Don’t pull the plug yet, parents — provocative TV shows like “Skins” or “Game of Thrones” don’t encourage kids to have sex, after all.
Media depicting sexual situations or talking about the birds and the bees has long been blamed for promoting risky sexual behavior in teens. Yet even though television, video games and the internet have the potential to expose adolescents to more sexual imagery than ever before, government data shows that not only are teen pregnancies at historic lows, but teens are also waiting longer to have sex.
So what’s the deal? A meta-analysis of 22 studies with more than 22,000 participants examined the link between sexy media and teenage sexual behavior. But the report published Tuesday in Psychiatric Quarterly determined that there really isn’t one once you remove control factors such as gender, personality and family environment. “The impact of media on teen sexuality was minimal with effect sizes near to zero,” stated the report.
Study author Christopher Ferguson, an associate professor of psychology at Stetson University, elaborated on his findings at The Conversation. He suggested that the older media-effects theories that believe we imitate what we watch are backwards. Sexy TV doesn’t make teens want to have sex; the teens who already want to have sex (hello, hormones) tune in to sexy TV. “Evidence suggests that users seek out and interpret media according to what they want to get from it, rather than passively imitating it,” Ferguson wrote.
The lack of correlation between sexy shows, books and movies and adolescent experimentation “is a warning sign we might be on the wrong track in trying to blame media for teen sexual risk-taking,” he said.
Ferguson suggests that parents have more influence on their teens when it comes to sex than what they watch on TV or see in movies. “To the extent media has any impact at all, it is likely only in a vacuum left by adults reluctant to talk to kids about sex, especially the stuff kids really want to know,” he added.
Guess it’s time to give The Talk, folks, before “Fifty Shades of Grey” does it for you.
