Grateful acknowledgment is due to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which has supported the Research Network on Successful Midlife Development, on which I serve as a member. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues on the network for their helpful feedback on all my work over the past several years. Most relevant to this paper is grant support for my review of the literature in evolutionary psychology, reproductive biology, and adolescent development in connection with a book manuscript in process on the reproductive phase of women's lives. I have drawn heavily from this review in the preparation of this paper.

Abstract

This paper applies a biopsychosocial perspective to adolescent sexual feelings and behavior. In particular, it explores sexual attraction, desire, and mate selection as evolutionary adaptations just as necessary to species survival as sweating to cope with summer heat or shivering in response to winter cold. Sex differences in mating strategies are described as part of this evolutionary adaptation, and recent research findings are summarized that demonstrate how these strategies explain contemporary sexual and reproductive behavior in Western societies today, as they do sexual behavior in the past or across diverse cultures. The implications of these findings are discussed for their significance to intervention efforts to postpone sexual initiation and avert births outside marriage. The author urges greater emphasis on the early pubertal years; increased attention to teaching adolescents more about their own sexual development; a less absolutist focus on sexual abstinence, which may be appropriate and feasible for 12-year-olds but not for 16-year-olds; better and more widespread sex education at earlier ages and throughout the school curriculum; frank discussion of all the options available for those who experience an unwanted pregnancy; and as much attention to adolescent boys as to adolescent girls.

Introduction

When Sigmund Freud pointed to work and love as two major factors necessary to a happy life, there is no evidence he was thinking in evolutionary terms. Yet work in the form of production of goods and services is the central means by which we survive, and love or some variant of sexual attraction is the major means that ensures species continuity through reproduction. I consider this point to any discussion of teenage sexuality and pregnancy, a reminder we need in Western societies because we have so clearly drawn a sharp distinction between recreational sex and reproduction. The impulses to grow, to learn, to make love, and to reproduce are not easily controlled, because they are built into our very nature as human animals.

Although sexual selection may affront our self-images as rational beings, it operates on us all; it is not restricted to peacocks and lions. Just as our food preferences, immune systems, and mechanisms to cope with summer heat by sweating or winter cold by shivering are the products of evolutionary adaptation, so too our inclinations in sexual attraction, desire, and mate selection represent adaptations that were necessary for the survival of the species. In the felicitous phrasing of David Buss, our evolutionary past "has grooved and scored our minds as much as our bodies, our strategies for mating as much as our strategies for survival" (Buss, 1994).

For the past two decades, my intellectual interests have centered on trying to bridge the gaps between evolutionary theory, biomedical knowledge of the physiological processes that underlie human behavior, the demographic shifts attending historic transitions from agricultural to industrial to postmodern information and service-oriented economies, and the social institutions in which we are embedded. My motivation in this effort at synthesis was to understand better human development across the life course and, in particular, to address the question of how stable or flexible differences between the sexes are. Drawing on the diverse disciplines that span historic structural changes at a macrolevel down to the inner workings of mind and body of contemporary men and women is an ambitious undertaking, subject to all the risks of partial understanding of any one discipline but holding the promise of a new synthesis that bypasses the turf boundaries disciplinary specialists tend to defend. But that is the essential goal of those of us who subscribe to a biopsychosocial perspective on human behavior.

In this brief paper, I hope to demonstrate the utility of that perspective as applied to understanding adolescent sexual behavior in our time and place. I believe the biopsychosocial perspective tempers the notion that programs to effect change in adolescent behavior have a high probability of success. This approach may be humbling, but it need not be pessimistic. Rather, it urges some caution against claims that a given program of education can radically change behavior or that the program can achieve dramatic success.

A basic point of my analysis can be simply stated: I believe there is a radical and unprecedented discordance between our biological natures that resulted from the processes of natural selection over eons of evolutionary time and the demands imposed on us by fundamental changes in modern societies. Let me give an example in an area remote from our concern with adolescent sexual behavior and its consequences. Anyone who has watched firsthand the tremendous drive human babies show in learning to get up on two feet and walk without adult support will understand how difficult it would be to curb this impulse in a healthy one- year-old. Imagine the social and physical restraints one would have to impose to prevent the baby from crawling and walking. Except by unthinkably cruel acts, our efforts would be either doomed to failure or require incredible crippling as the Chinese did for centuries of painful foot binding of young girls.

On comparable evolutionary grounds, I believe it is a lost cause to urge that adolescents abstain from sex for the very long span of time between sexual maturation at 12 and a "mature" age to mate and marry in the early to mid 20s. But more on this later. First, I want to sketch the mating strategies that have long differentiated males from females against which to assess our contemporary situation.

Sex-Differentiated Mating Strategies

For countless generations of human history, a basic biological difference between males and females predicted sex differences in mating strategies: a human female has a limited number of large-sized gametes in her ovaries compared with the millions of sperm in every male ejaculation. Given a conception, nothing further happens to the male progenitor, but the female is on a trajectory of a nine-month pregnancy and a decade and more of intense investment in child rearing. Further, assuming full consciousness or careful hospital procedures of identification at birth, a woman knows with full assurance that the infant born is her biological child. By contrast, a man has no assurance the child born is biologically his. Paternity depends on circumstantial evidence, even in cultures that require chastity at marriage, sequester women, and restrict their social contacts with males.

