IS THIS WHAT ABSTINENCE-ONLY EDUCATION LOOKS LIKE?: Simcha Fisher

at the National Catholic Register:

...I stumbled across this XOJane post, in which thoroughly secular people recount their experiences in school with abstinence-only education. Here's a typical story:

[G]irls were given two glasses of water and told to chew up food and spit it into one of them.

Their teacher -- a guest speaker from an anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy" group, then asked them which glass they'd rather drink. The lesson, in case you haven't guessed already, is that premarital sex makes you a gross glass of regurgitated food.

The readers recounted many variations on the "used food" theme: kids were supposed to lick a Hershey's Kiss and then invite someone else to lick it, too. Or kids were asked to take tape and stick it to their arms or the floor, and then pass it down the line. At the end of the activity, you look at the tape, or the candy, or the cup of water and think, "Ew, this is used. I don't want any."

Is this what a typical abstinence-only education is like? If so, I'm as horrified and disgusted as the XOJane commenters.

What's so bad about this kind of presentation? I'm going to answer as someone who remembers being a teenage girl (maybe men will have a different perspective, and can share it in the comment box).

Here are the problems: First, the message simply won't work for so many girls. What about the girls who have already had sex or "gone too far?" These demonstrations teach them that they are already ruined, worthless, revolting, useless. Many will despair, and throw themselves into promiscuity whole hog out of misery, or out of some desire to compensate themselves by at least getting some pleasure out of their "ruination."

And what about girls who are in love with their boyfriends, or think they are? They'll think, "Well, this is no problem for me and my boyfriend. I can give myself to him and it will be pure and beautiful because we'll be together forever <3 <3 <3" (and meanwhile, the boyfriend is thinking, "Score!").

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Labels: abstinence, adolescence, culture, Marriage, premarital sex, sex, sex education

posted by Eve at 5:07 PM VOTE

MOST U.S. HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS HAVE NEVER HAD SEX: Carolyn Moynihan

at MercatorNet: Here is some important info from the US that we missed last week. A report from the federal health monitoring agency, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), brings the news that births to teenagers aged 15-19 are down by 44 per cent on 1990. The 2010 birth rate for that age group of 34.3 per 1000 females represents a 70-year low, and record lows for all racial/ethnic groups.

Actually, by itself a lower teenage birth-rate is an equivocal statistic. It could have been brought down by abortion. It could mean that hundreds of thousands of young women are on hormonal contraceptives that make them vulnerable to diseases and facilitate harmful relationships. It is a matter for ethical evaluation whether it is worse for an 18- or 19-year-old to have a baby than to be subject to these alternatives.

The good news is that the dramatic drop in pregnancies is related first and foremost to increased sexual abstinence among teens. Those reporting (in the National Survey of Family Growth) that they had never had sexual intercourse increased from 48.9 per cent in 1995 to 56.7 per cent in 2006-2010 - a 16 per cent change. Significantly, this increase was greater among 18- to 19-year-olds (from 28.9 per cent to 36.5 per cent, which = 26 per cent increase) than among 15- to 17-year olds (from 61.4 per cent to 72.9 per cent = 19 per cent).

That suggests at least three-quarters of high school teens have never had vaginal sex, and more than a third of those starting college. Well over half of the combined age-groups say they have never had sex. You can believe them or not, but there is no evidence to support a statement like, “Most American teens have had sex by the time they leave high school.” more

Labels: abstinence, adolescence, contraception, culture, premarital sex, race, virginity

posted by Eve at 10:28 PM VOTE

TEEN PREGNANCY: WHAT CAUSES WHAT?: The Conversable Economist

blogs:

Here is a classic problem of cause and effect. Teenagers who give birth are more likely to be from households with lower income levels. Also, teenagers who give tend to end up later in life in households with lower income levels. But does the lower income level cause teens to be more likely to give birth? Or does giving birth cause as a teen cause that woman to be more likely to end up in a lower-income household? How can one untangle cause and effect? Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine tackle these questions in "Why is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States So High and Why Does It Matter?" which appears in the Spring 2012 issue of my own Journal of Economic Perspectives. They have lots of interesting comments to make about variation in teen birthrates across states and countries. Here, I'll focus on their analysis of the cause and effect question, which surprised me and offers a nice example of how economist try to disentangle these sorts of issues.

