Teens Should Have Sex and Smoke Pot
It used to be that researchers believed that teens who have sex early become delinquents. But new findings suggest this is not the case. Comparing identical twins, researchers found that “there was no positive relationship between age of first sex and delinquency.” They also found that identical twins were more similar to one another in the ages at which they had sex than were fraternal twins, suggesting that there is a genetic influence on the age at which a person will have sex. Putting these findings together, they concluded that a genetic inclination toward risk-taking or impulsiveness might cause both delinquency and sex at a young age.
In addition, the study found that adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to become delinquent than those who lost their virginity later. “In at least some cases sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble,” the researchers said.
So, not only does this research suggest that abstinence-only education does not promote behavior that will reduce delinquency, which its advocates have argued for some time, but it actually promotes delinquency. Now, obviously I’m not actually saying young people should have sex, but it is about time we understand that having sex at a younger age is not necessarily a bad decision.
But that’s not all! A totally different study of kids in Switzerland found that kids who smoke marijuana (without also smoking tobacco) were “significantly more likely to practice sports and they have a better relationship with their peers.” Also, “even though they are more likely to skip classes, they have the same level of good grades; and though they have a worse relationship with their parents, they are not more likely to be depressed” than those who do not smoke at all.
So: smoking pot is okay, and if you’re a young person inclined to take risks, you should have sex if you want to avoid becoming a delinquent.
This post isn’t going to affect any hopes for a political career, is it?
Comment by geoff on 12 November 2007 at 10:55 pm:
“they are not more likely to be depressed.”
Does that mean they’re less likely to be depressed or just as likely as the non-pot-heads to be depressed? I’m guessing the latter. It’s language like this that makes me despise these so-called studies. I can’t trust a study that manipulates language to make it seem groundbreaking and innovative…just give us the findings straight-up.
Also, I think you meant “later” when you wrote “earlier”.
Comment by kofi the i'm just teasing tom; and good post, brian. christ's sake it's been a drought around here. on 12 November 2007 at 11:16 pm:
An interesting post. Thank God.
if you’re a young person inclined to take risks, you should have sex if you want to avoid becoming a delinquent
I assume (hopefully correctly) that this was tongue in cheek. The studies make some interesting findings but its obvious they can’t be used to draw conclusions. The study also found that the children of “teen Harlem mothers” were better off in the long-term than children of “older Harlem mothers.” The explanations make sense (teen mothers are more likely to have a family structure to help raise the child) but its not advise to young Harlem women to become single mothers sooner rather than later. The better choice, option ‘c’, would be to not become a single mother incapable of supporting a child independently.
Similarly, the study notes that youngsters may be better off focusing their rebellious behavior on sexual endeavors than illegal behavior. Obviously this doesn’t mean we want our children having sex so that they will behave better (just look at some of Champaign’s high schools where the average age of pregnancy is about equal to the average age of first incarceration). This doesn’t mean that better parenting couldn’t remedy both early sexual behavior and deliquent behavior.
Regarding sex/deliquency the study was focussed on “first sexual experience” and “first deliquency.” I’d be interested in a study five years down the road, comparing the initial results (caving to sex being better than caving to deliquency) to later results (comparing the same subjects at 22 and measuring how many have children, have aborted pregnancies, have contracted sexual diseases, and who have been unable to escape their deliquent behavior).
I wouldn’t want to step out of line though so I’ll close with the obligatory: Assume 10 years from now technology has made all jobs obsolete, and all technology is everywhere and insurmountable. Name three technology jobs that exist and why.
Comment by kofi the i'm just teasing tom; and good post, brian. christ's sake it's been a drought around here. on 12 November 2007 at 11:16 pm:
An interesting post. Thank God.
if you’re a young person inclined to take risks, you should have sex if you want to avoid becoming a delinquent
I assume (hopefully correctly) that this was tongue in cheek. The studies make some interesting findings but its obvious they can’t be used to draw conclusions. The study also found that the children of “teen Harlem mothers” were better off in the long-term than children of “older Harlem mothers.” The explanations make sense (teen mothers are more likely to have a family structure to help raise the child) but its not advise to young Harlem women to become single mothers sooner rather than later. The better choice, option ‘c’, would be to not become a single mother incapable of supporting a child independently.
Similarly, the study notes that youngsters may be better off focusing their rebellious behavior on sexual endeavors than illegal behavior. Obviously this doesn’t mean we want our children having sex so that they will behave better (just look at some of Champaign’s high schools where the average age of pregnancy is about equal to the average age of first incarceration). This doesn’t mean that better parenting couldn’t remedy both early sexual behavior and deliquent behavior.