A male can maximize the transmission of his genes through multiple matings with a number of females. By contrast, the female has traditionally been more inclined to much more cautious behavior in the selection of a sex partner, driven by the search for a mate with sufficient skills and material resources to provide support for the offspring she produces. On these basic biological grounds alone, evolutionary theory predicts that the criteria guiding mate selection will differ between the sexes: to ensure the fertility of a female mate, and the stamina she will require to rear offspring to reproductive age, the male will seek a female who is young, attractive, and healthy; the female will seek a male who is healthy, dependable, with sufficient material resources (or the promise of future acquisition of such resources) to support her and the children she will produce through the years of their dependency.

Contemporary skeptics of evolutionary theory might concede that such sex differences probably did structure the relationship between men and women deep in the past of human history and further, that such theory helps explain the universal pattern in developing societies today that continues to buttress the socially legitimate mating pair with social supports through legal, economic, and cultural institutions designed to provide marital and lineage stability.

But many doubt that these long standing sex differences persist (or should persist) under the very different economic and social conditions of Western societies. This persistence is precisely what evolutionary psychologists have attempted to test in a number of fascinating studies in recent years. Studies of the criteria men and women seek in a mate from samples of adults 17 to 70 years of age, from 37 cultures on six continents (Buss, 1989, 1994) report a common finding: that women from all continents, all political systems, all racial and religious groups, and all systems of mating (intense polygyny to presumptive monogamy) place far greater value than men on good financial prospects in a potential mate. What type of resources are favored by women varies by culture or historical period: greater male strength in a hunting society; numerous cattle or sheep in a pastoral society; more land in a peasant society; and more education, higher social standing, or higher income in Western societies in our time. That women tend to marry men older than themselves is rooted in this same sex-differentiated mating strategy: age of the male is a proxy for greater demonstrated ability to acquire skills and resources (Kenrick & Keefe,1992). So too, male height is an index of likely command of resources. One of my research colleagues, Michael Marmot, who is conducting a large-scale longitudinal study of British civil servants, reports that height is significantly correlated in a linear fashion with grade level of men in the civil service: the higher the rank, the taller the man. Height shows no similar pattern in relation to grade level among women in the civil service. Even more persuasive evidence is Marmot's finding that men who began their civil service career at lower grades and moved up the hierarchy were taller than their nonmobile peers in the lower grades.

The counterpart to female preference for men with resources to support them and their children is male preference for young, fertile, and attractive women. It does not sit well in our thinking to concede the role of physical and sexual attractiveness as a criterion for success in life; we prefer to believe that accomplishments and skills, not the good fortune of our genes, are what lead to productive and reproductive success. But a good deal of evidence accumulated over the past decade shows physical attractiveness as a powerful predictor of social and personal evaluations of ourselves and others. Youth and attractiveness in the female are proxies for fertility potential: a symmetrically shaped face, clear skin, shiny hair, slim waist, and full hips and breasts are indicators of good health and fertility potential, indicating as they do that the woman is free of parasite infection and has not given birth before (pregnancies tend to increase the female waistline), that she gives reasonable attention to personal cleanliness, and that she has enjoyed good nutrition. The waist-hip ratio is a particularly interesting indicator of a woman's 'attractiveness as perceived by both men and women. One outstanding study was conducted by Devendra Singh (1993), who designed an ingenious test for judgments of female physical attractiveness by drawing three types of female figures, identical except for weight (underweight, average, and overweight), and within each of these three weight classes, four figures that varied in their waist-hip ratio. The waist-hip ratio is a good indicator of sex hormone profile and fertility and the risk of such major diseases as hypertension, adult onset diabetes, cardiovascular and gallbladder diseases, and cancer of the breast, endometrium, and ovaries (National Academy of Sciences, 1991). Singh found that female waist-hip ratios were highly significant predictors of judgments of attractiveness of the female figures, overriding the role of body weight: the smaller the waist compared with the hips, the more attractive were the female figures judged to be. The waist-hip ratio can be readily perceived by eye and hence represents a good proxy for female health and fertility. Few men would explain their preferences in such terms, illustrating the point that mating strategies typically operate on an unconscious level. Nor are women and fashion designers consciously projecting fertility potential when they give visual reinforcement to low waist-hip ratios by the use of wide belts in one era, corsets and bustles in another, or midriff nudity in recent summertime dress.

This sketch of sex differences in mating strategies illustrates the relevance of an evolutionary perspective on human sexuality. To the question of how relevant such considerations are to today's sexual and reproductive behavior, let me briefly mention a few illustrations from recent research:

Women continue to be more cautious in sexual partner selection than men, reporting fewer pre-marital partners, and less engagement in casual sex encounters.(Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels,1994).

In fictional scenarios, men report more willingness than women do to engage in sex with a new partner, the more attractive the potential partner is (Hatfield & Sprecher,1986; Wilson, 1981,1987).

In reporting on their first sex experiences, men claim they came about because they were "ready" or "curious" about sex; by contrast, more women stress the closeness of the relationship with the partner (over half the women but fewer than a third of the men claimed they were in love with their first sex partner (Laumann et al.,1994).

In the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) sex survey in the 1990s, (the first large-scale survey since the Kinsey studies in the 1940s and 1950s), analysts demonstrate far greater cohort change in multiple premarital sex partners among women than men. For example, among women born in the 1930s (therefore of high school age in the 1950s), only 6% report having had two or more partners before their 18th birthday; among women who were high school age in the 1980s, 35% reported two or more partners before their 18th birthday, a sixfold increase. By contrast, the increase in early premarital partners among men rose from 30% in the 1950s to 44% among those of high school age in the 1980s (Laumann et al.,1994).

None of the men in the NORC sample but 25% of the women claim they did not want to have sex when they first did so, suggesting the persistence of a long standing pattern of men pressing for sex with their partners at an earlier stage in the development of a relationship than women are ready for.

