I grew up in a fairly wealthy little town where pretty much nobody was the child of a teen parent. It’s awfully facile, and to my own experience, to pretend the children of such parents are the only people having sex in high school.
I live in a part of Maryland with high teen pregnancy rates. Unsurprisingly, the pregnant teens are often the children of single moms who were also pregnant teens. Is this a coincidence? Even ignoring truancy problem, somehow I don't believe sending all these kids to wealthy gold-plated schools to get a "proper" sexual health education will fix the issue because my argument is that the messaging they receive at home through their parent(s) is 10x stronger and more influential than the school's messaging.
I would guess failure to use effective birth control methods could be correlated pretty well with income but I’d be pretty surprised to see any evidence that sexual activity was much lower in the tony towns. I’m also going to refer back to my memories of being a teenager to say that I often didn’t really put much stock in my parents’ values or wisdom, and hardly think I was alone in this.
