The Power of Healthy Choices

1. The Power of Healthy Choices November 2013 DR. NANCI COPPOLA CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER PROGRAM REACH, INC. HEALTHY RESPECT PROGRAM

2. "NEVER DOUBT THAT A SMALL GROUP OF THOUGHTFUL, COMMITTED INDIVIDUALS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD.  INDEED, IT'S THE ONLY THING THAT EVER HAS."—MARGARET MEAD

3. What is the goal of health education? • Formation of healthy individuals and stable families. • The formation of healthy families requires skill and hard work NOT luck! • The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

4. “PRIMARY PREVENTIONIS THE KEY” THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RISK REDUCTION AND RISK AVOIDANCE

5. What is it about risk avoidance that baffles so many opinion makers and policymakers? • A simple concept • Yet we loose our common sense

6. SHOULD THE RULES CHANGE? • When it comes to sex, should the rules change? • Or is “don’t do it” a valid message here as well?

7. What Students want to hear? • 94% of teens in North America believe that it is important that they be given a strong message from society that they should not have sex until they are at least out of high school. • 64% of teens in North America believe that they need to be taught health information as well as morals and values.

8. WHAT THEY DESERVE… • The youth of New Brunswick deserve a healthy future. • The adults of New Brunswick are required to provide them with the skills necessary to make choices today that ensure healthy tomorrows!

9. Delivering the Message • How do we deliver the message of risk avoidance or risk prevention rather than risk reduction? • Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development • Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs • Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development • Bandura’s Theory of Self-Efficacy Developmental Assets

10. Self-Efficacy & Risk Prevention UNDERTAKING MANY HEALTH BEHAVIORS REQUIRES A SENSE OF PERSONAL CONTROL – A BELIEF THAT ONE CAN ACTUALLY PERFORM THE HEALTH BEHAVIOR. IE – CAN I REMAIN ABSTINENT?

11. SUCCESS SEQUENCE • We must teach teens the importance of achieving goals. • We must dispel the myth that engaging in risk behaviors as a teen has few, if any, negative consequences.

12. Success Sequence • In particular it is necessary to correct the widely held notion that having a child as an unwed teen has few, if any, negative consequences on future relationships and marriage, or for the children involved. • Dafoe Whitehead, Barbara and Pearson, Marlene, National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 2006.

13. The Value of Following the Sequence EDUCATION LOVE MARRIAGE PARENTHOOD

14. Youth Development & Risk Prevention • Effective for: • Alcohol • Tobacco • Drugs • Violence • Sex

15. Nurturing the Wholeness of Personhood • What are the risks of early sexual debut • Physical • Emotional • Financial • Intellectual

16. Involving Parents & the Community • Why Parents? • Why community leaders?

17. The Critical Years – Enabling Healthy Choices • Youth Development works to help students think about the effects of today’s choices on their futures. • Helps students learn the importance of short-and long-term goals thereby promoting a future orientation. • Teaches critical thinking skills. • Teaches decision making skills.

18. Youth Development & Brain Development • The youth development model helps us to compensate for the underdeveloped frontal lobe in the adolescent brain.

19. The Good News About Waiting • Married people are more than twice as likely to be happy. • National Opinion Research Center, General Social Survey, 1998.

20. Married men and women report less depression, less anxiety, and lower levels of other types of psychological distress than do those who are single, divorced, or widowed. • Waite and Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, healthier and Better off Financially, New York: Doubleday, 2000.

21. Married couples are wealthier than cohabitating couples. A married couple earns 61.4% more than a cohabitating couple. • McManus, M. and Harriet McManus, “Living Together Myths, Risks & Answers,” Howard Books, 2008.

22. What Do the Pediatricians Think? • The American College of Pediatricians strongly endorses abstinence-until-marriage sex education and recommends adoption by all school systems in lieu of “comprehensive sex education". This position is based on “the public health principle of primary prevention – risk avoidance in lieu of risk reduction,” upholding the “human right to the highest attainable standard of health.”

23. What is the Rationale? • By every measure, adolescent sexual activity is detrimental to the well-being of all involved, especially young women, and society at large. Children and adolescents from 10 to 19 years of age are more at risk for contracting a sexually transmitted infection (STI) than adults. • Multiple and higher risk sexual partners. • Immaturity of the cervical tissue of girls and young women. • CDC recently stated that of the 19 million new cases of STIs annually reported in the United States, 50 percent occur in teens and young adults under 25 years of age. • Twenty-five percent of newly diagnosed cases of HIV occur in those under 22 years of age. • One in four sexually active female adolescents being infected with at least one STI.

24. Program Reach’s Healthy Respect Program • Classroom Component • After-School • Parent Workshops

25. Healthy Respect Program - Results • Independent Evaluation shows that: • The program is positively associated with increased knowledge about risk of STIs and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. • Students completing the program are more likely to report commitment to abstinence until marriage than they were at pretest and than comparison students.

26. Program Results Continued • Students completing the program are more likely to view abstinence until marriage as the norm for sexual behavior than they were at pretest and than are the comparison group. • Students completing the program are more likely to perceive harmful effects of teenage sex than they were at pretest and than are the comparison group. Participants in the program were almost 10 times as likely to report that “teen sex makes it difficult for a person to study and stay in school in the future.”

27. Parent Program Results • The program is positively associated with an increase in parent-child communication about sex and drugs. Students who completed the program were more than three times more likely than at pretest and then compared to the comparison students to report having talked with their parents about “changes in your body, dating, or alcohol and other drugs”.

28. The Next Generation • The biggest failure is that by and large people have never tell youth that we believe in them, and that’s what programs need to do. If you want to be successful, you can’t just spew out information to kids and expect them to embrace a concept and live by it. You need to give students the core fundamentals of empowerment by telling them that we believe that they can make good and healthy choices, not just for one day, for one week, not just until they graduate from a specific program, but that they can learn to make good healthy choices over the course of a lifetime.