Some sexologists claim that sexual scripts are purely social constructions and that this is particularly the case for heterosexual scripts. If so, it is of special interest to note the difference in sexual behavior of gay men compared with lesbian women. From the earliest studies by Bell and Weinberg in the 1970s to such recent studies as David Greenberg's (1995), the contrast is the same: 43% of white gay men, for example, and 33% of black gay men studied in the 1970s in the San Francisco area reported having had hundreds of sex partners (that is, 500 or more), but none of the lesbian couples report very high numbers of partners in their sexual histories (Bell & Weinberg,1978).

The surplus sexual endowment of the human species can lead to considerable personal and social distress, not merely pleasure. We espouse monogamy, but because we are highly sexed, our sexual physiology and psychology predispose us to multiple matings. The most monogamous of all the primates are gibbons who are strongly pairbonded; but unlike humans and most other primates, gibbon pairs live in very large home ranges of some 100 acres, with few intruders; hence a gibbon pair has few temptations to sexual dalliance (Wright, 1994). By contrast, humans evolved in tight small groups, rife with genetically profitable alternatives to fidelity; and in our time, sheer population density and the anonymity of large urban centers set the stage for easy access to numerous sex encounters, marital fragility, extramarital affairs, and high divorce. Here then is one critical disjunction between the ancestral contexts within which we evolved and the social contexts within which we now live out our lives. For some, an internalized conscience, religious belief, or both may lead us to turn away from most sexual temptations, but we cannot turn off the deeper levels of our emotional responses, although they may be diverted into sexual fantasy rather than expressed in behavior. At this deeper level, we remain the creatures who evolved in a Pleistocene environment. As S. Boyd Eaton, a radiologist, recently put it to a reporter in Atlanta, "We're Stone Agers in the fast lane."

Trends in Sexual Maturation. In the course of sketching a bioevolutionary perspective on mating strategies, I have already identified one major factor that confronts adolescents coping with early adolescent sexual awakening: the drop in the age of sexual maturation, which in turn has affected the age of sexual initiation. There are several important consequences that flow from this century-long trend. On a macrolevel, the trend toward earlier sexual maturation might not have been associated with increasing personal and social problems were it the case that early adolescents were socially sequestered, subject to very close chaperonage, or married at very young ages. But as the 20th century unfolded, there have been solid reasons for postponing marriage as a consequence of the increasing need for higher levels of schooling to prepare for entry into a competitive labor market. For adolescents who do not go on to higher education, the economic uncertainty of obtaining or holding a secure job severely reduces their ability to support a family. In a future fraught with uncertainty, a poor young male has slim chances of obtaining sufficient resources to offer a young woman in marriage, and poor adolescent girls have little reason to be hopeful about finding and marrying a male with adequate resources to support her through the early stages of childbearing and child rearing.

If such poor young adolescents were embedded in stable intact families and living within kin and neighbor networks of supportive adults, the environment might go a long way toward encouraging adolescents to develop impulse control and learn the advantages of postponing childbearing, if not sexual gratification, to a more mature age. But this condition is precisely what is lacking in the hundreds of urban pockets of disorganized neighborhoods in our crowded urban habitats. Aspirations for a happy future life require a stable social setting with numerous examples of adults enjoying the payoff of hard work rewarded by steady, adequate income. But few such minority members remain in these deteriorating settings: as soon as they can afford to do so, they move out of inner cities to suburban homes with neighbors like themselves, with the consequence of escalating the rates of individual, family, and social pathologies in the communities they left behind (Wilson, 1987).

It is not widely enough recognized that growing up in a broken family or with a mother who had never married in the first place is itself conducive to early sexual maturation of young girls. The mean age at menarche may be 12.6 years, but there is considerable variance involved, from very early maturers under 10 years of age to 16 years or older. Some 30% of menarcheal timing is genetic: early-maturing women have early-maturing daughters and sons (Garn, 1980; Goldman & Schneider, 1987; Surbey, 1990).

Beyond the genetic factor, increasing evidence indicates that the presence of a biological father has a significant effect on the growth and development of his children. The presence of a biological father postpones sexual maturation of girls; the presence of stepfathers or cohabiting men living with the girls' mothers tends to advance the age at maturation (Caspi & Moffitt, 1991; Moffitt et al., 1992; Surbey, 1990; Steinberg, 1988).

One recent study is particularly rich in identifying the effect of parent presence or absence on child development and sexual maturation (Flinn et al., 1996). In an eight-year study of children in a small village on the east coast of Dominica in the Lesser Antilles, Flinn and his associates studied children from birth on, with special attention to the effect of separation from father or mother on the child's stress level, as indexed by cortisol and testosterone levels assayed from numerous saliva samples from the children. Cortisol is a key hormone produced in response to physical and psychosocial stressors. Without cortisol we would not be able to tolerate the ups and downs of daily life, because cortisol controls a wide range of somatic functions including energy release, immune activity, mental activity, growth, and reproductive functions. In other words, cortisol prepares the body to respond to unanticipated sudden changes in the environment. But when stress is a constant feature of life, it has negative consequences: an impaired immune system, a slowdown of cognitive development and mental activity, and a worsening of psychological adjustment. For that reason, prolonged stress associated with the death of a family member or separation of a child from the care-giving adult is so often followed by an elevation of infectious disease and other health and psychological problems.

