Having strong religious backgrounds might prevent teenagers from having sex at an early age, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics.
To be more specific, teens with a strong religious background tend to become sexually active on average at age 21, regardless if they had taken a virginity pledge.
The author of the study is Janet E. Rosenbaum, a post doctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She compared the sexual activity of teens who had taken a virginity pledge with those who had not taken a virginity pledge and concluded that religious students, regardless of whether they take virginity pledges are more conservative than their non-religious peers.
The study found that when compared against national averages, religious teens are having sex an average of about three years later than the average American.
“It is something that I think can be looked on as encouraging. Kids who are choosing to be religious are also choosing to abstain,” Rosenbaum said.
She used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health carried out in 1995 and 1996, which followed 934 high school students, including 289 who were 17 years on average when they took a virginity pledge, and 645 teens who did not take a pledge but were otherwise similar.
Another interesting finding of the study was that teens who took a virginity pledge were also reportedly less likely to use condoms than non-pledgers. However, both virginity pledgers and non-pledgers had about the same number of sexually transmitted diseases as well and had on average three sexual partners. Those who took the pledge had 0.1 fewer partners, on average.
The study supports the need for sex education in schools, highlighting the findings of a previous study, which showed that over 90 percent of parents think schools should teach about birth control.
“It's really vital for kids to learn accurate and comprehensive information about birth control, including how to use condoms in school,” Rosenbaum said.
However, parents should fill in the blanks and be there for their children when they have questions about sex. They should teach them that having sex means being more responsible than they think, as sexual transmitted diseases are countless and they can affect them for a life time.
A study released in March 2008 by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than one in four American girls seems to be carrying at least one sexually transmitted disease, with the highest rate in African-American girls. This translates in an estimated 3.2 million U.S. girls ages 14 and 19 having a sexually transmitted infection such as human papillomavirus or HPV, chlamydia, genital herpes or trichomoniasis.
