What are you sexting? Parental practices, sexting attitudes and behaviors among Italian adolescents

Background Sexting has recently emerged as a public health and social issue. The present study had two aims: a) to preliminarily test adolescent gender differences on parental practices regarding adolescent online life, parental monitoring, adolescent attitude towards sexting and sexting behaviors; b) to separately test for male and female adolescents a conceptual model in which sexting behaviors are explained by the parental practices and monitoring, with the mediation of adolescent negative attitude towards sexting. Methods Direct and indirect links between the variables in the model were investigated. The study was carried out with 541 participants. Participants were Italian adolescents (60% males; 40% females) aged 14 to 19 years (Mage = 16,19 years, SDage = 1,31). Results Results suggested that females sent more multimedia sexts, had a higher perception of risk associated with sexting and reported higher scores for both parental practices regarding adolescent online life and parental monitoring. Rules on Contents, Parental Knowledge, Adolescent Disclosure, and Parental Control resulted to be linked to both sexting attitudes and behaviors for male and female adolescents. Conclusions Findings emphasize the important role that parents play in shaping attitudes and behaviors of both daughters and sons during adolescence.

"Our study aimed at testing a conceptual model in which parental practices regarding adolescent online life and parental monitoring explained adolescent sexting behaviors through the mediation of adolescent negative attitude towards sexting. Consistent with previous evidence [9, 67, 71], our preliminary results on gender differences regarding sexting frequency among adolescents showed that females sent more multimedia sexts but also had a higher perception of risks associated with sexting if compared to males. [...] It is possible that for females some other factors associated with motivation for sexting (e.g. peer or partner pressure, impress someone they like, blackmail) impact on the choice to engage in sexting behaviors. [...] Preliminary results highlighted some gender differences as well: females scored higher on all the variables investigating both parental practices regarding their online life (except for Rules on Contents) and parental monitoring. [...] a negative attitude towards sexting was found to be associated with less engagement in sexting behaviors for both males and females. Therefore, adolescents who are more aware about the risks connected to sexting are less prone to send both text and multimedia sexts. [...] More in depth, an interesting result is that among parental practices regarding adolescent online life, only Rules on Content resulted to directly (and indirectly only for females) explain both adolescent sexting attitudes and behaviors. Rules on Contents provided by parents contributed to shape negative attitudes towards sexting and to decrease adolescent engagement in sexting behaviors. This result, albeit unexpected, highlights the importance for parents to control and provide rules on the contents to which the adolescent may have access rather than on the time spent online. (Confalonieri et al., 2020, pp. 7-8)