If it turns out teenagers aren't having that much sex, does some credit go teaching about abstinence?

The NYT reports that most high school kids these days are virgins.

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys....

As for that supposed epidemic of oral sex, especially among younger teenagers: national statistics on the behavior have only recently been collected, and they are not as alarming as some reports would have you believe. About 16 percent of teenagers say they have had oral sex but haven’t yet had intercourse....

Judith Warner — the NYT's women-and-children columnist — processes the information:

[T]he overblown focus on messed-up kids affords parents the possibility of avoiding looking inward and taking responsibility for the highly complex problems of everyday life....

Certain kinds of children have certain kinds of vulnerabilities that make them particularly susceptible to the toxic elements of our culture. This is true of those who do or don’t fall victim to stress and anxiety, and it’s true of those who do or don’t engage in too-early, too-risky sex. Certain kinds of policies can help children. (Abstinence-only sexual education clearly does not help in combating teen pregnancy.) Certain kinds of parenting can help or hurt, too.

Having a family life that’s so atomized and disconnected that children have the physical and emotional space to upload nude pictures of themselves onto the Internet, and lack the self-esteem and self-respect to know better is obviously undesirable. Being a stressed and frantic, frazzled and depressed parent is harmful, too....

[W]e – the adults in this society – are “a mess.” I think it’s time to stop projecting our dysfunction onto our children.

I think that was mainly about why adults believe myths about kids and then how adults are pretty screwed up. But the news was good: Kids aren't having so much sex. Shouldn't we give ourselves credit for teaching them well, and shouldn't we give the teenagers credit for conducting themselves well? How did this turn into another occasion for hand-wringing? Is that a liberal disease? If there isn't one problem, quick, see another problem, because programs will be needed to solve them?

Now, the only mention of abstinence education was in the context of preventing pregnancy. And there — hey, I'm impressed that the NYT hot-linked to the Washington Post — we've seen a slight upturn in teen pregnancies after years of decline. Do we know enough about the cause-and-effect to say that abstinence education "clearly does not help" with this? I don't know, but it would seem to me that if teenagers are keeping abstinent, one reason might be that adults are successfully presenting abstinence to them in a positive light and teaching them the social skills to avoid sexual activity when they prefer abstinence.

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I must say that, reading Warner's column, I had this image in my head — it may be just my Myth of the Stereotypical New York Times Reader — of an upper middle class, middle aged woman reading the column and enjoying tingles of resonance with her own life: Yes, I'm so busy, I'm frazzled, I'm stressed, and frantic....

I spend less and less of my news reading in the pages of the NYT over the years, and one reason is that I feel that more and more the paper is written for that reader. Ironically, I am an upper middle class, middle aged woman, but I'm not her... especially if she's the kind of person who wants the newspaper written to resonate with her exquisite emotions.