Can We Talk program examines Valley teen woes

An East Valley group launches a program today to help parents talk with their children about sex, drugs, violence and other difficult topics, and advocates say it couldn’t come at a better time.

New results from a federal survey indicate that nearly half of Arizona high school students have had sex, one-third have been in a physical fight and nearly 40 percent have obtained illegal drugs from someone on campus.

At the same time, the state’s financial crisis is likely to strip funding for abstinence programs and doom plans Gov. Janet Napolitano had to reduce unplanned pregnancies among older teens. Other cuts being considered to close a nearly $2 billion budget deficit include substance abuse and mental health funding.

The new program, called Can We Talk, is based on a national model using parent workshops, training sessions and online activities to get families talking and spread expertise among health care workers, employers and other community groups.

“Parents a lot of times are very uncomfortable discussing these topics,” said Ellen Owens-Summo, director of the Greater Valley Area Health Education Center, a program of Apache Junction-based Empowerment Systems, the behavioral health agency that is bringing Can We Talk to Arizona.

“But these are topics that have to be discussed,” she said. “A lot of parents are just not equipped. They don’t know how to handle these issues.”

While the debate over abstinence education rages, research consistently shows that teenagers say their parents have the most influence over their decisions about sex. Studies also have shown that parents know how important it is to talk to their children about sex, but have difficulty knowing what to say or when to say it.

Can We Talk includes six online courses on topics including puberty, sexuality, self-esteem and bullying that encourage parents and their children to sit down at the computer together and watch videos, answer questions, talk about problem-solving techniques and the family’s values.

In the section on drugs and alcohol, for example, a fill-in-the-bubble section asks kids to complete a cartoon showing a boy offering his girlfriend a pill.

Children complete the bubbles above the characters’ heads with what the girl and the boy might be saying or thinking.

“Any kind of program that supports parents and teens, and helps parents talk to their teens and communicate their values to their teens I think is excellent,” said Dana Naimark, president and CEO of Children’s Action Alliance.

“We do tend to ignore teens in our culture until they get in trouble, and then we pay a lot of attention to them.”

As critical as it is for parents to talk with their children, Naimark said the program shouldn’t be considered a replacement for sex education in schools and behavioral health programs for children.

The first version of Can We Talk started in 1994 as the Plain Talk Initiative, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in several large U.S. cities to combat teen pregnancy. It eventually became Can We Talk, run by the National Education Association, with funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dominic Cappello, who designed and wrote Plain Talk and Can We Talk, will run the first Arizona training session later this summer. Facilitators are being trained in more than 100 U.S. cities.

Without state or federal funding, however, Empowerment Systems is hoping that Can We Talk in Arizona will pay for itself by charging parents about $25 for the online programs and charging for the training program.

Owens-Summo said Can We Talk provides medical information and statistics regarding sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies, but doesn’t tell parents how to advise their children.

“That’s the beauty of this program. … It’s putting that responsibility back on parents,” she said. “Whether or not you decide to teach them about condom use or abstinence ... you’re still having to get that conversation started. How do you do that?”

Napolitano in January joined more than a dozen other states in rejecting $1 million in federal abstinence funding, noting that a series of studies indicate a decade of funding abstinence education has failed to change teens’ sexual behavior.

That freed up about $800,000 the state would have used to match the federal dollars, money the governor wanted to use for family planning programs targeting community college students.

There’s no requirement that Arizona schools teach sex education. But about 28,000 students last year were part of abstinence-only programs, which are required to teach that abstaining from sex outside of marriage is the “expected standard for all school-age children” and that sex outside of marriage “is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

Some districts, including Scottsdale Unified and Phoenix Union, use abstinence-based programs that may include information about contraceptives.

It’s unclear whether the state-funded abstinence programs can continue since legislators are still mulling over budget cuts.

“It is a budget issue and the budget issues are completely in the Legislature’s court,” said gubernatorial spokeswoman Jeanine L’Ecuyer.

Meanwhile, the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted every two years by the CDC among high school students across the country, show some improvements in teens’ risky behaviors over the past 15 years.

But Arizona students are at greater risk than the national average for heavy drinking, cocaine and methamphetamine use, and failing to use a condom.

In addition, the same overall progress seen nationally did not translate to Hispanic teens, particularly with regard to sexual activity, suicide attempts, and drug and alcohol use.

To learn more about Arizona’s Can We Talk program, go to www.canwetalkaz.org or call Empowerment Systems at (480) 367-6937.

To read results of the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, go to www.cdc.gov/yrbss.