Study

Pre-Teens with Low Reading Skills Twice as Likely to Get Pregnant in High School

C. Price

Written by: C. Price

C. Price

C. Price is part of DatingAdvice.com's content team. She writes advice articles, how-to guides, and studies — all relating to dating, relationships, love, sex, and more.

Edited by: Lillian Castro

Lillian Castro

Lillian Guevara-Castro brings more than 30 years of journalism experience to ensure DatingAdvice articles have been edited for overall clarity, accuracy, and reader engagement. She has worked at The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Gwinnett Daily News, and The Gainesville Sun covering lifestyle topics.

Discuss This! Discuss This!
Advertiser Disclosure

A new study has found a link between pre-teen literacy and teen pregnancy.

Evaluating data collected from 12,339 seventh grade girls, the study found seventh grade girls with “less than average reading skills” were 2.5 times more likely to become pregnant in high school than girls with an average reading level.

The study also found seventh grade girls with above average reading skills were less likely to get pregnant in high school than girls with average reading skills.

 

“Twenty-one percent of seventh grade girls with below

average reading skills ended up pregnant during teen years.”

Overall, 21 percent of seventh grade girls with below average reading skills ended up becoming pregnant during their teen years.

Race also played a factor in the study and seemed to compound with literary problems, as black and Hispanic seventh graders with poor reading skills were even more likely to become pregnant as teenagers than their white peers.

“We certainly know that social disadvantages definitely play a part in teen pregnancy risk, and certainly poor educational achievement is one of those factors,” said Dr. Krishna Upadhya, a reproductive health and teen pregnancy researcher from Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore.

“This is really about adolescent health and development more broadly, so it’s really important for us to make sure that kids are in schools and in quality educational programs and that they have opportunities to grow and develop academically and vocationally,” she said.

Source: ContraceptionJournal.org. Photo source: staticflickr.com.

Advertiser Disclosure

DatingAdvice.com is a free online resource that offers valuable content and comparison services to users. To keep this resource 100% free, we receive compensation from many of the offers listed on the site. Along with key review factors, this compensation may impact how and where products appear across the site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). DatingAdvice.com does not include the entire universe of available offers. Editorial opinions expressed on the site are strictly our own and are not provided, endorsed, or approved by advertisers.

Our Editorial Review Policy

Our site is committed to publishing independent, accurate content guided by strict editorial guidelines. Before articles and reviews are published on our site, they undergo a thorough review process performed by a team of independent editors and subject-matter experts to ensure the content’s accuracy, timeliness, and impartiality. Our editorial team is separate and independent of our site’s advertisers, and the opinions they express on our site are their own. To read more about our team members and their editorial backgrounds, please visit our site’s About page.