"Our reading of the totality of evidence leads us to conclude that being on a low economic trajectory in life leads many teenage girls to have children while they are young and unmarried and that poor outcomes seen later in life (relative to teens who do not have children) are simply the continuation of the original low economic trajectory. That is, teen childbearing is explained by the low economic trajectory but is not an additional cause of later difficulties in life. Surprisingly, teen birth itself does not appear to have much direct economic consequence."

Conceptually, how would one tell whether giving birth as a teenager is a cause of lower future economic prospects?

more, & quite interesting

Labels: adolescence, class, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, teenage pregnancy

posted by Eve at 10:25 PM VOTE

MODERN YOUTH MINISTRY A "50-YEAR FAILED EXPERIMENT," SAY PASTORS: Christian Post

reports:

A group of pastors and former youth ministry leaders suggest that today's youth ministries should be disbanded, calling the common practice of separating congregations by age for worship and Bible study "unbiblical."

The church leaders state their case in the documentary film, "Divided: Is Age-Segregated Ministry Multiplying or Dividing the Church?"

The film is produced by the National Center for Family Integrated Churches in association with LeClerc Brothers Motion Pictures. The producers released the documentary earlier this month online, and have made it available for free until Sept. 15.

"Divided" follows "edgy twenty-something" Christian filmmaker Philip LeClerc on a quest to find answers to why his generation is increasingly turning away from attending church. Recent surveys have shown that as many as 85 percent of young people will leave the church and many never return.

NCFIC Director Scott T. Brown told The Christian Post that today's modern concept of youth ministry is a "50-year failed experiment." Brown said that when he was a church leader in the '70s and '80s he could have been the "poster boy" for the youth ministry movement in California. However, he said he now feels that dividing children from adults at church is an unbiblical concept borrowed from humanistic philosophies. ...

"I look back and realize I did more harm to families than I ever imagined," Dellinger says in the film. "I see that more as I look back because I was usurping the authority of parents, especially fathers by having their children's hearts turn towards me – with their permission."

more (and a more critical look here)

Labels: adolescence, Christianity, culture, emerging adulthood, Fathers, religion

posted by Eve at 9:06 PM VOTE

INCOME INEQUALITY AND TEENAGE PREGNANCY: NYT Economix

blog:

Researchers have long tried to untangle the complicated mix of economics, culture, education and contraception (or lack thereof) that leads to teenage pregnancy.

Despite a decline in births to American teenage mothers over the past two decades, the United States stands out among developed nations in that its teenagers are much more likely to give birth than their peers in Canada, Germany, Norway, Russia (a country that is still advancing on the spectrum of development) or Switzerland.

A new study [pdf] by Melissa S. Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, and Phillip B. Levine, an economist at Wellesley College, builds on their previous research [pdf] looking at the link between income inequality and rates of teenage childbirth.

It turns out the connection is quite striking.

In general, teenage childbirth is more common among poor girls. But poor girls who live in places with a high level of inequality — meaning that the ratio of income at the median of the income distribution to the income at the 10th percentile of the income distribution is higher than in other places — are even more likely to bear children as teenagers. ...

Inequality, the authors suggest, makes the poorest citizens believe that they have little chance of economic mobility. They are giving birth “at a young age instead of investing in their own economic progress because they feel they have little chance of advancement,” the authors write.

In fact, the authors point out that other research has shown that poor girls who have babies when they are teenagers do not suffer much worse economic outcomes in the long term than their peers who wait to have children. Teenage childbearing is “a symptom, not a cause” of poverty and economic immobility, Mr. Levine said in an interview.

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Labels: adolescence, children, class, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, poverty, teenage pregnancy

posted by Eve at 9:44 PM VOTE

PUBERTY BEFORE AGE 10--A NEW "NORMAL"?: NYTMagazine

feature:

One day last year when her daughter, Ainsley, was 9, Tracee Sioux pulled her out of her elementary school in Fort Collins, Colo., and drove her an hour south, to Longmont, in hopes of finding a satisfying reason that Ainsley began growing pubic hair at age 6. Ainsley was the tallest child in her third-grade class. She had a thick, enviable blond-streaked ponytail and big feet, like a puppy’s. The curves of her Levi’s matched her mother’s.

“How was your day?” Tracee asked Ainsley as she climbed in the car.

“Pretty good.”

“What did you do at a recess?”

“I played on the slide with my friends.”

