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The teen actors in the video "The Importance of Condoms".
A New York state funded series of web videos created for teens by teens in order to teach them about safe sex, STDs and pregnancy is causing controversy. Some feel the “racy language” is disturbing and simply not the way money for safe sex campaigns should be spent. I heard the story on the news this morning when the reporters mentioned how they could barely show many of the parts on TV, in fact. The language was just too bad for TV viewers.
The ‘ More Than Just Sex’ series posted on Vimeo.com features five public service announcements and the campaign is meant to target inner city kids. Continue reading »
The birth rate is the lowest in a century
Last year the birth rate in the United States dropped even lower for the third straight year as women put off having children because of our poor economy.
In 2010, the birth rate was four million, down from an all-time high of 4.3 million in 2007, according to the Associated Press. The AP reports experts believe “the downward trend is tied to the economy, which officially was in a recession from December 2007 until June 2009 but remains weak. The theory is that women with money worries — especially younger women — feel they can’t afford to start a family or add to it.”
If your kids don't get the 411 on sex in here, are you going to fill them in on all the dirty details? Really?
My daughters are little. Like, toddler little and newborn little. The very thought of them having sex is beyond disgusting. Perish the thought of them ever being sexual beings. Yuck!
But here’s the thing: some day they will grow to be women. Women who have sex (again, yuck!). As such, at some point they’ll need to learn about it (growing up and having sex). If I didn’t ensure they learned about both, I’d be a pretty bad mom, nay, a bad person.
I get the parents in New York City who are in an uproar over the sex education classes in which kids are learning firsthand about lubricants, oral sex and vibrators. But the truth is, I don’t really get the uproar.
The New York City Department of Education is about to start requiring one semester of sex ed in sixth or seventh grade, and then again in ninth or tenth grade. The information they get in there will be lots of practical stuff, like facts about abstinence, birth control, and STD and pregnancy prevention. But they’re also throwing a curve ball by way of teaching some other real stuff, like the safety of “intercourse using a condom and an oil-based lubricant,” mutual masturbation, French kissing, and anal sex, according to Jezebel. They’ll also learn about oral sex with braces, “doggie-style sex” and S&M fetishes.
Continue reading »
A new report on teens finds teen pregnancies are at an all-time low.
This just in: Teenagers are still sleeping together, and we don’t mean resting.
The newest National Survey of Family Growth report finds 43% of teen girls and 42% of teen boys report having had intercourse, rates that have essentially stayed the same over the last nine years.
For those that are having sex, condom use is up, particularly among boys, 80% of whom report using one during their first “encounter.” Despite this though, use of condoms is not consistent. USA Today reports that only “… 49% of girls and 66.5% of boys said they used one every time they had sex in the past four weeks.” (In the past four weeks? How often are they getting it on?)
What does it take to keep teens from getting pregnant?
You can’t “catch” pregnancy like you can a common cold, right? We all know what causes that, and it’s nothing you’re going to get from hanging around your pregnant girlfriends.
While pregnancy can’t be “caught” like the flu, it still might be contagious. At least among teenage girls. That’s the finding of a new study British study that shows a profound effect of teen pregnancy on a girls’ sisters. Having an older sister get knocked up doubles the odds that you’ll become a pregnant teenager yourself.
Other factors like education can mitigate the effect, but the impact of a sister’s pregnancy seems to be the strongest influence on a girl’s own liklihood of becoming pregnant. At least our families still have more influence on us than lousy shows like 16 and Pregnant.
High School Student Pretends to Be Preggers
Gaby Rodriguez could have chosen from a whole myriad of projects for her senior year. She could have trained a guide dog, started a recycling program or made a modern day adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But instead what did this 17-year-old A-student do? She pretended she was pregnant.
For six and half months, Rodriguez lied to just about everyone she knew. She told her friends and school mates that she was knocked up and wore a fake baby bump to complete the charade. There were only a handful of people in on the deception; her best friend, her boyfriend, the school principal, and her mother were among those in the know. The rest of her friends and all but one of her seven siblings all believed that she was pregnant. And her boyfriend’s parents? They thought they were going to be grandparents and were apparently hoping for a boy. So why would Gaby Rodriguez pretend to be preggers? Continue reading »
Teen pregnancy rates are down, but still high.
A new report by the Centers for Disease Control suggests that teen pregnancy rates in the US are at an all time low. That’s the good news. The bad news is, “teen birth rates in America are up to nine times higher than many other developed countries,” according to CBS News.
Only 50 percent of teen moms get a high school diploma by the age of 22, compared to 90 percent of teen girls that don’t give birth. We know that states that don’t require abstinence education have the lowest teen pregnancy rates, and that (accordingly) teen pregnancy rates are highest in the South. (The Northeast has the lowest rates of teen pregnancy in the US.) In Memphis, teen pregnancy had become such a problem, local schools adopted a “No Baby” program to educate girls about how to say no to unprotected sex.
The CDC writes, “TV, music, the Internet, and other popular youth media tend to glamorize teens having sexual intercourse and teen parenting, but the reality is starkly different.” Take it from one who knows. Teen mom Bristol Palin teamed up with Jersey Shore‘s The Situation to film a bizarre PSA discouraging teens from having sex and encouraging them to use protection if they do engage in intercourse. Despite the goofy combo of Palin and Sorrentino, the CDC would like to remind us teen pregnancy is no joke. Teen births still represent 10% of the 4 million births each year in the US, and Hispanic and black teen girls are about 2–3 times more likely to give birth than white teen girls.
Perhaps most importantly, though, girls born to teen parents are almost 33% more likely to become teen parents themselves, continuing the cycle of teen pregnancy. Continue reading »
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