More teens have sex and fewer parents know

When Natalia Wagner was 10, one of her friends became pregnant. The young girl had been taken advantage of by her older brother's friend.

By the time she was 13, so many of her peers were having sex - or at least talking about it in their old steel-mill town in central Florida - that she started a teen-pregnancy prevention program.

Now 15, she is unfazed by the recent report that found 20 percent of teens 14 years old and younger have had sex. "I think there's actually more than that, but a lot of kids aren't honest about it," she says.

But what did bother Natalia, who's now as practiced at counseling girls in the bathroom as she is lobbying legislators in Tallahassee, was the way many adults reacted to the report by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. They seemed genuinely stunned that people so young were sexually active.

"Parents don't believe their kids are the ones that are doing it, and they are," she says. "That's what creates a big conflict - a big, big conflict."

While the overall rates of teen pregnancy and sexual activity have declined over the past 20 years, the surveys usually focused only on adolescents in high school. At the same time, anecdotal evidence was mounting that younger teens were increasingly active. That prompted the National Campaign study. The headline was a shocker: One in 5 kids ages 12, 13, and 14 have had sex.

But experts contend that below the headline lies an even more disturbing message: that in our increasingly sexually explicit culture where kids are bombarded daily with sly innuendo about sex in everything from billboards to sitcoms, most parents are still uncomfortably Victorian when they approach their children about the birds and the bees. In fact, two-thirds of the parents of the sexually active 14-year-olds had no idea their children were sexually active.

"What is really clear from this report is that it's still the voices of parents and other adults that are stunningly absent in the lives of many of our kids," says Michael Resnick, director of the National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Research Center at the University of Minnesota. "Parents first and foremost are the No. 1 sex educators of their children. But far too many do this by offering a course in silence, or simple monosyllabic answers to something deeply felt, very complex, and very important to many young people."

That parental awkwardness can have profound consequences. Young sexually active teens are at a much higher risk for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases than those that choose to wait. They're also more likely to engage in risky behaviors: Eighteen percent of sexually active youths report drinking, 29 percent report having smoked regularly, and more than 40 percent have tried marijuana, according to the National Campaign report.

Another new report by the Heritage Foundation also found that sexually active teens were more likely to be depressed and more likely to have attempted suicide.

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