Parents may be able to use their lunch hour to learn how to talk with their children about sex, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that a program held at 13 California workplaces helped parents learn ways to speak with their adolescent children about sexual health. After eight lunch-hour sessions of the “Talking Parents, Healthy Teens” program, parents became more comfortable with topics like birth control, condoms and sexually transmitted diseases, the study found.

Nine months after the program ended, nearly all employees who had participated said they had broached at least some sex-related topic with their children.

The researchers, led by Dr. Mark A. Schuster of Children’s Hospital Boston, report the findings in the online edition of the British Medical Journal.

The study shows not only that parents can learn to discuss sex with their kids, but that the workplace is a good place for them to get that lesson, according to Schuster’s team.

One of the problems in any education program for parents is lack of time, the researchers note. Programs held at schools, for instance, are often inconvenient for parents, especially if they work full-time.

So the researchers designed the “Talking Parents, Healthy Teens” program to be offered at work sites, once a week during the lunch hour. The program uses tactics like role-playing and group discussions to help parents become more comfortable with talking to their children about sexual health issues.

For the current study, Schuster’s team randomly assigned 535 employees at 13 workplaces to either attend the program or be part of a comparison group that didn’t participate in the program; all had children between the ages of 11 and 16. Those in the program attended eight weekly sessions.

Parents and their children filled out surveys before the program, and then several times during the 9 months after the program ended. Over that 9-month period, Schuster’s team found, parents in the program were more likely to bring up “new topics” related to sexual health.

Ninety-two percent of parents in the program group said they had broached sexual-health topics with their children, compared with 71 percent in the control group.

A “particularly dramatic” example, the researchers write, was the change in parents’ willingness to talk about condoms. By the end of the study, 29 percent of parents in the program group had talked with their children about how to use a condom, versus 5 percent in the comparison group.

“We’d teach them some skills one week, and they’d come back the next week bubbling over with excitement that they’d talked with their teen about relationships, love, or sex…their teen had actually engaged in a real conversation with them, or role-played a topic like how to say no to unwanted sexual advances,” Schuster said in a statement.

Many workplaces already offer health-promotion programs. The current findings, the researchers write, “point to the potential to expand the scope of worksite health promotion beyond employees’ own health.”

SOURCE: British Medical Journal, online July 11, 2008.