Teen Pregnancy Prevention

Promoting positive youth development has recently emerged as a major strategy in preventing teen pregnancy. Youth development focuses on providing young people with skills that will help them succeed as adults. One of the most promising approaches to reducing teen pregnancy is to improve educational and career opportunities for teens and instill a belief in a successful future.

• There is a strong relationship between educational and career plans and protection from adolescent pregnancy. Improving girls' education and life options are correlated with reduced pregnancy and birth rates.

• Young people who have skills, goals, and adequate family are much less likely to engage in high-risk behaviors than those who lack these skills and supports.

• Young people need opportunities to acquire a broad range of skills and to build connections within the community.
Focus on providing adolescents with skills that will help them succeed as adults. These programs do not necessarily need to focus on sexual behavior.

Pay attention to meeting young people's needs and developing their abilities to assume the responsibilities and challenges of adulthood. Adolescents' personal and social needs include safety, structure, group membership, and opportunities to contribute and serve.

TIPS:
Go to the young people. Use young people as partners. Talk and listen to teens. Encourage girls to participate in competitive and recreational sports. Sports participation is associated with lower risk of pregnancy.

Questions to ask yourself:
• Am I comfortable talking about sexuality with teens?
• What are my own values and assumptions about teen sexuality and teen sexual behavior?
• Am I willing to respect teens who do not share my values?

Involve family

Families matter when it comes to affecting a teenager's sexual behavior and the risk of early pregnancy. Involving family and other supportive, caring adults maximizes the effectiveness of pregnancy prevention programs.

• Parents are important influences in the lives of their teenagers. Supportive family relationships, shared activities, strong values, parental supervision, and higher parental education and income are associated with reduced risks of teen pregnancy.

• These family factors are associated with increased risk of adolescent pregnancy: families with little supervision; strict or overly controlling parents; low socioeconomic status; a single parent, older sexually active siblings or pregnant/parenting teenage sisters; lack of religious affiliation; teens experiencing violence or abuse.

• Young people who have access to many caring, supportive adults outside the family are likely to be resilient in life.

• Young people are less likely to engage in sexual risk behavior if they have a good relationship with their parent(s), including good communication about parental attitudes and values.

TIPS:
The more defined the role of parents and other caring adults is the more likely that parent participation will occur.
Have a family day. Include food, games and cultural entertainment.

For many years, teen pregnancy prevention efforts have concentrated almost exclusively on girls and young women. Recently there has been a growing interest across the country in targeting males and acknowledging the critical role they play in unintended and early pregnancies among teenagers.

• Most teenage females reporting that they had used contraception at first intercourse reported a male method-either condoms or withdrawal.

• Girls and boys mature physiologically and psychosocially at different rates and have different needs during adolescence. Adolescent boys initiate sex earlier than girls and tend to accumulate more sexual partners over their lifetimes. Pregnancy prevention efforts should be tailored according to these differences.

• One of the biggest shifts in teenagers' reproductive behavior in recent years has been improvement in teenage males' contraceptive behavior. Condom use has been increasing since the late 1970s.

Provide the opportunity for young men to discuss sexuality-related topics with women through the use of female speakers or coed discussion groups.

Use sports, recreation, clubs, employment assistance, or job training as a vehicle to attract and bring young men together. Coupling these activities with education and reproductive health has been successfully used to recruit and keep male participants engaged in the program.

Engage in "plain talk". The information has to be clear, real, and accessible.

Appeal to hopes and dreams, rather than using scare tactics or blame.

Redefine "manhood". Start with respect for oneself and creating self-esteem. Emphasize caring, responsibility, commitment to family, self-control, and greater respect for women.

Sexual Education

Effective sexuality education plays an important role in providing youth with the knowledge and skills necessary to make healthy decisions about their intimate relationships.

- Focus clearly on reducing one or more behaviors that lead to unintended pregnancy or HIV/STD infection.

- Ensure that behavioral goals, teaching methods, and materials are appropriate to the age, sexual experience, and culture of the students.

- Allow enough time for participants to complete important activities.

- Use a variety of teaching methods to involve the participants and have them personalize the information.

- Provide basic, accurate information about the risks of unprotected intercourse and strategies to avoid unprotected intercourse.

- Include activities that address social pressures related to sex.

- Provide modeling and the practice of communication, negotiation, and refusal skills.

Avoid lecturing. Incorporate active involvement using group activities, group discussion, and peer facilitation.

Empower youth to make their own decisions within the context of careful clarification of their own, their family's, and their community's values and goals.

Don't assume one's sexual orientation protects against teen pregnancy. Teens who question their sexual orientation may engage in heterosexual sex to prove to themselves or others that they are heterosexual.

Sexually active teenagers need access to family planning information and services. They also need support and encouragement to use contraception effectively and consistently.

• In a recent survey, the leading reason given by adolescents for not getting needed care was reluctance to tell parents about health problems. Lack of insurance and financial limitations were next in importance.

- Many barriers exist, actual and perceived, that limit teens' access to reproductive health services.

- Actual barriers include cost, time, lack of insurance, and lack of transportation.

- Perceived barriers include lack of confidentiality, embarrassment or discomfort, misinformation about risks, fear of procedures, fear of side effects, lack of knowledge regarding the need for contraception, and lack of awareness of legal rights to services.

• Media does not necessarily play an important role in improving access to services.

• Males and females may conceptualize health seeking and access differently.

• Low-income teens seem to separate access to birth control information from access to services; moderate-income teens seem to put these two together.

Ensure privacy and confidentiality of teens. Reduce cultural and language barriers wherever possible. Provide peer group support and/or peer counselors. Consider a "young teen" group session (ages 13-16).

TIPS:
Provide incentives, offering movie tickets, CDs, gift certificates and other rewards for continued visits. Provide bus tickets/tokens for transportation.

Establish school-based or school-linked services that provide comprehensive care, including health care, family planning, health education and counseling, mental health services, and referral to other agencies. Establish a strong educational link between the clinic and the classroom.