Teen Sex Life

Teen Sex Life
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Sex is part of "normal adolescent development," according to a new study that shows more than half of teens are sexually active.
Dec 15, 2020, 03:42 PM EST | Updated Dec 16, 2020
- Laura Lindberg, The Guttmacher Institute
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Senior Wellness & Parenting Reporter, HuffPost
Nearly 60% of teenagers have had sex by the time they graduate high school, according to a new study that found sexual activity was common among teens throughout the United States.
“It doesn’t matter where teens live in the U.S., normal adolescent development includes increasing sexual activity and for many, a transition to having sex,” Laura Lindberg, lead author on the study and a principal research scientist with the The Guttmacher Institute, told HuffPost.
Data for the study came from the 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which is run through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It included information on sexual activity among 130,000 high schoolers in 40 states.
Nationally, 38% of teens said they’d had sexual intercourse.
And the proportion of teenagers who say they are sexually experienced appears to grow with each grade. For example, just under 20% of high school freshman said they were sexually experienced; by senior year, nearly 60% were.
“These findings are not surprising to me at all,” Mary Sullivan, adolescent advocacy and outreach program director with UVA Health’s Teen & Young Adult Health Center, told HuffPost. She did not work on the study.
Sullivan has been working with teenagers around issues of sex and contraception for decades, and told HuffPost that she hopes the study can start conversations between parents and teenagers, who often find them uncomfortable.
But how to do it? Parents might say something like: “I read this study and I thought it was really kind of interesting. What do you think about that?” Sullivan added that it is important for parents to normalize that sexual activity can be a typical part of being a teenager, so that children feel comfortable opening up.
And when teenagers open up, Sullivan urged parents to “modulate their response” — adding that she often hears from children that their parents seemed angry when they spoke about sex, when in fact she believes those parents were simply concerned.
“Sometimes it’s just a matter of taking a breath,” Sullivan said. If an initial conversation does not go well, Sullivan added that parents have plenty of opportunities for “do-overs.” (Indeed, groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics urge parents to talk to children about sex “ early and often .”)
“Too often, when parents share their values and information with their children, it’s too little, too late.”
“Kids really want to hear from their parents,” echoed Lindberg. “They consider them their most trusted resource, even when they don’t have all the details or information.”
She hopes that faced with data clearly showing that the majority of American teenagers are sexually active to some degree in high school, parents will recognize that silence on the topic is not an option.
“Too often, when parents share their values and information with their children, it’s too little, too late,” Lindberg added.
The study also has clear policy implications, she and her co-authors argue.
Seven of the 10 states with the highest proportion of sexually experienced teenagers are in the South. Yet six of the 10 states with the lowest condom use are in the South. And six of the 10 states with the lowest prescription contraceptive use (like the birth control pill and IUD) use are also in the South.
State laws should allow children to obtain contraceptives without their parents’ consent, the authors argue. Just under half of states in the U.S. have laws explicitly allowing minors to confidentially get that care.
The researchers also believe the findings point to a clear need for comprehensive sex education in all schools. (Currently, 29 states that offer some form of sex education in school say that abstinence should be stressed.)
Lindberg argued that adolescents “need access to information and services.”
“We can’t have the state of their residence be a barrier to getting them the care they deserve,” she said.
Senior Wellness & Parenting Reporter, HuffPost

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Sara is a staff writer for Live Science, covering health. She grew up outside of Philadelphia and studied biology at Hamilton College in upstate New York. When she's not writing, she can be found at the library, checking out a big stack of books.

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The percentage of teens in the U.S. who have had sex has ticked down since the 1980s, a new report finds.
The latest estimates — which are based on data gathered from 2011 to 2015 — are that 42 percent of girls and women ages 15 to 19 who have never been married have had sex, down from 51 percent in 1988, according to the report. For guys who have never been married, 44 percent have had sex, down from 60 percent in 1988.
These trends follow another pattern that researchers have observed in previous studies: Teen birth rates are also on the decline, according to the report published today (June 22) by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [ 10 Facts Every Parent Should Know about Their Teen's Brain ]
Indeed, the researchers found that the surveyed teens' views on pregnancy played a large role in their decisions about whether to have sex and their likelihood of using contraception .
In the report, the researchers analyzed data on more than 4,000 teens ages 15 to 19 who were interviewed for the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) from 2011 to 2015. The NSFG is a national survey of people ages 15 to 44 in the U.S. that involves in-person interviews conducted by the survey researchers.
The majority of teens in the survey said that when they had sex for the first time , it was with someone with whom they were in a relationship: 74 percent of teenage girls and women said their first partner was a significant other, and 51 percent of teenage boys and men said the same.
A very small percentage of teens — 2 percent of teen girls and women and 7 percent of teen boys and men — said that their first partner was a person that they had "just met," the report found.
Among the teens who hadn't had sex yet, the most common reason was that it was against their religion or morals. Other common reasons included not having found the right person and not wanting to get pregnant or to get someone pregnant.
The new report also looked at contraception use among teens.
The researchers found that 80 percent of teens reported using contraception when they had sex for the first time. And among teenage girls and women who'd had sex more than once, a whopping 99 percent reported that they had ever used some form of contraception when they had sex.
Teens cited condoms as the most common form of contraception they used during sex, with 97 percent of girls and women and 95 percent of boys and men saying that they had ever used condoms. Also, 60 percent of teen girls and women reported having used the withdrawal method (the report did not give the percentage of boys and men who reported using this method), and 56 percent of teen girls and women reported ever using birth control pills , according to the report. [ 7 Surprising Facts About the Pill ]
The researchers also found that a larger percentage of teen girls and women said they would be "very upset" if a pregnancy occurred compared with teen boys and men. Nearly two-thirds of teen girls and women said they would be very upset if they got pregnant, compared with 46 percent of teen boys and men who said that they would feel the same if they got a girl pregnant.
Indeed, teenage girls and women who said that they would be very upset about a pregnancy were also more likely to use contraception compared with those who said they would be pleased with a pregnancy, the researchers found.
And one in five teens who have never had sex cited not wanting a pregnancy as their primary reason for avoiding intercourse.
Originally published on Live Science .
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