Regarding sex/deliquency the study was focussed on “first sexual experience” and “first deliquency.” I’d be interested in a study five years down the road, comparing the initial results (caving to sex being better than caving to deliquency) to later results (comparing the same subjects at 22 and measuring how many have children, have aborted pregnancies, have contracted sexual diseases, and who have been unable to escape their deliquent behavior).
I wouldn’t want to step out of line though so I’ll close with the obligatory: Assume 10 years from now technology has made all jobs obsolete, and all technology is everywhere and insurmountable. Name three technology jobs that exist and why.
Comment by kofi the i'm just teasing tom; and good post, brian. christ's sake it's been a drought around here. on 12 November 2007 at 11:16 pm:
An interesting post. Thank God.
if you’re a young person inclined to take risks, you should have sex if you want to avoid becoming a delinquent
I assume (hopefully correctly) that this was tongue in cheek. The studies make some interesting findings but its obvious they can’t be used to draw conclusions. The study also found that the children of “teen Harlem mothers” were better off in the long-term than children of “older Harlem mothers.” The explanations make sense (teen mothers are more likely to have a family structure to help raise the child) but its not advise to young Harlem women to become single mothers sooner rather than later. The better choice, option ‘c’, would be to not become a single mother incapable of supporting a child independently.
Similarly, the study notes that youngsters may be better off focusing their rebellious behavior on sexual endeavors than illegal behavior. Obviously this doesn’t mean we want our children having sex so that they will behave better (just look at some of Champaign’s high schools where the average age of pregnancy is about equal to the average age of first incarceration). This doesn’t mean that better parenting couldn’t remedy both early sexual behavior and deliquent behavior.
Regarding sex/deliquency the study was focussed on “first sexual experience” and “first deliquency.” I’d be interested in a study five years down the road, comparing the initial results (caving to sex being better than caving to deliquency) to later results (comparing the same subjects at 22 and measuring how many have children, have aborted pregnancies, have contracted sexual diseases, and who have been unable to escape their deliquent behavior).
I wouldn’t want to step out of line though so I’ll close with the obligatory: Assume 10 years from now technology has made all jobs obsolete, and all technology is everywhere and insurmountable. Name three technology jobs that exist and why.
Comment by Brian on 12 November 2007 at 11:17 pm:
Thanks for catching the “later” thing. Fixed it.
On your first point, I think you’re right, but I don’t know why that makes the study misleading or manipulative. I wasn’t trying to argue that smoking pot is helpful, only that it isn’t harmful (in these particular ways). The first sentence of the article on the study is, “A study of more than 5,000 youngsters in Switzerland has found those who smoked marijuana do as well or better in some areas as those who don’t, researchers said on Monday.” “As well or better” is not a manipulation of language, just a statement of what the study finds. What’s the big deal?
Comment by kofi the i had the "talk" with my parents when i was seven on 12 November 2007 at 11:28 pm:
Brian mentioned, and the article linked to puts a number on ($200M), abstinence education. In the past few months the argument has evolved from sex-ed vs. abstinence-ed, particularly at a young age. I won’t take the effor to find and link an article, but one school district wanted to make birth control available to mid-schoolers. Might the sex education in some schools undermine and counteract positive, effecitve parenting? Is sex education - abstinence or otherwise - something that should be taught in schools at all? Shouldn’t such an important topic (on par with religious education, in my opinion) be rightfully left up to the parents?
Comment by Hanno on 13 November 2007 at 12:14 am:
I’ve never smoked pot, but I’m ok with sex. Rock on.
Comment by frank lloyd wright on 13 November 2007 at 8:53 am:
Ergo, Brian is nearly guaranteed to be become a violent convict and recidivist.
Comment by tet on 13 November 2007 at 9:44 am:
I think that a lot could be learned by examining the serotonin levels of the students who are having sex, smoking pot, playing in sports and doing none of the above.
I’d bet on low serotonin for the first three groups as a generality. One of the methods by which low serotonin teenagers used to compensate (smoking cigarettes) has been removed from our society to a large extent. I wonder if this has changed the frequency of employment of the other methods of raising endorphin levels.
Kofi, so help me, I’m going to ask a Dick effin’ Cheney question next week.
To answer your snide question:
1) Programming the means of production and services
2) Repairing the means of production and services
3) Shooting means of production and services that have gone rogue.