In the back seat, Ainsley wiggled out of her pink parka and looked in her backpack for her Harry Potter book. Over the past three years, Tracee — pretty and well-put-together, wearing a burnt orange blouse that matched her necklace and her bag — had taken Ainsley to see several doctors. They ordered blood tests and bone-age X-rays and turned up nothing unusual. “The doctors always come back with these blank looks on their faces, and then they start redefining what normal is,” Tracee said as we drove down Interstate 25, a ribbon of asphalt that runs close to where the Great Plains bump up against the Rockies. “And I always just sit there thinking, What are you talking about, normal? Who gets pubic hair in first grade?” ...

So why are so many girls with no medical disorder growing breasts early? Doctors don’t know exactly why, but they have identified several contributing factors.

Girls who are overweight are more likely to enter puberty early than thinner girls, and the ties between obesity and puberty start at a very young age. As Emily Walvoord of the Indiana University School of Medicine points out in her paper “The Timing of Puberty: Is It Changing? Does It Matter?” body-mass index and pubertal timing are associated at age 5, age 3, even age 9 months. This fact has shifted pediatric endocrinologists away from what used to be known as the critical-weight theory of puberty — the idea that once a girl’s body reaches a certain mass, puberty inevitably starts — to a critical-fat theory of puberty. Researchers now believe that fat tissue, not poundage, sets off a feedback loop that can cause a body to mature. As Robert Lustig, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco’s Benioff Children’s Hospital, explains, fatter girls have higher levels of the hormone leptin, which can lead to early puberty, which leads to higher estrogen levels, which leads to greater insulin resistance, causing girls to have yet more fat tissue, more leptin and more estrogen, the cycle feeding on itself, until their bodies physically mature.

In addition, animal studies show that the exposure to some environmental chemicals can cause bodies to mature early. Of particular concern are endocrine-disrupters, like “xeno-estrogens” or estrogen mimics. These compounds behave like steroid hormones and can alter puberty timing. For obvious ethical reasons, scientists cannot perform controlled studies proving the direct impact of these chemicals on children, so researchers instead look for so-called “natural experiments,” one of which occurred in 1973 in Michigan, when cattle were accidentally fed grain contaminated with an estrogen-mimicking chemical, the flame retardant PBB. The daughters born to the pregnant women who ate the PBB-laced meat and drank the PBB-laced milk started menstruating significantly earlier than their peers.

One concern, among parents and researchers, is the effect of simultaneous exposures to many estrogen-mimics, including the compound BPA, which is ubiquitous. Ninety-three percent of Americans have traces of BPA in their bodies. BPA was first made in 1891 and used as a synthetic estrogen in the 1930s. In the 1950s commercial manufacturers started putting BPA in hard plastics. Since then BPA has been found in many common products, including dental sealants and cash-register receipts. More than a million pounds of the substance are released into the environment each year.

Family stress can disrupt puberty timing as well. Girls who from an early age grow up in homes without their biological fathers are twice as likely to go into puberty younger as girls who grow up with both parents. Some studies show that the presence of a stepfather in the house also correlates with early puberty. Evidence links maternal depression with developing early. Children adopted from poorer countries who have experienced significant early-childhood stress are also at greater risk for early puberty once they’re ensconced in Western families.

Bruce Ellis, a professor of Family Studies and Human Development at the University of Arizona, discovered along with his colleagues a pattern of early puberty in girls whose parents divorced when those girls were between 3 and 8 years old and whose fathers were considered socially deviant (meaning they abused drugs or alcohol, were violent, attempted suicide or did prison time). In another study, published in 2011, Ellis and his colleagues showed that first graders who are most reactive to stress — kids whose pulse, respiratory rate and cortisol levels fluctuate most in response to environmental challenges — entered puberty earliest when raised in difficult homes. Evolutionary psychology offers a theory: A stressful childhood inclines a body toward early reproduction; if life is hard, best to mature young. But such theories are tough to prove.

Social problems don’t just increase the risk for early puberty; early puberty increases the risk for social problems as well. We know that girls who develop ahead of their peers tend to have lower self-esteem, more depression and more eating disorders. They start drinking and lose their virginity sooner. They have more sexual partners and more sexually transmitted diseases. “You can almost predict it” — that early maturing teenagers will take part in more high-risk behaviors, says Tonya Chaffee, associate clinical professor of pediatrics at University of California, San Francisco, who oversees the Teen and Young Adult Health Center at San Francisco General Hospital. Half of the patients in her clinic are or have been in the foster system. She sees in the outlines of their early-developing bodies the stresses of their lives — single parent or no parent, little or no money, too much exposure to violence.