In the Dominica study, the researchers found elevated cortisol levels in very young children when their mothers were away from home for more than a day, as they are in families with prolonged internal conflict between the parents, compared with the cortisol levels of children living in amiable families. The specific outcomes of persistent stress differ by sex: the boys show antisocial and delinquent behavior, whereas the girls show elevated anxiety and withdrawal behavior. Father absence had a particularly negative effect on boys. An evolutionary interpretation stresses the point that natural selection favors sensitive interaction with family care givers; for boys, fathers are particularly important as models of care, resources, and social status. For girls whose fathers are not present, Flinn and his associates believe their mothers may give them less consistent care because of economic stress in the absence of a marital partner or inattention to their daughters as they seek male partners, however temporary.

I have cited the Flinn study because it is unique in demonstrating the intervening physiological pathways between stress brought about by parental absence or family conflict and the outcome of behavioral and psychological disturbance in the children. Other studies in New Zealand (for example, the Caspi & Moffitt study referred to above) and Canada (Surbey, 1990) have also reported that girls mature at later ages in father-present homes and earlier ages when nonbiological males are present in the home. I consider the Dominica findings particularly important because families in these small villages are not isolated but embedded in extended families with much social life taking place outdoors. From a child's perspective, the boundaries between family and unrelated neighbors may be blurred, and hence child supervision is difficult beyond the biological parents to other adult community members. Parent absence or conflict may have far more serious consequences in societies like our own because most families do not live in closely interdependent social groups but in isolated households in which a parent is of overwhelming psychological significance for the well-being of very young children.

Of particular interest are studies like Michelle Surbey's in Toronto, which built on the thesis first espoused by Patricia Draper and Henry Harpending (1982), who argued that a society or social group within a society with unstable marital behavior and low paternal investment in the young would prompt women to develop a reproductive strategy that emphasized early childbearing, bypassing careful mate selection because men could not be depended on as reliable spouses or fathers. By contrast, in social groups in which men are perceived to be reliable providers who become actively involved in child rearing, women would postpone childbearing until they could make a judicious selection of mates. Jerome Barkow (1984) expanded on this idea by proposing that the two different reproductive strategies would predict an impact of father presence or father absence on the timing of sexual maturation of girls. Barkow drew on several sources of evidence in preliminary support for this thesis: studies of female adolescent promiscuity and teenage pregnancies, for example, often point to "broken homes" as a background factor associated with social deviance and early childbearing. The line of reasoning was therefore that disturbed families lead to early sexual maturation, followed by early sexual initiation and subsequent early childbearing, a development since confirmed by Richard Udry's research (Udry, 1979; Udry & Campbell, 1994).

This was the background to Michelle Surbey's study of the effect of father presence or absence on the timing of menarche in a sample of 1,247 daughters, among whom 16% (204 cases) were from families where father absence occurred before the girl's menarche. Several major findings from this study follow:

Father absence was significantly related to earlier ages at menarche, whereas mother-absent family types showed no significant difference in menarcheal age compared with families with both parents present.

The greater the number of years a girl spent with a father present in the home before she turned 10 years of age, the greater the delay in menarcheal age, suggesting that father absence triggers an early increase in gonadal and adrenal hormones during the early or prepubertal years.

Girls with stepfathers matured earlier than girls without stepfathers who lived alone with their mothers.

Father-absent girls whose parents divorced matured at earlier ages than those whose fathers died. This hinted at the possibility that high family conflict between the parents before the divorce triggers increased stress in the daughter (as the cortisol study of Flinn and colleagues would predict), associated with a reduction in the closeness of the father-daughter relationship. This finding is consistent with Steinberg's research (1988) that showed that increased psychological distance between father and daughter is associated with early menarche.

Of particular relevance here, Surbey found that mothers in the father-absent families were younger when they first menstruated and first dated, had less positive views toward men and toward the family generally, and gave birth to more children. The daughters replicated their mother on many of the same measures: early menarche, early dating, more negative attitudes toward the family, and a highly significant elevation of negative life events. Such findings are consistent with Mavis Hetherington's early studies (1972) that found that girls whose parents divorced were more likely to be sexually flirtatious and precocious than girls from intact families.

These studies have particular relevance to the situation of young black girls growing up in our urban ghettoes. Common findings are that black women have a much higher rate of early menarche, followed by early sexual initiation, and earlier and more births outside marriage. Both the genetic link and the fact of growing up in disorganized families and neighborhoods contribute to this profile and the similarity across the generations of many black women.

Conversely, an "upside" to this profile should be noted. In the lower social strata of a society, where males have limited economic opportunity and high rates of unemployment and imprisonment, men have little to offer to women as providers capable of investing in child rearing. From a woman's perspective in the lower classes, men offer sociability, sexual gratification, and insemination. In terms of reproductive strategies, a black underclass woman has little to gain by postponing sex and childbearing; and from the point of view of pregnancy outcome, little is gained by bearing children at older ages, because lower-class women are subject to continuing inadequacy of good-quality food, experience prolonged social and economic stress, and have inadequate health care, with the result that the longer childbearing is postponed, the greater the toll of these factors on uterine and placental capability. In fact, infant mortality is lower among infants born to black underclass mothers during their teenage years than at older ages (Geronimus, 1987, 1991; Lancaster, 1986, 1994). In sum, postponement of childbearing does not necessarily improve a black underclass woman's life chances or ensure infant and maternal health.

Changing Marriage Norms. A second factor implicit in an evolutionary perspective on mating strategies pinpoints a significant feature of modern societies that represents a radical historical departure from all we know about family structure and social norms concerning mate selection in the past. Until recent times, the choice of a marital partner was not left to the individual but to parental or lineage decisions, and they were made out of concern for the long-term best interests of the child or the lineage itself. Independent households of the newly paired couple were typically rare; more prevalent was the incorporation of the young couple into the existing family of the bride or more typically, of the groom (that is, patrilineal residence). In our time in Western societies, parents have only indirect control of the range of potential mates young people may acquire; for example, by choice of neighborhood or the school their children attend, parents can impose some restrictions on the range of likely other-sex friends their maturing children may meet and eventually marry. But the final choice is an individual one.

