I am sure we all have our own funny stories about sex ed class. But they really aren't so funny when we think about the fact that many of us got our (mis)information about the birds and bees from halted conversations with our parents, from gossiping with our friends, or from reading the bathroom wall.
Despite today's availability of information about sex and abstinence, things haven't gotten much better for adolescents. Ask a kid what "not having sex" means and you'll get a million different answers.
Legislation like the recently introduced REAL Act (The Responsible Education About Life Act) aims to end such misinformation by providing federal funding for comprehensive sex education in schools. (For the last 10 years billions of dollars have gone to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs while zero dollars went to what is known as comprehensive sex education.)
Informing policy initiatives, the actual design of sex education curricula, and activist interventions, is a body of knowledge produced by nonprofits and university based research centers that aims to answer critical questions about sex education.
What should kids know about sex and at what age?
What effect does knowing about sex have on adolescent sexual behavior?
Who is responsible for teaching kids about sex? parents, gym teachers, health teachers?
Are LGBTQ teens being left out of sex ed?
What can we do to prevent teen pregnancy?
What works best in HIV prevention education?
This is an issue that affects everyone, yet because the issue is often cast as being a moral issue it is tempting to avoid it altogether or to even imagine that the debate about sex education is a thing of the past. We encourage you to take a minute to explore some of the research collected here and get a different view on sex ed.
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Do As I Say...Should We Teach Only Abstinence in Sex Education?
Contributing Organization(s): Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS), University of California, San Francisco
Publication date: 1997-09-11
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In order to address these problems more effectively, it is not necessary to settle any of the political debates that whirl around the issue of sexuality education. What is needed is a commitment to results. Elected officials, teachers, school boards and parents need to choose: is the function of sexuality education in public schools primarily to prevent disease and unplanned pregnancy or to promote traditional ideology?
We need to use the information currently available to set responsible sexuality education policy focused on improved outcomes for youth. Quality research on program effectiveness, along with a close analysis of the needs of young people at especially high risk, provides important guidance.
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Involving Males in Preventing Teen Pregnancy
Contributing Organization(s): Urban Institute
Publication date: 1997-12-01
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Preventing teenagers from having unplanned pregnancies is an important goal that has been pursued since the 1970s, when births to teenagers were first diagnosed as a major social problem. Much has been learned about the types of interventions that work and do not work (Kirby, 1997; Moore et al., 1995; Frost and Forrest, 1995; Miller and Paikoff, 1992). A glaring gap, however, is the lack of systematic information about how males could and should participate in pregnancy prevention efforts. This guide begins to fill that void by pulling together -- from data on programs around the country -- what is currently known about male reproductive behavior and programs designed to influence this behavior. Complete listing and access info » |
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Why Should We Invest in Adolescents?
Contributing Organization(s): Urban Institute
Publication date: 1998-07-01
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Too often in the past, public policy has either ignored adolescents or focused on them only when they behave in ways that trouble their elders. Compared to very young children and to the elderly, adolescents suffer from few life - threatening conditions. The formation adolescence of certain health habits with long-term negative consequences (such as smoking tobacco products, use of other addictive substances, or sexual activity without protection from STD and AIDS) often does not produce morbidity or mortality in adolescence itself. Rather the effects, and the costs, develop over a lifetime. Thus, when societies face decisions about where to invest significant health and other supportive resources, attention to adolescents often receives short shrift, despite the fact that after early infancy, adolescence is the period of greatest vulnerability until one gets to the diseases of old age. This work focuses on youth in Caribbean and Latin American Countries. This work contains both English and Spanish versions. Complete listing and access info » |
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Childbearing by Teens: Links to Welfare Reform
Contributing Organization(s): Urban Institute
Publication date: 1998-08-01
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Teenage pregnancy and childbearing have been a continuing source of concern to health practitioners, educators, the media, politicians, and the public. Teen childbearing is associated with numerous negative outcomes for both the mother and her children and with costs to society -- including welfare costs -- and has been a major focus of welfare reform efforts. Complete listing and access info » |
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One Out of Every Five: Teen Mothers and Subsequent Childbearing
Contributing Organization(s): Center for Law and Social Policy
Publication date: 1998-08-01
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The birth of a child to a teenager puts the young family at risk for negative social and health consequences; the birth of additional children can further impede the family's financial, academic, and social success. Though there is a national interest in reducing the teen birth rate, strategies designed to achieve this goal often insufficiently target a readily identifiable group -teens who are already mothers. Of those programs that do target teen mothers, few have been able to demonstrate success. Teen mothers should be targeted for pregnancy prevention not only because they contribute to the teen birth rate with its attendant consequences, but also because second and higher-order births to teenaged mothers often limits life options further than having only one child.Compared to a teen mother with one child, a teenager with two or more children typically faces: - lower educational attainment;
- greater likelihood of poverty; and
- impaired health for the infant.
Complete listing and access info » |
Available for your listening pleasure: a podcast on the issue of adolescents and reproductive health. Stacy Kessler, IssueLab's Collections Assistant, chatted with Laura Lindberg, Senior Research Associate at the Guttmacher Institute about the role of nonprofit research in the debate about comprehensive sex ed and abstinence training.