Some of this may stem from the same social stresses that contribute to early puberty in the first place, and some of it may stem from other factors, including the common nightmare of adolescence: being different. As Julia Graber, associate chairwoman of psychology at the University of Florida, has shown, all “off-time” developers — early as well as late — have more depression during puberty than typically-developing girls. But for the late bloomers, the negative effect wears off once puberty ends. For early bloomers, the effect persists, causing higher levels of depression and anxiety through at least age 30, perhaps all through life. “Some early-maturing girls have very serious problems,” Graber told me. “More than I expected when I started looking for clinical significance. I was surprised that it was so severe.”

Researchers know there’s a relationship between pubertal timing and depression, but they don’t know exactly how that relationship works. One theory is that going through puberty early, relative to other kinds of cognitive development, causes changes in the brain that make it more susceptible to depression. As Elizabeth Sowell, director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, points out, girls in general tend to go through puberty earlier than boys, and starting around puberty, girls, as a group, also experience more anxiety and depression than boys do. Graber offers a broader hypothesis, perhaps the best understanding of the puberty-depression connection we have for now. “It may be that early maturers do not have as much time as other girls to accomplish the developmental tasks of childhood. They face new challenges while everybody else is still dealing with the usual development of childhood. This might be causing them to make less successful transitions into adolescence and beyond.”

Over the past year, I talked to mothers who tried to forestall their daughters’ puberty in many different ways.

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Labels: adolescence, childhood, children, culture, girls, parenting

posted by Eve at 2:00 PM VOTE

FOUR OLD SAYINGS ABOUT FAMILY THAT ARE (SOMETIMES) B.S.: John Cheese

at Cracked, so usual language-and-imagery warnings apply:

Everything you know and have comes from your family. Even if you could somehow forget that fact, society continually hammers you with the idea that there are no limits to how much [s***] you should have to put up with when it comes to your blood relatives.

I disagree.

Growing up, you are in the most frightening, vulnerable position of your life, and I'm not just talking about relying on mom to throw some corndogs in the oven, or dad to show you which porn sites won't [****] up your computer. Because of my own abnormal upbringing, I believed for the longest time that my views on family were skewed -- influenced in a negative direction as a result of a lifetime of fear. It wasn't until I started writing for Cracked and collecting emails from readers expressing the same viewpoints that I realized I wasn't unique in disagreeing with statements like ...

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Labels: adolescence, child abuse, childhood, children, culture, mental health, parenting

posted by Eve at 9:39 PM VOTE

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF DIVORCE: A REVIEW OF "A SEPARATION"

by me, at First Things:

An older man I know once remarked that in his experience, there wasn’t much point in arguing that divorce was wrong. What he’d come to believe was that—especially when the couple had children—divorce was simply impossible. These two people would continue to remain yoked to one another’s lives, their memories, griefs, resentments as intertwined as their laddering DNA.

A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning, naturalistic look at an Iranian couple clinging to their irreconcilable differences, depicts the characters’ inability to untangle themselves from all of their clutching obligations, not solely the marital ones. The characters are often framed by windows, door jambs, or staircases, all the furniture of the social world. They’re fenced in, crowded, and monitored. There are many striking shots in which characters are framed by the bodies of their relatives: as when Simin (Leila Hatami), the wife, is seen through the crook of her father-in-law’s elbow. Other people’s lives and bodies form the boundaries of their world.

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Labels: adolescence, aging, culture, divorce, Iran, law, Marriage

posted by Eve at 2:28 PM VOTE

SOMETIMES IT TAKES THREE TO TANGO: John Shore

at the Huffington Post:

In the comments on a recent piece of mine, "If no one's being hurt, God's okay with your sexuality," a woman wrote to share that she is polyamorous -- specifically meaning, in her case, that she is (as I learned) living with, in love with, deeply committed to, and basically in all ways but legally married to a man and a woman. I asked our new acquittance if she would be willing to let me interview her. At first she was reticent -- but, as she put it, "the opportunity to share with others a glimpse into our life is too good to pass up."

Could you give us a quick definition of what "polyamorous" is/means?

