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Commentary

What prevents teen sexual activity? Parents, sex education, or social programs?

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Christine Kim
Christine Kim

What are some of the measurable consequences of pre-marital sex?

The kinds of problems most people think of when they think of pre-marital sex are problems like sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancy, abortions, reduced ability for stable marriage, and maternal poverty.

What’s the best way to prevent teens from engaging in pre-marital sex?

On the one hand, social conservatives on the right favor the traditional family structure, complete with a father who lives in the home and is an involved parent. On the other other hand, social liberals on the left favor laws that promote pre-marital sex and no-fault divorce, which tends to weaken marriage and break up families. Those on the right prefer strong families and involved parents, while those on the left prefer to tax money away from families and use that money to provide sex education, taxpayer-funded abortions, and single-payer health care.

Who’s right?

Well, consider this research paper from the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank.

It’s written by Christine C. Kim. The title is “Teen Sex: The Parent Factor”. (PDF)

She writes:

Many policymakers, health professionals, and “safe sex” advocates respond to these troubling sta­tistics by demanding more comprehensive sex edu­cation and broader access to contraceptives for minors. They assume that teens are unable to delay their sexual behavior and that a combination of information about and access to contraceptives will effectively lead to protected sex, preventing any form of harm to youngsters. Not only are these assumptions faulty, they tend to disregard impor­tant factors that have been linked to reduced teen sexual activity. A particularly noticeable omission is parental influence.

[…]The empirical evidence on the association between parental influences and adolescents’ sexual behavior is strong. Parental factors that appear to offer strong protection against the onset of early sexual activity in­clude an intact family structure; parents’ disapproval of adolescent sex; teens’ sense of belonging to and sat­isfaction with their families; parental monitoring; and, to a lesser extent, parent-child communication about teen sex and its consequences.

That parents play a role in teen sex points to at least two significant policy implications. First, pro­grams and policies that seek to delay sexual activity or to prevent teen pregnancy or STDs should encourage and strengthen family structure and parental involvement. Doing so may increase these efforts’ overall effectiveness. Conversely, programs and policies that implicitly or explicitly discourage parental involvement, such as dispensing contra­ceptives to adolescents without parental consent or notice, contradict the weight of social science evi­dence and may prove to be counterproductive and potentially harmful to teens.

She supports her conclusions using her research findings and some very helpful graphs (see the PDF version).

My thoughts

So what does this mean? It means that parents need to be trained and equipped to talk to their children about topics like pre-marital sex. It means that unmarried men and women need to be serious about choosing their spouse so that there is an increased likelihood that the spouse will have the knowledge, the time, and the disposition to talk to their children about sex. The best way to find a spouse who can make moral judgments and be persuasive on moral issues with the children is to choose some who demonstrates those capabilities over a significant period of time, during the courtship.

I’ve noticed that many young people reject prospective mates who make moral judgments and who have definite ideas about moral issues. What young people seem to want is complete autonomy to pursue their own happiness. They don’t even want to deal with the normal demands of relationships with friends, co-workers, pets, children – and even with God. They just want to pursue their own vision. And if their own choices make them unhappy, then they blame others and demand to be bailed out, (often by the government).

But valuing amorality and permissiveness in prospective mates is not going to attract a spouse who is capable of teaching children right from wrong. Instead, young people should seek to marry someone who is informed on moral issues, and who is passionate about persuading others. Marriage is not the kind of thing that two selfish, amoral people can do well – there has to be a vision and a way of settling disagreements using a standard of objective morality and moral reasoning. Children don’t do well being raised by parents who have no vision for how the children ought to be.

I think a pretty good question to ask a prospective mate is “how would you like your children to turn out?”. What you are looking for is a person who wants their child to have respect for objective moral values and duties and a strong relationship with God. And then ask a second question, “what capabilities do you think your spouse should have to achieve that vision?”. And finally ask, “how have you prepared yourself to guide your children towards that vision?”. These are the questions that we should be asking during courtship to find out whether prospective mates are capable of imparting moral knowledge to their future children.

News

Scientists discover how fathers improve brain development of children

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Story from the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Dr. Braun’s group found that at 21 days, the fatherless animals had less dense dendritic spines compared to animals raised by both parents, though they “caught up” by day 90. However, the length of some types of dendrites was significantly shorter in some parts of the brain, even in adulthood, in fatherless animals.

“It just shows that parents are leaving footprints on the brain of their kids,” says Dr. Braun, 54 years old.

The neuronal differences were observed in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is related to emotional responses and fear, and the orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC, the brain’s decision-making center.

[…]The balance between these two brain parts is critical to normal emotional and cognitive functioning, according to Dr. Braun. If the OFC isn’t active, the amygdala “goes crazy, like a horse without a rider,” she says. In the case of the fatherless pups, there were fewer dendritic spines in the OFC, while the dendrite trees in the amygdala grew more and longer branches.

A preliminary analysis of the degus’ behavior showed that fatherless animals seemed to have a lack of impulse control, Dr. Braun says. And, when they played with siblings, they engaged in more play-fighting or aggressive behavior.

In a separate study in Dr. Braun’s lab conducted by post-doctoral researcher Joerg Bock, degu pups were removed from their caregivers for one hour a day. Just this small amount of stress leads the pups to exhibit more hyperactive behaviors and less focused attention, compared to those who aren’t separated, Dr. Braun says. They also exhibit changes in their brain.