Furthermore, it is culturally permissible and technologically feasible (thanks to effective contraception) to distinguish between a sex partner and a marital partner, with a considerable difference between the criteria involved in such choices. Looks and social skills play a major role in choice of a sex partner, with little attention to material resources or care giving and fertility potential that are more relevant to the choice of a marital partner, as illustrated in countless well-known novels. The very language used to distinguish between pre-marital and marital sex has become archaic. Premarital used to mean having sex with the partner one eventually married. Now it is typical for young adults in Western societies to have several sex partners before marriage. As we saw, the most significant change in recent decades has been that it is no longer just men who enter marriage with considerable sexual experience behind them but women as well. Not only is sexual experimentation a common feature of adolescent life, but it is now often followed by cohabitation for some years in early adulthood before marriage is even considered.

In the political climate of the 1990s, we are inundated with media and political messages decrying the breakdown of "traditional family values." Rarely do such invocations go beyond glib pieties to an analysis grounded in empirical facts; and there is much nostalgia in invoking such values (Coontz, 1992; Goldscheider & Waite, 1991). I have pointed out (Rossi, 1993, 1996; Rossi & Rossi, 1990) that no evidence suggests that intergenerational relations between parents and their children (especially mothers and their children) have undergone any profound disruptive change in the past half-century, either of normative obligations, affective mutual concern, or exchanges of help. There is no "war between the generations" among individuals, although friction on an aggregate political level may appear in the coming decade on entitlements enjoyed by the elderly.

There is strong evidence of changing social norms where marriage as an institution is concerned, a trend extremely difficult to reverse. With sex no longer confined to marriage, and increasing economic independence of women, marriage itself loses some of its appeal. It remains an open question what the social benefits were in the past or are today for women to enter or remain in marriages out of sheer economic dependence on men. Social acceptance of cohabitation is itself an index of an erosion of marriage norms, and this pattern is widespread in all Western societies (Bumpass, 1990, 1994). Surveys now report that an overwhelming majority of Americans no longer believe marriage or having children is necessary for a full, happy life for either men or women, and this view is spreading in newly industrialized countries like Korea and Japan as well (Bumpass & Choe, 1996). Together, these trends call into question any possibility that movements can successfully urge sexual abstinence, marital stability, or confining births to married couples who stay together.

It is nevertheless the case that the majority of young people do wish to marry and to have at least one child. I have come to believe that an important psychological function is served by simultaneously holding marriage and childbearing as a personal ideal, while at the same time subscribing to a backup contingent norm that says not all is lost if that ideal turns out to be impossible to attain.

I conclude from a variety of evidence that families are stable in some dimensions, that is, intergenerational bonds; flexible and adaptive to circumstances in other dimensions, that is, class and racial differences in economic opportunities that reduce the value of marriage to either men or women; and socially and psychologically problematic in still other dimensions, that is, the impact of marital instability or the absence of marriage on the welfare and development of young children. Some truth resides in the credo that it "takes a village" to rear a child, but not in the terms recently argued, by the intervention of a state bureaucracy. No substitute exists for hands-on care giving by adults strongly bonded with their children, particularly if the parent or parents live in a supportive setting with known kin and neighbors available to lend a helping hand in the everyday crises of illness, job demands, or natural disasters we may all experience.

Hence my conclusion: there is little prospect that the trend to low marriage rates, high divorce rates, sex outside of marriage, or out-of-wedlock births can be reversed, unless state intervention became so intense and intrusive as to jeopardize our democratic liberties in the most personal domains of our lives. In this instance, those liberties entail decisions concerning when and with whom to engage in sex; when, whether, or whom to marry; when or whether to conceive a child; or how to handle unintended pregnancies. In this sense, I agree with Carol Tavris in her recent review of Judith Stacey's new book, In the Name of the Family and Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers's book, She Works/He Works, in arguing that the "rhetoric of moral panic and the politics of backlash" are not going to achieve any change because,

Women who need and enjoy their jobs aren't going to give them up. People who are unhappily married aren't going to stay together. Teenagers aren't going to have a mass conversion and choose abstinence until they marry - if they marry. (Tavris, 1996).

Concern about state intrusion has particular relevance when the domain of sexuality is at issue, a concern that extends beyond the state to well-intentioned private efforts at intervention as well. It is one thing to extend options and opportunities to an underprivileged, disadvantaged group in society. It is quite a different matter when such intrusions involve "controlling individual desires." As social historian Thomas Laqeur at Berkeley recently pointed out in connection with efforts to reduce smoking among adolescents, the issue does not stem from any discovery about the nature of tobacco or the fact that it is addictive:

It's an interest in controlling desires. When you start saying that the state has an interest in which desires can be gratified and which can't, it's a profound thing to do." (quoted Manserus, 1996).

Now, let me turn to the specific issue of adolescent sexuality and teenage births.

"Just Say No" Abstinence Programs. I pity today's young adolescents, inundated from all sides by invocations to "just say no" not only to sex but to any kind of drugs, smoking, drinking, or contact with strangers, at the same time they are urged to avoid fatty junk food in favor of fruits and vegetables and to run, jog, swim, or hike rather than to spend their time watching TV or talking by the hour on the phone with their friends. In addition, young adolescent girls are subject to social pressures to pay more attention to their studies than to boys and to pursue the goal of losing weight to attain a degree of thinness that is not only unhealthy but for the most part as impossible for them as for their midlife moms (National Academy of Sciences, 1991; Nichter & Nichter, 1991; Nichter & Vuckovic, 1994; Nichter et al., 1995).