Honestly, the term "polyamorous" wasn't on our radar when we fell in love. It was later that we discovered there was a term for what we were. If we need a term, we consider ourselves "polyfidelitous," which is what polys call those who love more than one person in a long-term, faithful kind of way. Some people consider themselves polyamorous because they believe they need and/or want to be in multiple relationships at any given time. This is not a good description of us. We all feel we could be satisfied with just one person. It's just that we fell in love with two, pretty much all at the same time... and we discovered (through lots of open and honest communication!) that we were all not just OK with it, but that it was something we wanted.

Truthfully, we don't think of ourselves as polyamorous. We just think of ourselves as us. ...

Were any two of you in a relationship before the third one of you joined it?

I was a (divorced) single mother, and they were a happily married couple. After my divorce, I had the joy of finally being free from an abusive marriage. I was supporting four children with very little support, but managing. She had been my best friend for years, and we've always been closer than sisters. People used to always comment on how close we were, but we never realized that could be sexual, too. Both of us were raised to not even be aware that was a possibility.

Long story short, the three of us began doing more and more things together and it just... worked really well. We got along incredibly, the three of us, and at some point, my best friend realized she had feelings for me. She was the one who began the conversation about, "What if?" A lot of talking, a lot of thinking, all of us talking together, as well as doing a lot of thinking on our own, individually. I realized I had feelings for her (and for him), all feelings that were completely buried (since it was impossible to love either of them like that, right?). ...

Do you all live together?

Yep. Wouldn't have it any other way. The year that we lived apart was horrible. Fun, in that it was a new relationship, so it was exciting but totally exhausting. The minute we bought our big house together, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. Then came the adjustment of blending two families. That takes time, but we parent in very similar ways, and the children and teens already were very close, so it all meshed together well, too. If we didn't think the two families had the ability to blend well together, we never would have done it in the first place, because we feel very strongly about our kids and want the best for them. ...

The teenagers know that we are all in a relationship together, since it's pretty hard to keep anything from teenagers, but the younger children do not. They just know that we are all best friends. The teenagers were upset at first but have grown to like it. One of them recently said, "I can't believe I ever thought it would be weird for you all being together. I love having two moms!"

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Labels: adolescence, children, culture, more than two parents, parenting, polyamory, religion

posted by Eve at 1:42 AM VOTE

SHOULD SCHOOLS TEACH TEENS HOW TO BE GOOD SPOUSES?: Vicki Larson

at the Huffington Post:

...Is there a place for marital education amid algebra, environmental ed and world history classes?

Some high schools already offer that. In 1998, Florida became the first state to require a class on relationships and marriage for high school students, part of a larger plan to encourage marriage skills by discounting marriage licenses for couples that take a premarital skills course. The mandate hasn't had much impact because "loopholes in the law make it easy to avoid changing the education curriculum," according to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Loopholes or not, many see a need for such high school classes. In 2000, long-time teacher Marlene Pearson was asked by the National Marriage Project to review the effectiveness of several marriage and relationship programs used in schools. As she says in her study, "Can Kids Get Smart About Marriage," youths are:

Confused and misguided about the differences between sex and love, living together and marriage, manhood and fatherhood. They get little help or accurate information from their elders. The Baby Boom generation, veterans of the sexual and divorce revolution, has little to say, and certainly not much good to say, about marriage. This leaves young people like my students with few clues as to how they achieve a goal they almost universally seek. They have to try to figure it out by themselves. But the sad truth is that it is hard to figure out marriage on your own. Most young adults in most societies across the world are able to depend on the teachings and traditions of the larger community in life matters as consequential as finding a lifelong mate and getting married. But very little guidance is available in our society today, and what guidance there is comes from Hollywood and Madison Avenue. As a result, young adults are floundering and often failing in their personal and family lives.

But are high schools -- most of which have had to lay off teachers and staff because of budget cutbacks and are struggling to boost academic scores to keep up with new legislation -- the best place to teach kids about marriage?

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Labels: adolescence, culture, divorce, divorce reform, Marriage, marriage counseling, schools

posted by Eve at 8:06 PM VOTE

TEEN PREGNANCY RATE HITS 30-YEAR LOW: KJ Dell'Antonia

at the NYTimes parenting blog:

Between 2006 and 2010, the number of unmarried teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 who reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that they’ve had sex dropped below 50 percent. The C.D.C. described this as an actual drop in the number of teenagers having sex; the cynical addition of the word “reported” is mine: obviously the only way for the C.D.C. to determine whether those teenagers were sexually active (and how) was to ask them, and I’ve expressed my doubts about the resulting data.

