Teenage sex: why more young people are waiting.

The popular portrait of teenage sexual behavior can leave many parents with the disquieting sense that American teens are becoming sexually experienced at ever-younger ages. The media depicts an adolescent culture where casual sex is the norm, where early sex has killed off first love, where kids engage in sex acts with nonromantic partners, also known as "buddies with benefits," and where most teens have had sexual intercourse long before they graduate from high school. More than a few parents wonder if it is even possible for teens today to resist the pressures to have sex at an early age.

But a large-scale survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control, offers a different picture. As its findings show, the trend among teens has been moving in the opposite direction. Teens aren't having sex at younger ages. They're delaying sexual intercourse until they are older. In 1995, the share of never-married girls, fifteen to seventeen years old, who had ever had sex was 38 percent. In 2002, however, it had dropped to 30 percent. The decline was even greater for fifteen-to seventeen-year-old boys. It fell by 12 points, from 43 percent to 31 percent. Perhaps most unexpected, the share of never-married teenage boys who had had sexual intercourse by age nineteen dropped from 83 percent in 1995 to 65 percent in 2002.

Clearly, teen behavior is turning in a more positive direction. But the really interesting question is: what accounts for this new direction? Why are impressionable, impulsive, and hormonally challenged teenagers exercising greater sexual restraint? And why now? It can't be because of a more conservative popular culture. Hollywood and Madison Avenue continue to push the edge of the envelope in presenting to teens and even children what is sexually permissible. Nor can the shift be chalked up to a ceasefire in the battle over sex education between opposing armies of professional advocates. Washington-based partisans on the right and left continue to battle as fiercely as ever over the content of sex-education curricula in the public schools and over federal dollars for their favored programs.

The most likely reason for this trend lies not in elite influences but in grassroots public opinion. Though the nation is closely divided on many cultural issues, it is not divided over sexual abstinence for teens. The level of public support for a strong abstinence message is overwhelming. A 2003 survey for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy asked respondents to agree or disagree with the following statement: "Teens should be given a strong message from society that they should not have sex until they are at least out of high school." Ninety-five percent of parents and other adults agreed. The percentage of teens agreeing was almost as high--at 92 percent. Moreover, such high levels of support for abstinence have existed at least since the mid-1990s. Thus, the public holds a widely shared view of what the main message and expected standard for teens ought to be. Simply put, it is: We don't think you should be having sex. We want you to wait.

As for the role of sex education in the schools, a mere 6 percent of teenagers rate sex educators at the top of a list of potentially important influences on their behavior. A much larger share--45 percent--says that their parents are most influential.

There is a lesson in these survey findings. Parents can't leave sex education to the schools. Teens are simply bored by the standard stuff they get in a typical sex-education class. They've heard about the health risks of sex. They've been told about ways to avoid getting pregnant or contracting a socially transmitted disease. They've heard that they should "just say no." But too often this is all that teens hear. What they are looking for from parents and other trusted adults is not more information about avoiding the health risks of sex but more guidance about the larger meaning and purpose of sex, where it fits into their aspirations for achieving mutual love, marriage, and parenthood in the future, and why refraining from early sex is more than just a good health practice.

There is also a lesson here for the inside-the-Beltway partisans who continue to fight over the details of sex-education curricula as if these school programs were all that mattered. The partisan battle over sex education means less and less to the public at large. The advocacy class may need this fight, but the public has moved beyond it. From the vantage point of grassroots opinion, the ideological warfare over sex education is beginning to look less like a clash of civilizational proportions and more like a tempest in a teacup.