The Beat: Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention and Abstinence Education

The Family and Youth Services Bureau webinar "Understanding the Impact of Trauma in Developing Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs for Tribal Youth," held for FYSB grantees in January, is now available to the public online. The session was chaired by Gwendolyn Packard of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center and Dr. Carole Warshaw of the National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma & Mental Health.

You'll find a video recording, transcript and slides designed to help youth service providers:

• Define trauma, including historical trauma;
• Provide an overview of the biological responses to stress and trauma;
• Recognize...

Homeless youth are more likely than the general teen and young adult population to get pregnant or contract an STD. But most STD and pregnancy prevention programs are designed for youth who live at home and go to school regularly. A group of researchers in the Los Angeles area, mostly at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, have been studying the attitudes and behaviors that may make homeless youth more likely to have risky sex. Their work, recently published in a trio of papers, sheds light on some of things public health workers and health educators might be able to do to tailor prevention programs to this vulnerable population.

Using a combination of interviews and surveys with homeless youth in and around Los Angeles, the researchers...

You may have seen the headlines last fall: Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that girls with below-average reading ability went on to become teen mothers nearly twice as often as girls with average reading ability. The finding was presented at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting last year and will be published in the paper “Pre-Teen Literacy and Subsequent Teenage Childbearing in a U.S. Population,” forthcoming in the February 2013 volume of the journal Contraception.

We wanted to know more, especially about what the correlation between low literacy and teen parenthood means for youth workers. So...

A number of studies have shown the challenges that youth in foster care have in establishing healthy romantic relationships. Experiencing abuse and neglect can hinder their ability to connect with others. Youth in foster care also lack role models to give them a picture of what healthy interactions look like.

It stands to reason, then, that youth in foster care might benefit from formal relationship education, like that provided through the Family and Youth Services Bureau's Personal Responsibility Education Program. But when Senior Researcher Mindy Scott and her colleagues at Child Trends, a nonprofit research center in Washington, reviewed the research on programs that teach foster youth about healthy dating and romance, they found...