Engaging parents and caregivers of system-involved youth in a sexual health intervention

•Engaging parents and caregivers in programming to build their capacity to support their youth’s sexual health development is a meaningful approach to improving sexual health outcomes among system-involved youth.•Fifty-five percent of parents/caregivers in the study fully engaged in the intervention and received at least two sexual health-related topics.•Parent/caregiver engagement resulted from extensive time and effort, requiring researchers to contact parents/caregivers, on average, 6 times over 27.4 days to engage them fully in the intervention.•Practitioners and researchers will benefit from considering and planning for the substantial time and effort needed to achieve intervention engagement goals.