Childhood Friendships Linked To Teen Sex
Study: Dating Habits, Friendship Patterns Play Role
Your 11-year-old child's friendships may help determine whether he or she will be sexually active as a teenager, according to a new study.
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The study, published in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, also showed that preteens with friends in higher grades were more likely to have sex in early adolescence. "Going steady" in early adolescence was also linked to having sex as a young teen.
The study used data on 1,678 children, following them from ages 11 or 12 until they were 15 or 16. The researchers defined early adolescence as ages 13 and 14 and middle adolescence as ages 15 and 16.
"Social networking at ages 11 and 12 is powerfully predictive of sexual initiation between early and middle adolescence," said Elizabeth Cooksey, a study co-author and an associate professor of sociology at the university.
Cooksey and her colleagues also found that one-third of the teens in the study had had sex by age 16. Of these, one in eight said they had had sex before ever going out on a date.
And there was a three-fold jump in reported sexual experience -- from 10 percent to 34 percent -- between early adolescence and middle adolescence. Nearly half -- 45 percent -- of the black children in the study said that they had had sex by age 15 or 16.
"Many people assume that a teenager will progress from casual dating to going to steady and then to having sex," Cooksey said. "There are cases where that assumption is wrong. Our results suggest that a significant minority of youth are having sex outside of a relationship."
Only three in 10 youth reported that they had dated during early adolescence. Of those who did, six in 10 reported going steady.
"A 'steady' relationship correlates with early sexual behavior, regardless of how often a teenager goes on dates," Cooksey said. "So frequent dating -- as opposed to going steady -- may be more innocuous than going steady when it comes to initiating sexual behavior."
As preteens, boys with mostly female friends were more likely to have started dating in early adolescence and to have had sex by middle adolescence than were boys with mostly male friends. However, the reverse was true with preteen girls who had mostly male friends. These girls were less likely than girls with mostly female friends to have had sex.
"This may seem counterintuitive until you consider that preteen girls who hang out mostly with boys may be the more active, sports-oriented girls traditionally called tomboys," Cooksey said. "Other research shows a higher age for sexual behavior in adolescent females who participate in athletics."
So how can parents read their children's friendship patterns?
"There are a couple of things that parents of young adolescents can watch out for, such as a child having more friends in higher grades or dating someone on a steady basis," Cooksey said.
But Cooksey cautioned that friendship patterns may be related to other events in a child's life.
"For example, a higher proportion of youth who reported having friends in higher grades had been held back at least two grades," she said.
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