Adolescent Sexual Attitudes

A central goal of U.S. social welfare policy is to ensure that all children have the opportunity to reach their full potential as productive adults. Yet it is increasingly clear that where children live plays a central role in determining their life chances. This paper provides an overview of The Urban Institute's Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development, which is dedicated to understanding the relationships between neighborhood-level factors and the well-being and development of children and youth and identifying and evaluating place-based, community-wide strategies to help children grow up to reach their full potential as adults.

Many young people in the District of Columbia are failing to make a successful transition to adulthood. Their challenges include poor preparation for the high-skills labor market and long-standing health problems. Recent District government efforts have centered around school reform and early childhood, but these areas are not sufficient to improve the well-being of older youth. This report provides comprehensive data indicators and analysis on the state of older youth (age 12-24) in the District and examines the role of area nonprofits that work with young people, their families, and neighborhoods.

From health and housing to school achievement and employment, a new report from the Urban Institute provides the most comprehensive source of data on the state of teenagers and young adults in the District of Columbia.

anelists will discuss the effects teen childbearing has on the life trajectories of the mother and child, the costs to government agencies aiding teens' children, and the increased risks these children face, including maltreatment, being placed into foster care, and incarceration. Private and public programs that reduce teen pregnancy, help teen mothers avoid bearing a second child, and change teen behavior will be explored.

The Moving to Opportunity program targeted families living in some of the nation's poorest, highest-crime neighborhoods and offered them a chance to move to lower poverty areas. One hope was that, away from concentrated poverty and the risks associated with it–including poor physical and mental health, risky sexual behavior and delinquency–families would fare better. This brief examines how adolescent girls benefited from moving out of high poverty and discusses why girls might have fared so much better than boys.

The federal Moving to Opportunity program (MTO) was designed to help poor minority families move from distressed, high poverty neighborhoods to better locations, thereby improving their quality of life and long term chances for well-being. Low income families living in concentrated poverty face a variety of challenges to their safety, health, and economic health, including poor schools, high crime and unemployment. This brief examines areas where the MTO program helped movers with those challenges, areas still problematic even after moving, and factors affecting those outcomes and considers policy implications for the next generation of assisted housing mobility initiatives.

The Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs (OAPP/DHHS) has been encouraging its abstinence-oriented grantees to incorporate youth development strategies. It wanted to learn (1) more about the relationship between these strategies and prevention of sexual risk taking, (2) how its funded programs have combined youth development and abstinence education components, and (3) whether one could determine the independent effects of each component on youth outcomes. This report describes findings related to these issues from a comprehensive literature review, examination of grantee documents, and site visits. Recommendations focus on strengthening the usefulness of grantee year-end reports, strengthening individual grantee evaluations, and strengthening OAPP's ability to assess effectiveness across grantees.

A 50-state survey of state policies and programs to discourage teen and nonmarital childbearing conducted by Child Trends in 2001 analyzes changes since the 1999 and 1997 surveys. State efforts to prevent teen pregnancy and early childbearing changed little between 1999 and 2001 with one exception. More states reported school-based abstinence education in 2001 than in 1999. Although states focused less effort on nonmarital pregnancy prevention than on teen pregnancy prevention, states are emphasizing welfare caps, improved access to contraceptive service, programs encouraging unmarried pregnant couples to marry, and youth development or young adult education programs. The online version of the brief includes tables that identify the teen and nonmarital childbearing programs in place in each state.