With teenage, the complexities - disobedience, new friendships, secrecy and involvement in sexual activities may come! So parents normally try to maintain tight control over their teen children so as to save them from risky sex or abuses. A lot of "sensible" teens also show abstinence in order to stay or play safe.
A new study reveals that such teen abstinence may not work out well to save them from risky sex in their later life. In other words, teens, who abstain from having sex or delay the onset of their sex life may still engage in sexual risk taking after they attain adulthood.
The study, which was conducted by researchers at the University of South Florida, suggested that other factors such as heredity and environment may also have a leading role in this regard. According to them, sexual promiscuity during adolescence is not responsible for causing sexual risk taking in later life. The typical sexual risk taking behaviors include having multiple partners, using drug and alcohol at the time of sexual encounters and indulging in unprotected sex.
Marina A. Bornovalova and her colleagues studied the behaviors of more than 1,000 pairs of identical and fraternal twins. All of these twins had been a part of the Minnesota Twin Family Study since they were 11. These children were asked about various factors associated with biology and also about psychological and social issues, such as friendships. When they turned 24, the subjects were asked about their sex lives and risky ventures.
When one of the siblings in a twin pair was found to be involved in sexual behavior at the age of 16 and the other was found to have initiated it much later, but their sexual risk-taking was found to be equivalent irrespective of their sex initiation ages!
The findings indicate that hereditary factors like a tendency to act impulsively as well as environmental factors like poverty and unstable family are mainly responsible for shaping an individual's sexual behavior during adulthood.
In simple terms, an individual's genes and life experiences are the actual dictators of his sexual behavior in his future life. The researchers clarified that the purpose of this study was not to support an early onset of sexual life, which can cause depression while affecting school performance.
Bornovalova added, "if our goal is to reduce sexual risk-taking, we need to be focusing on something else." She confirmed that early sexual initiation is in no way responsible for risky sex. The study is yet to be published in an issue of Psychological Science.
