To understand what American high school students know and believe about parenting and child development we designed, validated, and administered a questionnaire to a sample of over one thousand American high school students. The Adolescent Parenting Knowledge and Attitudes Survey (APKAS) assesses the extent to which students hold certain beliefs associated with positive outcomes for young children, as well as their knowledge of certain milestones of child development.

A small number of studies using surveys have been conducted to understand the attitudes of specific adolescent groups—such as teens considered at high risk of teen pregnancy (e.g. Larsen & Juhasz, 1985; Meyer, Jain, & Canfield-Davis, 2011)—but to our knowledge this is the first-ever survey on the topic to be administered to a large and geographically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse sample of adolescents. To obtain a copy of the APKAS please email us.