A "no-no" approach may also be doomed to failure if the messengers are adults like their parents, because a critical task in early adolescence is to try one's wings at independence from adult authority, and some studies suggest abstinence appeals of an absolutist nature may actually increase the desire of teenagers to experiment, to find out for themselves what it is they have been told to say no to. If an abstinence approach is very narrowly defined, then the predictable impact on adolescents who cannot remain chaste is to define themselves as "bad". Unless such adolescents are given the tools with which to experiment safely, the likelihood of pregnancy goes up. Ignorance is not bliss. At a minimum, abstinence programs may be effective only with healthy, well-motivated adolescents, which is to say the very youngsters in need of information and guidance will be left exactly where they are in the absence of such a program, if not worse off.

Those concerned with developing programs dealing with adolescent sexual behavior and pregnancy might do well to look at the history of safe-sex campaigns aimed at changing the behavior of gay men and drug users to prevent exposure to the AIDS virus. It is my understanding that many such programs worked at first but quickly declined owing to the belief that the educational mission was completed. Because of this belief, the San Francisco Aids Project disbanded in 1987, following which gays slipped back to their former unsafe, condomless sex more and more often and younger men saw no point in starting safe-sex practices. In the judgment of some still active in AIDS work, the former strategy that centered on normative, hand-slapping variations on "just say no" were doomed to failure on other grounds as well. The appeal in pamphlets, posters, TV spots, and talks spoke only to the head, with little sensitivity to the conditions of loneliness, low self-esteem, and despair that served as stimulants in many gay men's (and, I would add, adolescent teenagers') search for intimacy, however fleeting, in sexual encounters (Green, 1996).

Another warning worth heeding is the tendency of the safe-sex campaigns to address all adults, rather than target high-risk groups, not only wasting great amounts of money but running the risk of a backlash response to repeated "cry wolf" appeals. I think this is precisely the high-risk effect of any exclusive focus on abstinence. All life includes risk taking, and this applies to sexual behavior as to any other aspect of human behavior. What is more important is to talk in terms of relative risks. Oral sex is less dangerous than unprotected anal sex. So too, the risks of an unintended pregnancy are relative: mutual masturbation, oral sex, intercourse immediately just before or after a menstrual period for girls with regular cycles incur low risks of infection in the case of oral or masturbatory sex and low risk of pregnancy in the few days surrounding the menstrual period.

On similar grounds, dire warnings of dreadful reductions in life chances as appeals to teenage girls to avoid early pregnancies and births should not be absolute, because the girls themselves may well know many exceptions: siblings or aunts who are doing just fine with their babies; other girls who had abortions and as a result became more cautious about contraception and thought seriously about getting additional schooling and job experience under their belts before any childbearing. The need for loving response from others that it is claimed motivates many teenagers to accept their unintended pregnancies needs to be addressed, not simply discarded by pointing to the long period of time before babies are able to reciprocate the affection shown to them. The girls themselves know that their peers who became pregnant were often heroines in the eyes of others, not failures.

And finally, it is important not to exaggerate the prevalence of teenage pregnancies, however natural it may be for advocates, program developers, or evaluation researchers to do so out of their commitments to a cause. The 1990s are not the first time even in recent history that cries about an "epidemic" of teenage births have been sounded. As Maris Vinovskis has pointed out, teenage pregnancy and childbearing rose after World War II but became a major public concern during the late 1970s and early l980s, 20 years after the peaking of the rates of teenage pregnancy and childbearing in the late 1950s (Vinovskis, 1981; 1987). In the 1990s only 12% of children born in the United States have teenage mothers, and the vast majority involve 18- and 19-year-olds, not girls under 16 years of age. Kristin Luker points out that young women under 20 have produced children at about the same rate for most of this century (Luker, 1996). Nor are births to nonmarried women restricted to teenagers: births to never-married women have gone up at every age, and three out of five such births are to never-married white women. As I have argued, out-of-wedlock births reflect the declining emotional and social significance of marriage, not only among young teenagers but among adults of all ages as well.

I have no experience in program development, implementation, or evaluation, which makes any suggestions I have of limited utility to those charged with such responsibilities. At most, I can draw implications from my analysis, although I am aware of many of the institutional restraints of a cultural and political nature that stand in the way of the feasibility of several of my suggestions in today's political climate. It is important, however, to consider a full range of options in an era when the political tide threatens civil liberties and denies political and individual alternatives to parents, adolescents, and teachers.

Target Group. Perhaps the most pertinent suggestion is that the target group most in need of help, and most important from the point of view of maximizing impact, is teenage girls and boys from early puberty through early adolescence, approximately 8 to 14 years of age, the ages during which hormonal changes are occurring and visible maturation takes place in secondary sex characteristics. This young age group is still young enough to vacillate between efforts at independence from parental authority and returns to dependence on adult authority for guidance, making for greater susceptibility to influence than mid to late adolescents. These stages of development are also important because lifelong habits and personal traits are being formed, in particular the development of an internalized conscience and the ability to postpone gratification. Consequently, the very early age of intervention I have urged has the greatest promise of instilling values and habits of a durable nature that can sustain youngsters when they confront the greater complexity of temptations at later stages of adolescent development.

It is also important for both program developers and evaluation researchers to think seriously about the unintended consequences of any program with a narrow focus on abstinence until marriage. What will happen, for example, when girls trained in an abstinence program reach early adulthood and find that there are no males available who share their own lack of sexual experience and who have lower levels of self-esteem and job skills than the women have? As a society, female solidarity is widespread, particularly among disadvantaged black women. It is female-male and male-male solidarity that is desperately needed. Programs that concentrate just on the development of female friendships and a commitment to chastity until marriage run the risk of precipitating an increase in marital mismatches and divorce.