Now the Guttmacher Institute is backing up those teenagers with hard facts: in 2008, the pregnancy rate among teenagers dropped [pdf] to its lowest point in more than 30 years. In 1990, when the rate was at its highest, 116.9 out of every thousand girls between the ages of 15 and 19 became pregnant; in 2008, only 67.8 did. Among young women under 15, the pregnancy rate fell even more. ...

A representative of the Guttmacher Institute just let me know that it did, in fact, draw some conclusions. “A large body of research has shown that the long-term decline in teen pregnancy, birth and abortion rates was driven primarily by improved use of contraception among teens.”

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Labels: abortion, adolescence, contraception, culture, pregnancy, premarital sex, teenage pregnancy

posted by Eve at 12:32 AM VOTE

How a Conservative Catholic School Saved My Teen from Public Education: Amy Phillips

in the Washington Times:

Middle school is hard. Children leave the structure and relative safety of elementary school, and armed with a brand new set of hormones and "feelings,"get thrust into a school where the hall talk has moved from Pokémon to bra sizes and sex. Yes, sex. I get that. I thought I was prepared for it.

Then the middle school took my daughter and threw her in a world of sadness and despair, and I had to act fast. ...

On the first day of school, my daughter went willingly, happy for a new environment and I held my breath. I did not have to hold it for long. I got a call within an hour telling me that the principal wanted to talk to me. Here it comes, I thought. I was right; Cheyenne had made sure to tell everyone she was pagan and gay. And then something remarkable happened. They supported me and Cheyenne. Yes, they asked that she not announce to everyone (literally, because she does that) but they were not going to kick her out and would do everything to protect her from other students. The principal and teachers have become her greatest source of strength and inspiration.

It has not all been smooth sailing. She is once again on the outside of the class, since most of the children come from conservative backgrounds. Other girls will even tell her it is wrong to be gay. I do not know for sure, but I suspect the principal must have gotten one or two phone calls from other parents insisting that they expel my child. After all, many of them send their kids to Catholic school to get them away from the very influences espoused in my daughter. She is still a mediocre student, and is a constant thorn in her religious teacher’s side as she challenges every tenant of faith.

But Cheyenne has persevered and thrived.

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Labels: adolescence, Catholic Church, culture, homosexuality, schools

posted by Imapp Staff at 11:46 PM VOTE

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE TEENAGE MIND?: Alison Gopnik

in the Wall Street Journal [definitely worth reading the whole thing --Eve]:

"What was he thinking?" It's the familiar cry of bewildered parents trying to understand why their teenagers act the way they do.

How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth control find herself pregnant by a boy she doesn't even like? What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?

Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. A leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.

At the same time, first with the industrial revolution and then even more dramatically with the information revolution, children have come to take on adult roles later and later. Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare knew that the emotionally intense combination of teenage sexuality and peer-induced risk could be tragic—witness "Romeo and Juliet." But, on the other hand, if not for fate, 13-year-old Juliet would have become a wife and mother within a year or two.

Our Juliets (as parents longing for grandchildren will recognize with a sigh) may experience the tumult of love for 20 years before they settle down into motherhood. And our Romeos may be poetic lunatics under the influence of Queen Mab until they are well into graduate school.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.

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Labels: "emerging adulthood", adolescence, age at first marriage, childhood, children, culture, parenting, schools, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 1:10 PM VOTE

Teens Fall in Love, Share Their Passwords:

link round-up:

In a moment of passionate texting, they decided it was time...to share their passwords.

A thoughtful New York Times article published yesterday speaks to an eerie new trend: In the digital era, teenagers in love want to share their most intimate secrets, ideas and, of course, their Facebook accounts. ...

A 2011 Pew Internet and American Life Project study revealed that 30% of all teen Internet users shared a password with a friend or significant other. Of that percentage, 38% of girls shared a password with a friend or significant other versus only 23% of boys.

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Labels: adolescence, boys, culture, girls, relationships

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:57 PM VOTE

CDC: MANY TEEN MOMS DIDN'T THINK THEY WOULD GET PREGNANT: USA Today

reports:

A new government study suggests a lot of teenage girls are clueless about their chances of getting pregnant.

In a survey of thousands of teenage mothers who had unintended pregnancies, about a third said they didn't use birth control because they didn't believe they could pregnant. ...

