Teenage Sex

One of the world’s biggest problems in today’s society is teenage sex. United States has the highest pregnancy, abortion and child birth among teenagers. The biggest reason for this is because children grow up with the media promoting sex. Movies, music and magazines send the message that sex is okay and often expected. Teenagers don’t fully understand the consequences that can arise from there decisions. The national campaign to prevent teen pregnancy has done a lot of studies and found about twenty percent of adolescents will have sexual intercourse before there fifteenth birthday and one in seven sexually active fourteen year olds will become pregnant. It has also been a concern that sexually active teenagers are far more likely to engage in other risky behaviors. Eighteen percent of sexually active young people reported that they drink regularly compared to three percent virgins. Similarly 29 percent of the sexually experienced adolescents said they had smoked regularly, and 43 percent had used marijuana, compared with 8 percent and 10 percent of the virgins. This report also found that teenagers have ample opportunities to engage in sexual activities. More than half of the fourteen year olds that were questioned have attended a party with no adult supervision, and about a third said that within the last three months, they had lain on a bed or couch alone with someone they liked. From half to three-quarters of the experienced 12- to 14-year-olds said they had used contraception the first time they had sex. About a quarter of the 12- to 14-years-olds had dated or had a romantic relationship with someone at least two years older -- and the greater the age difference, the more likely the relationship was to have included sexual intercourse, the study found. The data in the report comes from three federally financed surveys of young people -- the National Survey of Family Growth, the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth -- and four smaller data sets.

Education about responsible sexual behaviors and specific clear information about the consequences of sexual intercourse are frequently not offered. Therefore, much of the "sex education" that adolescents receive filters through misinformed or uninformed peers. Today there are two different forms of sexual education class’s. Depending on what your state or local school district wants teens either learn comprehensive sexuality education or the abstinence only until marriage program. Comprehensive Sexuality Education is a program that starts in kindergarten and continues through high school. It brings up age appropriate sexuality topics and covers the broad spectrum of sex education, including safe sex, STDs, contraceptives, masturbation, body image, and more. If this is the type of sex education your teen is receiving at school there may be times that you need to buffer some of the information, as it may have come sooner than your teenager needed it. Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs emphasize abstinence from