Research by Roberta Simmons on early adolescents suggests the ages of 10 to 14 are the years when sexual differentiation takes hold in numerous respects: girls lose ground in academic studies as they are diverted into an obsession with boys and peer popularity; gossip becomes rampant, and youngsters are prone to believe all the talk about social and sexual deviance among their peers, often with little foundation in fact; early-developing boys are at an advantage on the playground and in their appeal to girls, both enhancing their self esteem, whereas early-developing girls often lose ground in self-esteem and are targets for jokes or unwanted sexual approaches by older boys and young men (Simmons & Blyth, 1987; Simmons, Blyth, & McKinney, 1983). For 12- to 14-year-olds, it is important that they be informed that the majority of their peers are not sexually active; and for girls in particular, every effort should be made to communicate the idea that boys' sexual demands that are not matched by their own readiness for sex are themselves an indication the boys are not worthy of their affection. This same point applies to mid- and late-adolescent girls as well: for example, boys and young men who refuse to use condoms are not worth becoming involved with, since such refusal is an indication of male immaturity, recklessness, and lack of consideration for a girl's health and well-being.

Finally, educators know only too well that curriculum content must be tailored to youngsters' stage of cognitive and social development. What is appropriate and desirable for a 6th grader is very different from what is appropriate and desirable for a 10th grader. Thus, while a purely abstinence approach to 10- to 12-year-olds may be appropriate, it is no longer appropriate for 15- to 17-year-old adolescents. By midadolescence, ignorance of contraception and abortion is not bliss, but a high-risk error that may lead to serious social problems and personal trauma.

For decades, Europeans have reported that sex education including full and frank education on contraception does not lower the age of sexual initiation or raise the frequency of sex among adolescents. Douglas Kirby's review of American research (in this issue) reports the same results. It is the presence of good sex education in other Western nations and its absence in the United States that explain the fact that unwanted pregnancies are not the problem in countries like Sweden and the Netherlands that they are in the United States. Abstinence campaigns in the United States will worsen, not improve, this international contrast.

Accent the Positive "Just Say No" appeals. Precisely because adolescents today are subjected to so many nay-saying appeals, they may tune out more of the same. Adolescents may be more receptive, however, if issues concerning sexuality are embedded in other primary topics of instruction, from biology to social history, whether in a classroom, pamphlet, or youth group. An interesting indicator of the appeal a positive approach can have is the continuing success of Mary Pipher's book, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (Pipher, 1995). Written by a woman therapist with considerable clinical experience with adolescent girls and their mothers, Pipher eloquently counters the cultural pressures on young girls in American society that, as she puts it, involves "cutting up good healthy carrots to make roses of them." Although a critic of a culture that encourages girls to focus on popularity with boys over other life goals, she provides a good deal of encouragement of a positive nature for how parents and teachers can help adolescent girls value other aspects of themselves, whether or not they have been sexually active. Little wonder that her book was on the nonfiction bestseller list for 99 weeks, as of February 16, 1997. There is clearly a large interested audience of very diverse parents who are searching for ways to appeal to, interact with, and guide their adolescent children. But such appeals must involve a wide array of possibilities in the way Pipher does, not a narrow authoritative insistence on total sexual abstinence.

Knowledge of Sexual Development. Not birds and bees, but honest and up-to-date information on the human reproductive system is needed, with special attention to endocrine functions and the importance of the clitoris for female sexual gratification. Vaginal intercourse is not necessary for sexual gratification of either males or females. Girls should also be instructed in the stages of sexual development: for example, that menarche is a late phase of this development, following by 3 to 5 years the early changes in hormone levels that may be affecting the moods and the heightened physical sensations in the genitals in children as young as 8 or 9. Another example of the information young girls should have is an understanding of when the ovulatory phase of a menstrual cycle takes place. All too many girls who have gone through sex education courses in grade school and junior high persist in the erroneous belief that they are more apt to become pregnant just before or immediately after their period. On average, ovulation occurs 14 days before the onset of a menstrual period, hence calculable only for girls with regular menstrual cycles, which means that young girls cannot make such calculations because they typically have an erratic timing pattern for the first few years after menarche. They should also understand that full, regular fertility is not attained for girls for up to two years after a first menstruation and that young boys their age, if capable of ejaculation, have not only low sperm counts and low sperm motility but also a high proportion of malformed sperm and very poor control over ejaculation. Young girls should know that they are far more likely to experience orgasmic pleasure autoerotically than with young male partners because young males' tendency to ejaculate prematurely and because of the males' inadequate knowledge (or lack of interest in learning) of a lover's skills in facilitating female orgasm. Implicit in such instruction is some guidance on what a good lover should be capable of and the different needs of the female as opposed to the male in attaining sexual satisfaction. An obvious implication is that young boys are every bit as much in need of sex education as girls.

Discussion about Experiences with Sex and Early Childbearing. Frank discussion about adolescents' experiences with sex and childbearing is necessary; with no one-sided portrayal of only negative experiences. How to weigh options or alternative paths of action is cognitively difficult for early adolescents, but they can surely respond to and learn from colorful personal stories about the very different paths other adolescents have taken and what the consequences have been in their lives. Older adolescent models probably have greater potential influence on early adolescent teenagers than adults have.