The researchers interviewed nearly 5,000 teenage girls in 19 states who gave birth after unplanned pregnancies in 2004 through 2008. The survey was done through mailed questionnaires with telephone follow-up.

About half of the girls in the survey said they were not using any birth control when they got pregnant. That's higher than surveys of teens in general, which have found that fewer than 20 percent said they didn't use contraception the last time they had sex. ...

Only 13 percent said they didn't use birth control because they had trouble getting it.

Another finding: Nearly a quarter of the teen moms said they did not use contraception because their partner did not want them to. That suggests that sex education must include not only information about anatomy and birth control, but also about how to deal with situations in which a girl feels pressured to do something she doesn't want to, Gavin said.

The findings are sobering, Albert said. But it's important to remember that the overall teen birth rate has been falling for some time, and recently hit its lowest mark in about 70 years.

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Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, sex, teenage pregnancy

posted by Eve at 1:26 AM VOTE

BOYS SWIMMING ON GIRLS' TEAMS FIND SUCCESS, THEN DRAW IRE: NYTimes

reports:

During his first-period broadcast Monday, the Norwood High athletic director Brian McDonough congratulated Will Higgins for breaking the meet record in the 50-yard freestyle the previous day at the Massachusetts South Division fall swimming and diving championships.

McDonough chose not to mention that it was a girls swimming championship.

“I didn’t want to get into that,” he said.

Anthony Rodriguez, another boy on the Norwood girls team, heard a grace note in McDonough’s omission.

“If people hear that you set a record, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s awesome,’ ” Rodriguez said. “But if they knew you were competing against girls, they wouldn’t have as much respect for you.”

Higgins, a senior, and Rodriguez, a sophomore, are among roughly two dozen boys competing on girls teams in Massachusetts because their schools do not have boys swimming programs. They are able to do so because of the open access amendment to the state constitution, which was voted into law in the 1970s and mandates that boys and girls must be afforded equal access to athletics.

Boys have been members of girls swim teams since the 1980s, but until recently they were mostly a sideshow. It has only been in the last year or two that boys have swum well enough to draw attention — and people’s ire. The epicenter of the debate is the 50-yard freestyle, an event in which strength can trump talent or technique.

At the Division I state championships on Saturday at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there are eight boys in the 28-swimmer field in the 50 freestyle. Although Norwood’s Higgins was ruled academically ineligible Friday and will not compete at the state meet, two of the top four seeds in the 50 freestyle are boys, giving rise to the possibility that a boy could be the girls state champion. ...

Paul Wetzel, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, said the state’s swimming committee would meet after the season, and among the topics on the table would be Higgins’s record swim.

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Labels: adolescence, boys, culture, gender, gender differences, girls, schools

posted by Eve at 10:44 PM VOTE

High School Teacher Wins Kudos for Book Tied to His Affair with Student: Newser.com

reports:

A teacher bounced from an international American high school after having an affair with a 17-year-old student is winning critical acclaim—for his novel about a teacher who has an affair with his student, reports Jezebel. Reviewers from the New York Times to novelists are gushing about Alexander Maksick's book, You Deserve Nothing. But students at the American School of Paris, including one who calls him a "sick bastard," complain that almost all the events of the book are real. The disgusted victim says Maksick used personal information she told him in confidence, notes Jezebel's Elissa Strauss.

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Labels: adolescence, culture

posted by Imapp Staff at 5:00 PM VOTE

BULLYING: WE'RE AGAINST IT, BUT CAN WE AGREE ON A DEFINITION?: Janice D'Arcy

Parenting column at the Washington Post:

In what looks to be the latest tragedy related to bullying, a 10-year-old apparently committed suicide after she complained of constant teasing at her Illinois elementary school Ashlynn Conner’s death has given us yet another reason to combat bullying. Not that anyone needed one.

Culturally, almost all of us have come to understand that bullying is unacceptable. Unlike a few decades ago (or less), when harsh schoolyard treatment was overlooked, most states now ban bullying and schools have adopted anti-bullying programs.

Obviously, it remains a problem. Part of the reason may be that the language that bans bullying tends to be vague and open for interpretation. That’s often by design. Though we can all agree that bullying is wrong, we can’t agree on exactly what it is.

Does it include hazing?

Yesterday, The Post’s Michael Alison Chandler wrote about the mixed success administrators at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School have had in trying to control a school tradition that’s become an annual hazing ritual. Where officials were increasingly concerned “Color Day” had become an excuse to demean and mistreat younger students, some students have argued that it’s merely a fun rite of passage.

