Factors associated with maternal attitudes towards condom education for children aged 12–14 years in Myanmar

ABSTRACT

Condom education, an important part of comprehensive sexuality education, involves lessons on negotiating, motivating and demonstrating condom use. Expanding condom-related knowledge and skill reduces risks of unwanted pregnancy, HIV and sexually transmitted infections. Condom education for adolescents has been a controversial subject among parents, teachers, health professionals and the general public. Mothers are key stakeholders in efforts to implement such programmes. Therefore, this study explored factors associated with their attitudes towards the condom education for children aged 12–14 years. We used secondary data from the Myanmar Demographic and Health Survey. The sample includes mothers (N = 7011) who had at least one living child and responded to the question “Should children aged 12–14 be taught about condom use to prevent AIDS?” The answers yes, no and unsure were used as proxy for their attitudes. In total, 41.5% of the mothers agreed with the condom education. Mothers, who had an adolescent child, belonged to an ethnic minority, rural residents, low-educated, poor knowledge of HIV and condoms were less supportive of the condom education. These findings highlight the need for rural mothers in Myanmar to be given awareness about adolescent sexual and reproductive health focusing on HIV/AIDS and condom desensitization.

KEYWORDS:

• Condom education
• adolescents
• maternal attitudes
• Myanmar

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to DHS programme for providing us with Myanmar Demographic and Health Survey (2015–2016) dataset to be able to conduct this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in [Harvard Dataverse] at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6IUDFV.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.