Discussions of the Options. In today's political climate, honest discussion of options available to a young women with an unwanted pregnancy may be extremely difficult because that discussion would involve debunking many lines of argument put forth by pro-life advocates. An interesting example of the penetration of pro-life language in adolescent discourse was provided by Rebecca Stone and Cynthia Waszak (1992) in their focus group interviews with teenagers 13 to 19 in several cities around the United States. The adolescents never spoke of a fetus or abortion as a medical procedure but of "killing the baby," "murder pure and simple." Most did not know that abortion was legal in every state; they cited a widely disparate number of states in which they thought abortion was illegal. But at the same time, almost all (but girls more than boys) took the view that individuals faced with an unintended pregnancy have the right to make their own decision about what to do. In sum, they were anti-abortion, but pro-choice, an interesting example of the adolescents' willingness and ability to recognize and accept distinctions between private morality and public policy, distinctions frequently obscured in public debates among adults about abortion.

Adolescents might develop a very different perception of abortion if they were knowledgeable enough about human fertility to view the early stage of fetal development against the enormous reservoir of thousands of ova in the female and the millions of sperm in every male ejaculation. Poor health, ill timing, or fetal malformation and much potential heartache can be avoided by terminating one pregnancy to fulfill the dreams of having and rearing a healthy child under more favorable circumstances in the future. As with my point about embedding sex education in larger topical contexts, so too abortion need not be dealt with in any explicitly pro-life or pro-choice manner but in a purely factual way considering the enormous potential fecundity of the human animal, ways to avoid the unhappy experience of an unwanted pregnancy, and the options if such pregnancies do occur. Some hard truths need to be confronted by program developers and educators and shared with adolescents: that three-fifths of all pregnancies in the United States, for example, are unintentional; and that half of such pregnancies are aborted, 80% by unmarried women, and over 90% during the first trimester of the pregnancy. Late-term abortions to which so much public attention has been given in the past two years are extremely rare, and the overwhelming majority are performed to protect the woman's life and health or to spare her the agony of giving birth to a very seriously deformed child. Any late-term abortion is clearly traumatic for the woman, since the sheer fact of retaining the pregnancy for so many months indicates her desire for a child, but she has had the courage to follow medical advice and can look forward to a subsequent birth or adoption of a healthy child and years of normal child rearing rather than the heartbreaking experience of caring for a seriously handicapped child. Finally, sex educators should know that despite the backlash in recent years about abortion, public opinion has not become more conservative: the proportion of the American public that approves legal abortions for Aany reason@ has increased from 34 percent to 43 percent since the late 1970s, with most of the increase having taken place in the past five years (Bumpass, 1996).

Knowledge of Other Adolescents' Sexual Histories. Young adolescents under 16 should be alert to the fact that, despite all the talk among their peers, the majority of them are not sexually active and that those who had a first experience of vaginal intercourse were not thereafter necessarily sexually active on a regular basis. In fact, Richard Udry and Ben Campbell (1994) report very irregular sexual histories among adolescents, a 16- year-old teenager, for example, may have two sexual episodes when she was 13 but none for the past three years. Sharon Thompson's narratives of adolescent girls describing their sex experiences include many stories that read as though the girls had redefined themselves as chaste, despite having given in to boyfriends' sexual demands in the past; they outgrew those relationships and were now waiting for a male friend 'worthy' of their love (Thompson, 1994, 1995).

Apprenticeship in Responsible Social Roles. On the premise that there is no substitute for firsthand experience, a good dose of close-up contact with what it takes to care for a baby or preschool child may help young adolescent boys and girls to understand what parenting can and should mean. This lesson was less necessary in the past when sib sets were large, but in a one- or two-child family, many young adolescents have no immediate exposure to infants nor experience in their care. Even if younger children are present, there may be no examples of good parenting in their own families. Surely, though, networks could be established through schools, churches, and community agencies to train and place young adolescents in well-functioning normal families as a parent's aide, not merely for a few hours of evening baby-sitting but for an entire day or weekend. Seeing parent/young child interaction at close range for a long enough period of time to understand the ups and downs, the physical and emotional drain that can attend intensive care giving and attention, would be instructive. Exposure to real babies in real-life situations has the potential of teaching very important lessons in personal and social responsibility.

By the same token, any experience of young adolescents in carrying responsibility for children younger than themselves could provide the same lessons in responsibility. In the past when kindergarten through eighth grade elementary schools were the norm, 12- to 14-year-olds in seventh and eighth grade had such opportunities in the same building to be leaders and mentors for younger children. Today, however, most 12- to 14-year-olds move into junior high or middle schools and are more apt to orient themselves toward older adolescents than to younger children. Here too, Simmons and Blyth (1987) show the psychological disadvantages, especially for girls, of this change in school organization. Establishing links between junior high and elementary grade students might contribute to changes helpful to young adolescents' development both by encouraging social responsibility and by providing experiences that bolster their self-esteem.

So, too, close contact with adults engaged in real work on real jobs within some feasible range of possibility for themselves in the future may contribute to early adolescent emotional and social development: not a parade of successful executives, scientists, or lawyers but contact with such skilled workers as an electrician, nurse, plumber, or data processor.

It may seem far removed from sex education, but teaching youngsters about money management or time management may foster a willingness to set goals that require postponement of gratification, a lesson with obvious implications for sexual initiation as well. What does a car cost, and how is it financed? What does an adequate diet cost for a family of three per week? Keeping time budgets for several days can pinpoint how worthwhile and how pleasurable the activities were that youngsters engaged in and how that time contributes to any long-term, even if still fanciful, goals for their own adult lives.

In conclusion, any program building on any of these suggestions should be sure to project the wonder and mystery of human life and the complex road over eons of evolutionary time that led to the sheer miracle of the human species we and our youngsters belong to.

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