitor and control situations related to expressing sexuality. Instead of ‘passive’ processes operating to manage sexual identities, this paper finds that parents and young people necessarily draw on more sophisticated practices of what can be conceptually termed as the ‘active acknowledgement’ and ‘active avoidance’ of sexuality as a means to manage sexual identities across different family contexts.