Parents as partners: Parents’ voices for school-based sexuality education in South Korea

Objective: This study investigated Korean parents’ perceptions of school-based sexuality education, the challenges they encounter in their children’s sexuality education and their perspectives on improvement strategies, positioning them as active partners rather than passive recipients. Method: A qualitative study was conducted using focus group interviews with 7 groups of parents (24 participants) of middle and high school students between 2022 and 2025. Participants were recruited through convenience sampling via online communities, supplemented by snowball sampling. Focus group interviews lasting 95–130 min were transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic analysis. Peer debriefing and member checking ensured trustworthiness. Results: The findings revealed three overarching themes and eight subthemes. First, participants expressed a ‘contradictory grievance’, noting that school sexuality education remains superficial due to systemic time constraints despite its recognised importance. Second, a ‘triple barrier’ posed significant hurdles to parental engagement in sexuality education. This barrier stemmed from a lack of institutional information, the perception that children grow up in a distinct digital world, and internal parental anxieties. To address this, the final theme, ‘Overcoming the Hurdles’, highlighted the need for synchronised collaboration. This requires learning how to open the door to conversation, positioning schools at the educational centre of the work that needs to be done and enhancing parental awareness of the need for school-based collaboration. Conclusion: The findings shift the fundamental paradigm of parental roles from passive recipients to supported collaborators requiring structured school support. Rather than a simple expansion of content, creating an effective sexuality education framework necessitates establishing the conditions that encourage parent–child conversations. This can be facilitated through active curriculum sharing, the provision of practical support material and the creation of collaborative structures that genuinely bridge the school and the home. These insights inform future educational policy by positioning meaningful parental engagement in school-based sexuality education not as a marginal element, but as a core domain central to the holistic development of adolescents within examination-centric educational contexts such as those found in South Korea.