Does it include sexual harassment?

A recent American Association of University Women sexual harassment study ( I wrote about it in an earlier post here) found that almost half of middle and high school respondents reported being victims of sexual harassment. But commentator Katie Roiphe wrote in the New York Times this past weekend that much of what the survey deemed sexual harassment should be considered a normal part of adolescence.

Does it include hateful speech?

Bullying became a partisan issue in Michigan in the past week. An anti-bullying bill there was altered by a Republican legislator to allow an exception for “sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction.”

Gay and Muslim groups immediately protested the new language. Even Stephen Colbert mocked the inserted language lampooning by declaring, “Bullying is just fine, as long as you get a permission slip from God.”

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Labels: adolescence, children, culture, freedom of speech, religion, religious liberty, schools, sexual harassment

posted by Eve at 8:35 PM VOTE

WOMEN WHO LOST VIRGINITY EARLY MORE LIKELY TO DIVORCE: BEHIND THE STUDY: Huffington Post

interview:

Want a successful marriage? Make sure you have sex when you're ready.

According to a new study, women who are sexually active early in their adolescence--specifically, before age 16--are more likely to divorce.

Researchers at the University of Iowa used the responses of 3,793 women who are married or have been married at some point in their lives from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth to examine the relationship between the age at which they had their first sexual experience, and the success of their first marriage.

At first glance, the findings seemed alarming: multiple outlets (including this one), reported that up to 47 percent of women who lost their virginity during their teen years divorced within 10 years of getting married--implying that women who lose their virginity during adolescence will inevitably face conflict in their later adult relationships.

In fact, while the age at which sex first occurred was significant in determining women’s likelihood to divorce, more important was whether that sex qualified as “wanted." That's because the earlier women had their first sexual experience, the less frequently the sex was actually wanted. In short, the study's conclusions were less about the correlation between when a girl loses her virginity and her risk of divorce than it was about how the nature of the first sexual experience affects later romantic relationships.

While some of the initial reports about the study alluded to this point, they often did not explore it completely, so we decided to go to the source--lead researcher Anthony Paik--to shed more light on this surprisingly complicated study. ...

HP: How is “unwanted” sex defined?

AP: The survey [results are culled from] the CDC’s 2002 Survey of Family Growth. It has a couple of questions that ask for the context of first intercourse—that it “caused mixed feelings,” that it “wasn’t completely wanted,” or that it “was completely wanted.” It’s not clear from the survey what the womens' experience was specifically. ...

HP: Why would unwanted sexual experiences be associated with divorce?

AP: There are two arguments: one is that it’s a PTSD process, which is a psychological model of a post-traumatic stress syndrome process [stemming from] childhood sex abuse. This model emphasizes that these experiences, particularly with adults, are traumatic, [and] lead to high levels of sexualization [which] makes individuals susceptible to relationship difficulties.

In the second argument, unwanted sexual experiences lead to early sexualization, which is associated with subsequent life-course events that are key divorce determinants, such as having more sex partners, premarital conceptions, and premarital births.

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Labels: adolescence, culture, divorce, girls, Marriage, mental health, out-of-wedlock births, sex, sexual assault

posted by Eve at 3:26 PM VOTE

WOMEN WHO LOST VIRGINITY EARLY MORE LIKELY TO DIVORCE: NEW STUDY: Huffington Post

reports:

There might be a new argument to try when convincing your teen to wait to have sex. According to the a study conducted by the University of Iowa, women who lost their virginity in their young teens are more likely to divorce.

The study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, surveyed the responses of 3,793 women and found that 31 percent who lost their virginity as teens divorced within five years, and 47 percent divorced within 10 years. On the flip side, the divorce rate for women who had waited to have sex was only 15 percent at the five year mark, and 27 percent by the time 10 years rolled around.

But the study also found that a first sexual experience before the age of 16 -- wanted or not -- was still strongly associated with divorce.

Of course early sexual experiences can have lasting effects on relationships later in life. So it's not surprising that with 42 percent of participants claiming their first sexual experience before the age of 18 wasn't completely wanted, that it could affect them in their adult life.

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Labels: abstinence, adolescence, culture, divorce, girls, Marriage, premarital sex, sex, sexual assault, virginity, women

posted by Eve at 5:17 PM VOTE