"Best Bets" to Prevent Pregnancies and Births:
Encourage High Educational Aspirations and Friendships with High-Achieving Peers

Teens with higher educational aspirations have more positive reproductive health outcomes. Using the 1982 NLSY, Afxentiou and Hawley (1997) found that the more years of schooling that a female teen expected to complete was associated with a lower likelihood that she would be sexually experienced. In addition, among sexually experienced teens, those with higher educational expectations were less likely to have a birth. Smith (1997) examined a sample of urban minority youth and found that, for female teenagers, higher school aspirations were associated with a lower likelihood of early sexual activity.

Having a high proportion of achieving friends (friends who think or hope they will go far in school) in adolescence reduced the risk of being involved in adolescent pregnancy in a sample of adolescents in 150 public high schools in two upstate New York counties from the 1980s and early 1990s (Kasen, Cohen, & Brook, 1998).