Dr. Michael Carrera’s teen pregnancy prevention programs have met with extraordinary success—not only in reducing the rate of teen pregnancy, but in improving the lives of their young participants.
As director of the National Adolescent Sexuality Training Center at the Children’s Aid Society, Carrera heads a pioneering program. This program includes not only family and sexuality education, but also six other components that cultivate health and well-being: academic assistance, job training, mental health services, self-expression training, instruction in individual sports that can be played throughout the life cycle, and medical and dental services.
It takes a lot of time to cover this much ground. Young people begin the program at age eleven and continue it until they graduate from high school, attending workshops six days a week, fifty weeks a year. It’s this intense dedication to the myriad aspects of healthy development that’s made Carrera’s program such a remarkable success.
Choice! Magazine spoke with Dr. Carrera to learn more about this program, and to hear his thoughts on the current state of sexuality education in the U.S.
Q: You joined the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in 1970 and began holding workshops about pregnancy prevention for young people and their families in underserved communities. But after several years you found that just offering sex education classes was not enough to accomplish your goals. Why?
A: When it came to the translation of cognition to behavior, there was a disconnect. I realized that we needed to look at all the things that made a young person whole, which included their sexuality and sexual expression, but also many other things.
Q: What changes did you make and why?
A: We had to identify the forces and factors that influenced the entire lives of young people we were serving. And the best way to do that was to ask them what they wanted and needed. They came up with the first six components of the program. I added the last component, medical and dental services, because everyone needs his or her own health care provider.
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