Parents should be concerned about how much television their children are watching every day, especially if they are not supervised. And when I say that I am thinking about what exactly is sold the most on current TV shows. As you have already guessed, it’s all about sex: movies about sex, sex on live TV shows and when I say that I am not thinking about porn stuff but all the things that lead our mind to sex and all of these happening in front of our children. And since some of us choose TV to occupy children’s time, it’s no wonder some of them, especially girls end up in pregnancy.

RAND Corporation, a non-profit research organization, studied the issue and found that teens who have high levels of exposure to television programs that contain sexual content are twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy over the following three years as their peers who watch few such shows.

“Adolescents receive a considerable amount of information about sex through television and that programming typically does not highlight the risks and responsibilities of sex,” says Anita Chandra, the study’s lead author and a behavioral scientist at RAND.

There are few informative shows on TV teaching teens about the consequences of sex. Therefore, they often engage in sexual relationships without using contraceptives, thus ending in unwished pregnancy and furthermore unwished abortions in some of the cases. Also, young mothers are more likely to quit school, require public assistance and live in poverty, the study said.

“The amount of sexual content on television has doubled in recent years, and there is little representation of safer sex practices in those portrayals,” Chandra said.

But let’s just stop at pregnancies. The study, which analyzed the results of three surveys of about 2,000 adolescents ages 12 to 17 from 2001 to 2004, reinforces the relationship between exposure to sexual content on television and pregnancy.

About 700 participants had engaged in sexual intercourse by the third survey and reported their pregnancy history. There were 91 pregnancies: 58 girls became pregnancy during the follow-up and 33 boys said they had got a girl pregnant.

The study focused on 23 free and cable television programs popular among teenagers including situation comedies, dramas, reality programs and animated shows. Comedies had the most sexual content and reality programs the least.

Pregnancies were twice as common among those who said they watched such shows regularly, compared with teens who said they hardly ever saw them. There were more pregnancies among the oldest teens interviewed, but the rate of pregnancy remained consistent across all age groups among those who watched the racy programs.

The study also found that teens living in a two-parent household had a lower probability or pregnancy, while African-American girls and those with more problem behaviors such as discipline problems were more likely to end in pregnancy. Also, youths who intended to have children early also were more likely to experience a pregnancy.

Pregnancy in the United States is a hot issue, as nearly 1 million girls aged 15 to 19 years old become pregnant annually, or about 20 percent of sexually active females in that age group. Most of the pregnancies were unplanned, RAND found.

The organization concluded that broadcasters should be encouraged to include more realistic depictions of sex in scripts and to portray consequences such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

The study was published in the November issue of the journal Paediatrics.