Teenage Sex Is Not Harmful

If there’s one thing liberals love, it’s spinning studies to back up their point of view. Take the recent study by two sociologists from the Universities of California and Minnesota who studied the effects of teen sex on academic achievement. This study is being spun as evidence that teen sex “is not going to derail [teenager’s] educational trajectories.” Of course, that’s not what the study actually found.

The study was done by Bill McCarthy and Eric Grodsky. They analyzed surveys taken by students in 1994-1995 and compared those to student academic records to determine if being sexually active had any effect on student academic achievement. Here’s what they found: teens who were in a “committed relationship” did no better and no worse than their non-active peers. In other words, as the AP describes these results:

“Teens in serious relationships did not differ from their abstinent counterparts in terms of their grade-point average, how attached they are to school or college expectations. They were also not more likely to have problems in school, be suspended or absent.”

Cool huh! Party on kiddies.

Indeed, here’s the spin people like Peggy Giordano, a sociologist from Bowling Green State University, have put on this: “this should give some comfort to parents who may be concerned that their teenage son or daughter is dating.” And the AP reported this study thusly: “the findings. . . challenge to some extent assumptions that sexually active teens tend to do poorer in school.”

Whew! And here I was worried.

But wait. . . there seem to be more findings.

First, the above conclusions apply only to teens in committed relationships. Teens who are engaged in “casual sex had lower GPAs, cared less about school and experienced more problems in school. . . . Teens who hook up also were at greater risk of being suspended or expelled and had lower odds of expecting to go to college.”

In other words, if your teen is in a “committed relationship,” then they should do as well as everyone else. But if they aren’t in a committed relationship, then being sexually active hurts their grades, their attendance, their chances of graduation and their chances of going to college. That's a pretty big caveat and looks a lot different than how the AP is spinning this study as finding that teenage sex is not harmful.

And it doesn't stop there. University of Southern California sociologist Julie Albright uses these results to argue that it’s time to revamp sex education to “emphasize the importance of relationships and spell out the consequences of casual sex.”

But that’s faulty logic, if you can even call it logic. In Vegas, these results would be called a sucker bet: if you win, nothing happens, but if you lose, then it gets bad. That’s hardly an enticing proposition. And, consequently, it makes no sense to advocate "committed relationships" to teens. In fact, that's like suggesting kids try pot in the hopes they stay away from meth.

There’s also one more interesting fact that I haven’t mentioned yet. It turns out the quote from the AP about teens in a committed relationship not being “more likely to have problems in school, be suspended or absent,” isn't accurate. To the contrary, the study actually found that teens “who have sex -- whether it’s a serious or casual relationship -- were at higher risk of being truant and dropping out compared with teens who don't have sex.”

In other words, our sucker bet actually is: if you do it right, you lose, if you do it wrong, you lose big.

The other thing the study did not address was the effects of teen pregnancy, which simply does not happen to the abstinent group. Teen pregnancy has been shown to be linked to lower educational levels for the mother and child, higher rates of poverty, and poorer “life outcomes” for the children of teenage mothers, i.e. lower paying jobs, higher chance of poverty, higher crime rates, higher drug addiction rates, etc.

How can anyone legitimately spin this to say that parents should take “comfort” from this study? Well, because this study is aimed at a generation of lazy parents who didn’t want to raise their kids. They preferred to hand that task off to the schools. And now they’re feeling guilty that their kids have turned out to be losers. The spin on studies like this is intended to assuage that guilt.

So what is the answer? The answer is probably to take this whole issue away from schools and thereby force parents to take responsibility for their own kids again. Having unionized employees teach kids to aim for the second worst outcome on a sucker bet just doesn’t seem like a good policy.