The basic wiring between the brain regions in the degus is the same as in humans, and the nerve cells are identical in their function. “So on that level we can assume that what happens in the animal’s brain when it’s raised in an impoverished environment … should be very similar to what happens in our children’s brain,” Dr. Braun says.

Read the whole thing.

Related posts

News

How feminism is opposed to chivalry, marriage and fathers

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Feminism makes women unable to relate to men in healthy ways

Here are two non-negotiable beliefs of third-wave feminists.

  1. Feminists want women to believe and act exactly like men because they think there are no sex differences
  2. Feminists believe that romantic love, chivalry and motherhood are all bad because they involve sex differences

Consider this post on how men perceive feminism as being opposed chivalry, (which is a prerequisite for romantic love).

Last summer I polled college guys from across the country and abroad at the National Young America’s Foundation Conference in Washington, D.C. Ninety-three percent of them said that chivalry has decreased in current times, and 84 percent of that group attribute this decline primarily or at least partly to the rise of radical feminism in society.

One man stated that feminism “devalued chivalry and made it seem sexist.” Another man proposed that the “‘I-don’t-need-a-man culture has crippled chivalry in the public sphere.” Yet another said that it was “difficult” to be chivalrous because some women portray chivalry as “subordinating, disrespecting, and devaluing.”

It seems that men are lodged between a rock and a hard place. If they try to be chivalrous, feminists call them sexist. Yet if they treat us the way the feminists say we want to be treated—the same as a man—we complain of not getting enough respect.

How do guys define chivalry? Three out of four responded that it had to do with respect, honor, and courtesy towards women. One man spoke openly: “Chivalry is the notion that a man has the duty to respect and serve women.”

Another man affirmed: “It is a set of manners and respect a man should show to a woman as a demonstration of respect towards her.” Another guy said women “need to understand that chivalry isn’t being put down like feminism would like you to believe, but rather is a way a woman can command respect from a man.”

Too often, however, these same men lamented that their efforts to be chivalrous were met with scorn.

If you’re wondering where all the “good men” went, and why men are so “unromantic”, blame feminism. Women in the secular feminist West have been taught to rush into physical activity, (like men), instead of being taught how to judge a good man, and how to recognize and relate to good men. This leads to fewer good men because men respond to women’s expectations of them. Today, women don’t know how to evaluate a man to see if he is capable of marriage and parenting. Feminism’s strategy of “act like a man” is an epic fail – it just produces a lot of guilt and hurt for young women.

In Theodore Dalrymple’s book “Life at the Bottom”, he explains how nurses in his hospital pursue violent men because they are physically attracted to them, only to be beaten, impregnated and abandoned by them, again and again. When he asks the women why they cannot recognize bad men, they explain that its wrong to make moral judgments about men. One nurse believed that men were all the same, and that she could not know in advance if the relationship would “work out”.

Women learn how to relate to men by watching how their father treats their mother. Are men encouraged to marry and to become involved fathers by the secular feminist state?

Feminism has resulted in children being raised without fathers

Feminists favor socialism because the higher taxes force women to leave their children and home to work, and because a massive government reduces the need for women to marry a good man. Big government is there with social programs to cover up the choice of a bad man, so that choosing a good man becomes unnecessary. Women no longer value men for their ability to protect and provide, so men stop exhibiting those behaviors and instead become lazy and aggressive. Children are born out-of-wedlock and are raised without fathers, which has terrible effects on children.

Consider this research paper from the Heritage Foundation.

Excerpt:

For decades, radical feminists depicted marriage as an oppressive institution that was injurious to women and children. In reality, facts show exactly the opposite: In general, marriage has profoundly beneficial effects on women, children, and men.

Foremost is the positive impact of marriage in alleviating poverty among mothers and children. On average, a mother who gives birth and raises a child outside of marriage is seven times more likely to live in poverty than is a mother who raises her children within a stable married family.70 Over 80 percent of long-term child poverty in the United States (where a child is poor for more than half of his or her life) occurs in never-married or broken households.71 Moreover, the economic benefits of marriage are not limited to the middle class; some 70 percent of never-married mothers would be able to escape poverty if they were married to the father of their children.72

The erosion of marriage is also a principal factor behind the growth of the current welfare state. A child born and raised outside marriage is six times more likely to receive welfare aid than is a child raised in an intact, married family. Each year, federal and state governments spend over $200 billion on means-tested aid for low-income families with children through programs such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, food stamps, public housing, the earned income tax credit, and Medicaid. Of this total, some 75 percent ($150 billion) goes to single-parent families.73

Marriage has profound positive effects on the well-being of children. Children raised by single mothers are 14 times more likely to suffer serious physical abuse than children raised in intact, married families. Children raised in single-parent homes are much more likely to be depressed and to have developmental, behavioral, and emotional problems; such children are more likely to fail in school, use drugs, and engage in early sexual activity. They are also more likely to become involved in crime and to end up in jail as adults.74

While radical feminists condemn marriage as an institution that foments domestic violence against women, in fact, the opposite is true. Domestic violence is most common in the transitory, free-form, cohabitational relationships that feminists have long celebrated as replacements for traditional marriage. Specifically, never-married mothers are more than twice as likely to suffer from domestic violence than mothers who are or have been married.

Early sexual activity and criminal behavior are serious problems.