Simple enough, really, if one has an imagination. I figure in less than twenty years, they’ll be able to install one in you.
Tom
Comment by tet on 13 November 2007 at 9:45 am:
Jeez, I sounded bitchy in that last comment. Sorry, Kofi, someone interrupted me in the middle of writing it and I came off more strident than I needed to. I realize that you were only teasing, seriously.
Tom
Comment by Brian on 13 November 2007 at 10:33 am:
Kofi,
I’ve often thought the “isn’t this subject so important that it should be left to parents?” argument is inadequate. The level of importance of a subject is not an argument either way for where something ought to be taught. Some things are really important to know that are taught in school, some are taught at home. The relevant question (and this helps to answer where religion ought to be taught, as well as other sorts of morals/values-based issues) is how personal a particular subject matter is, and to what degree we should let parents impart their values on their children before we want the schools to present some alternative, more socially normalized point of view.
For example, it was rather uncontroversial in my school (and I imagine everybody else’s) to teach that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was a largely good thing, and that racism is a bad thing. We celebrated Martin Luther King Day, we read books like To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. Obviously this point of view will conflict with SOME parents’ personal values. But we teach it anyway b/c an anti-racist perspective is such a socially normalized viewpoint that we want to make it part of the curriculum in the hopes of maintaining a cohesive culture.
I think that the perspective that if you have sex, you should be safe, is on the borderline between what is and is not a socially normalized point of view that we should want to make part of the curriculum. Because it is borderline, and because I can see reasonable arguments that are alternative to mine, I think it makes sense to allow parents to opt their kids out of sex education classes (without having to go to the lengths of home-schooling their kids). But I think enough of society wants their kids to be learning about this stuff, and does not feel equipped to teach about this stuff themselves, that schools should teach it.
I also think any responsible parent would not opt their kids out of those classes, but that’s sort of a separate debate.
Comment by Brian on 13 November 2007 at 10:41 am:
Oh, and yes, I was being tongue in cheek about the “kids should have sex” thing. BUT, I repeat that we should not automatically assume that a teenager having sex is a bad thing, or that it’s necessarily something that we (as parents, schools, governments, or whatever) should be expending a ton of effort trying to prevent. Part of that is just related to the fact that it’s a REALLY HARD type of behavior to prevent, but the other part is that it just isn’t always that big a deal.
Comment by tet on 13 November 2007 at 11:05 am:
Some interesting sociological items from my youth in a poor, rural culture in the 1950s.
While on the surface, sex between teens was discouraged, it was also rampant because of the number of farm animals providing examples for young men and women to emulate. I knew about procreation and death by the time I was five or six years old from watching the barn cats.
Because of the large amount of available, unobserved space, it was easy to get away from busy parents. There was one caveat, though, and I cannot mention this too strongly (it was enforced socially by threat of death, actually in some cases.) If a girl got pregnant, she was married to the father (or a willing substitute who wasn’t worried about the pregnancy) before she exhibited signs.
In a few cases, young women would leave the area and come back four or five months later, but, to tell the truth I don’t remember a case in which anyone I knew did this–it was always marriage.
Pretty good custom, actually. It taught you that sex was necessary for life and lots and lots of fun. It also taught you that you had to take responsibility for your actions. At the time, the known major sexually transmitted diseases were curable by penicillin. The girl in my Nightmoves article and I were fifteen and sixteen when we lost our virginity together.
I also had a buddy who was gay from birth. He was a bit of an outsider, but never in any real physical or mental danger from any of the other students, to the best of my knowledge. By the time we reached HS in the mid/late 60s, he had a bevy of the less-popular girls that went shopping with him.
Tom
Comment by Dead Florist on 13 November 2007 at 8:14 pm:
Looking at that pot study, My mental “post hoc ergo propter hoc” warning light is blinking.
I would not conclude that stoners have these atributes because they are stoners, I would say they have them because they result from the same elements in their personality that result in their willingness to use pot. For the sake of ease, though admittedly with some loss to precision, I will refer to two basic personality types, “uptight” and “laid back”. People who have never smoked the pot get along rather well with their parents because they are uptight. People who do smoke pot get along better with their peers and have more active lives because they are “laid back”.
These are gross generalities, but I think they convey the basic idea well. Essentially, if pot smoking were encouraged by society and everyone did it, I don’t think that all the kids would have the personality traits that the stoners do. I think that everyone would be basically the same as they are now because pot use is more indicative, rather than determinative of personality.