"Best Bets" to Prevent Pregnancies and Births:
Improve Family Socioeconomic Standing

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).