Every American understands that media is changing our culture. Children and teens today are growing up in a vastly different environment than their parents did 30 years ago.
But that culture shift is now proven to alter the way youth and teens live out their lives. In a recent study, Dartmouth researchers found that teens’ exposure t0 increased sexual content in movies is encouraging sexual behavior at an earlier age.
The Heritage Foundation’s Christine Kim explains the results:
The researchers found that for each additional hour of exposure to sexual content in movies, the risk of initiating sex at each age increased more than five times. The increased risk between teens with high exposure and those with low exposure widened significantly during the later teenage years.
The study additionally revealed:
- Exposure to sexually explicit content increases the likelihood of risky sexual behavior, including the overall number of sexual partners.
- Having a TV in the teen’s bedroom leads to increased sexual behavior
- Having an intact home reduces risk, supporting years of research about the importance of an intact family structure.
Our culture is changing, which is why parents should be involved in their children’s lives and monitor their media consumption.
Additional research aggregated by The Heritage Foundation’s FamilyFacts.org shows:
- Adolescents from intact family structures tend to delay sexual initiation until a significantly older age than their peers from non-intact family backgrounds.
- Adolescents from intact families are less likely to have ever had sexual intercourse, have had on average fewer sexual partners, are less likely to report a sexually transmitted disease, and are less likely to have ever experienced a pregnancy or live birth when compared to their peers from non-intact families.
- The effects of family structure on all adolescent sexual outcomes other than sexual debut tend to operate primarily through the delay in sexual debut experienced by adolescents from intact families.
How do you see media changing today’s youth?
Margaret Go - August 10, 2012
Teens also are less likely to seek marriage and more likely to live with the opposite gender before marriage. Deviant life styles are becoming acceptable as is the idea that children are optional and on the same level as having pets. They are encouraged avoid any pain or discomfort; to seek their own pleasure satisfaction rather than serve others. They are seeing life as something you do now. There is no spiritual or higher purpose.