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Programs that don't take that into account aren't likely to succeed, and media coverage based on sensationalism doesn't help. But as blogger Moira Breen observed: For a lot of teen-agers, teen sex isn't about sex, or at least enjoyable sex, but about the status of having a boyfriend or girlfriend. That's no surprise, given that teen-agers often have nothing else.

Once, teen-agers weren't a demographic: They were adults-in-training. They worked, did farm chores, watched children, and generally functioned in the real world. They got status and recognition for doing these things well, and they got shame and disapproval for doing them badly.

We defined maturity primarily in terms of being permitted adult vices, and then were surprised when teen-agers drank, smoked, or had promiscuous sex."

No longer adults-in-training, teen-agers became part of their own social class, on the one hand indulged and sheltered, on the other viewed as juvenile, oversexed and somehow dangerous. Increased sexual activity, research indicated, was directly related to increased schooling and decreased responsibility. Teen-agers may be busy with teen activities, but not with adult responsibilities, and it shows. pornofilm, porno, pornofilm,

Hine is right. (Abstinence programs, the U.S. News story reports, make teens more anxious to retain "technical" virginity, but often via riskier practices like anal sex.)

I recommend a different approach: If we want teen-agers to be more adult, in their virtues as well as their vices, we should try treating them more like adults. Teen-agers should be encouraged to hold jobs in addition to going to school. Much of high school is wasted time: School meets only about 180 days a year, with a lot of class time wasted on going over the same ground from one year to the next. Teen-agers with a powerful desire to be adults should be allowed to follow an accelerated program, with earlier graduation (and perhaps other privileges) as a reward. Many teen-agers would take advantage of this, rather than spending extra years in what's little more than a pre-adult holding tank.

Today's high-schoolers do work, but in general they're far less responsible for their own support, and far more separated from adult responsibilities and achievements, than people their age have ever been. Where once it was possible to gain status through actual accomplishment, now the chief status accessory is a boyfriend or girlfriend. Shorn of opportunities to exercise adult virtues, teens work with what they've got.

Consider this analogy: Unmotivated teen-agers who are idling away their time in school, protected from the real world and supported by their parents, are more like welfare recipients than they are like responsible citizens. However, since the implementation of welfare reform has forced a degree of personal responsibility, illegitimacy rates are way down, and so are many other social pathologies associated with welfare dependency. Maybe what teen-agers need is some "welfare reform."

Of course, lots of people would lose under an arrangement like this. Marketers would lose their grip on a key demographic. Busybodies would lose an important opportunity for tut-tutting. Journalists would lose an opportunity to run articles on teen sex that are simultaneously censorious and exploitative.

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