Adolescents from families with higher incomes are less likely to be sexually experienced, more likely to use contraception and less likely to have a teen pregnancy or birth than other teens (Mayer, 1997; Miller, 1998; Brindis, Pagliaro, & Davis, 2000). Using national-level data from the 1990s, Afxentiou and Hawley (1997) found that never-married teenagers who came from households with higher incomes were less likely to be sexually experienced and, if sexually experienced, were less likely to have a birth. Longitudinal analyses of a large state sample of 7th to 12th grades also shows that living in households with higher SES levels is a protective factor against initiation of sexual activity for both males and females (Lammers et al., 2000). However, a longitudinal study of high-risk adolescents indicates that adolescents whose mothers worked a higher number of hours while they were growing up were more likely to initiate first sex by age 14 than adolescents whose mothers worked fewer hours (Mott et al., 1996).

Parental education is another component of SES that is associated with adolescent sexual behaviors. Higher maternal education is associated with less frequent acts of intercourse in a sample of metropolitan males ages 17-19 (Ku et al., 1998) and with a lower likelihood of ever having sexual intercourse among a national sample of male and female adolescents aged 14-17 (Santelli et al., 2000), among a national sample of females aged 15-19 (Brewster, 1994a) and among females in a sample of white females and males in Michigan (Meschke et al., 2000). However, after controlling for individual and social context variables, the effects of maternal education lost significance in some models (Santelli et al., 2000; Meschke et al., 2000).