adolescence

According to well-worn stereotypes, boys who have sex are “players” or “studs,” while girls who have sex get stuck with nastier labels. But in a recent New York Times editorial, sociologist Amy T. Schalet argues that boys in the U.S. seem to care much more about romance—and avoiding pregnancy and disease—than they did 20 years ago.

Rates for 15-to-17-year-olds who report having sex have dropped since the 1980s, according to the Centers for Disease Control. “And there are virtually no gender differences in the timing of sexual initiation,” Schalet writes.

She offers a few rationales for the change, based on survey data and her own research:

Fear seems to have played a role. In interviewing 10th graders for my book on teenage sexuality in the United States and the Netherlands, I found that American boys often said sex could end their life as they knew it. After a condom broke, one worried: “I could be screwed for the rest of my life.” Another boy said he did not want to have sex yet for fear of becoming a father before his time.

In fact, Schalet writes, boys seems to be more preoccupied with negative outcomes than girls. She suggests these fears grow out of sex education and an awareness of AIDS, while the drive to have sex with another person might be, in part, quelled by access to Internet pornography.

Schalet suggests there could also be a positive reason American boys are hurrying less to have sex. It might be “because they have gained cultural leeway to choose a first time that feels emotionally right. If so, their liberation from rigid masculinity norms should be seen as a victory for the very feminist movement that Rush Limbaugh recently decried.”

Raising healthy kids is usually seen as a result of some magical combination of resources and education in a child’s home, school, and neighborhood. A newly released study by Penn State sociologists Molly Martin, Michelle Frisco, and Claudia Nau and the Census Bureau’s Kristin Burnett, however, finds poverty at schools has a greater effect on adolescent obesity than poverty or low education at home.

Well-educated parents are less likely to raise overweight children, but according to the study’s findings, if the student attends a poor school, the effect of his or her parents’ education is minimized. According to the online news source Futurity‘s report on the research , “A parent with a graduate degree who has a child in a poor school is more likely to raise an overweight adolescent than a parent with an eighth grade education who has an adolescent enrolled in a rich school.”

“The environment can actually limit our ability to make the choices that we all think we make freely,” Frisco says. Martin maintains that poor schools influence a student’s weight even beyond the typically-blamed unhealthy food choices. Low-funded schools have a difficult time offering athletic or fitness programs. Martin also argues that low income schools may house students with higher levels of stress. “Schools with limited financial resources tend to be more stressful environments,” Martin says. “Stress promotes weight gains and usually the worst kinds of weight gains.”

Young people have always tended to get into some trouble here and there. What’s shocking, though, is how often young Americans are being arrested–in fact, by the age 23, nearly a third of Americans will have been arrested for a crime other than a moving violation. This stat is reported by the New York Times and comes out of a study by Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the State University at Albany, and Robert Brame, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Their work analyzed data from the federal government’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Bushway and Brame found that the current arrest ratio (30.2 percent of young adults having been arrested for things other than a minor traffic violation) was a significant increase from 22 percent back in 1965. According to the researchers, this could be a result of an increasingly aggressive and punitive judicial system that has given rise to more drug related offenses and zero-tolerance policies in schools. According to Bushway:

This estimate provides a real sense that the proportion of people who have criminal history records is sizable and perhaps much larger than most people would expect.

Brame says that he hopes the study, which was appeared in the journal Pediatrics, could help alert physicians to signs that their young patients could be at risk. As he said in USA Today, “Arrest is a pretty common experience,” but still, “We know that arrest occurs in a context,” Brame told the Times. “There are other things going on in people’s lives at the time they get arrested, and those things aren’t necessarily good.” If doctors can intervene, he added, “It can have big implications for what happens to these kids after the arrest, whether they become embedded in the criminal justice system or whether they shrug it off and move on.”

Regardless of the study’s intended audience, the fact that nearly a third of young adults has an arrest record is a serious manner, especially in an era in which many employers routinely conduct criminal background checks and youth records that should be sealed are often found to be publicly available on the Internet.