Middle School: Too Late For Sex Ed?

A recent study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health seems to have found that stressing abstinence-only may help delay sex in teens. This flies in the face of many studies done in the past ten years, as well as solid numbers on pregnancies and teens with sexually transmitted diseases.

The problem seems to be that these classes are coming to kids too late. Sandy Banks, writing for the Los Angeles Times, did some preliminary research and found 12 to 20 percent of middle-schoolers around the country are already sexually active.

John B. Jemmott III, a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent years studying adolescent sex, thought that abstinence classes, properly constructed and taught, could help prevent adolescent sexual involvement. And in fact, one-third of the middle-schoolers taught abstinence hadn’t had sex two years later, compared to more than half of the students enrolled in other sex ed classes.

That’s considered success, he said. “But when we began with these young adolescents — sixth- and seventh-graders — 25% of them had already had sex,” he said. “That means you have to start younger . . . and I’m having a hard time imagining what an intervention would look like for fourth- and fifth-graders.”

Um, whoa.

Information from the Los Angeles Times.