Parental practices as predictors of adolescents’ compulsive sexual behavior: a 6-month prospective study

Compulsive sexual behavior (CSB) is a prevalent disorder among adolescents. To date, most studies focused on the selfreport assessment of individuals without assessing possible parental practices that might alleviate or exacerbate adolescents’ CSB. In the present research, I adopted the family systematic approach, which considers the efects of family context on children’s and adolescents’ development and examined whether and how parental (fathers’ and mothers’) support giving, communication, and restrictive mediation relate to children’s current and future severity of CSB. The sample comprised 300 Israeli families [triad of mothers, fathers, and one adolescent (39% boys, 61% girls; age 14–18)]. Results indicate that maternal support and paternal quality of communication with children signifcantly predicted lower severity of current and future CSB, respectively. These fndings highlight an important and understudied topic in the hope of motivating additional researchers and practitioners to adopt a familial, microsystem perspective on healthy sexual development—a