NYT says "Don't Panic"

Teens are not having more sex, nor are they having it earlier

The moral panic around teens and sex is uncalled for according to a story in today's New York Times. It is almost as newsworthy that the story, titled "The Myth Of Rampant Teen Promiscuity," by Tara Parker-Pope made it to the Times. Of course it wasn't front page news, but still. Here's what the article has to say:

"Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys."

(This doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about. There was an increase in teen pregnancy for the first time in more than a decade, which may mean that while teens are having less sex overall, some teens are having more and are not using contraception as often. ) Click here to read more

So what accounts for the misperception that teens are out of control? Part of it is the media and the hype around those sensationalized cases that do get reported.  But another reason, according to sociologist Kathleen Bogle, author of Hooking up: Sex, dating and relationships on campus is that teens' patterns of socializing have changed over the decades and the old scripts of courting or dating no longer apply. ('Script' is a term that sociologists use to refer to a common pattern of interaction.) The hook-up script is the one many teens use and because it separates exploration from some kind of "serious committed relationship" it is alarmingly promiscuous-seeming to adults who might themselves have been having sex at an earlier age, but with a person they were "in love with." Also terms common to the script like "fooling around" and "hooking up" are vague and easily misinterpreted.

But the misperception remains strong. I showed this article to my students today, and even though we'd just had a long discussion during which they were clearly advocating for research as a source of authority ("truth" in their words), they tended to reject the findings of the article. It clearly challenged something they "knew" was true. That they "knew" what they knew because of anecdote instead of research, and even though they had previously told me that one should not overgeneralize from anecdotes, some were unwilling to accept that this data could be accurate.

It's interesting that we are so invested in the idea that teens are out of control. I look around me and see see so much evidence that it's the grownups who are out of control. Is it any wonder we've worked so hard to shift the attention? I think back to Mike Males's book Scapegoat Generation and wonder how little things have changed.