Sex Ed Helps Teens Delay First Intercourse

The title of this post doesn't pull any punches. And that's deliberate. I want those search engines to pick up on "teens," "sex," and "intercourse" so as many parents (and teens) as possible will hear this important message:

Sex education greatly boosts the likelihood that teens will delay having intercourse. That's the word from a study of 2,019 teenagers, ages 15 to 19 years, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Teenage boys who received sex education in school were 71 percent less likely — and similarly educated teen girls were 59 percent less likely — to have sexual intercourse before age 15.

The boys were more than twice as likely to use birth control the first time they had intercourse if they had been in sex-education classes in school.

“Sex education seems to be working,” says study lead author Trisha Mueller, an epidemiologist with the CDC. “It seems to be especially effective for populations that are usually at high risk.”

Sex education remains important because kids still harbor “mythology” about sex, says Claire Brindis, interim director of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California at San Francisco. “Some still believe you can’t get pregnant if you’re standing up or doing it for the first time or if your boyfriend is drinking a lot of Mountain Dew."

“A lot of sex education is about the plumbing — teaching them about anatomy and physiology, what a condom looks like,” Brindis says. “What they really need help on is: ‘I’m in the back seat or I’m at a party, and there aren’t adults around and there’s pressure to do more than make out.’ They need help with ‘What do I do in that setting?’”