General good news for medical staffing professionals: There has been a rise in praise-worthy behavior among American teens, although new patterns of risky business like texting while driving are gaining ground.
According to a new survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of teens smoking, fighting and having sex has declined significantly in recent years. In 2013, 15.7 percent of teenagers report smoking cigarettes, the lowest rate recorded since the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey began in 1991, the CDC said.
However, texting and driving is prevalent among high schoolers, with more than 40 percent of participating students who had driven a car in the previous 30 days saying they sent text messages or emails while driving. It no news that this puts themselves and others on the road at risk, health officials said.
These are “not their parent’s vices,” the Chicago Tribune reads. And for the most part, it’s true. The media attention and research around smoking cigarettes have evolved drastically in the last 50 years. It has gone from hype to harm – the focus shifting from the aura of smoking’s “coolness” to the host of health diseases caused by cigarettes. No doubt we can attribute the in-depth studies and programs to prevent kids from smoking to the gradual decrease in young smokers.
With that being said, health officials worry that the growing popularity of e-cigarettes could puncture progress made by anti-smoking campaigns.
“We’re particularly concerned about e-cigarettes re-glamorizing smoking traditional cigarettes and maybe making it more complicated to enforce smoke-free laws that protect all non-smokers,” CDC Director Tom Frieden told the Chicago Tribune.
The rate of students using smokeless tobacco rose from 7.7 percent in 2011 to 8.8 percent in 2013.
In the wake of the survey, anti-smoking advocates pushed federal regulators to ban the marketing of all tobacco products to children.
Driving while “intexticated”
One of the biggest things on parents’ radars is texting while driving. Text messaging makes a car crash up to 23 times more likely. Although it is a big temptation for teenagers, educating and then reinforcing that education can help reduce collisions behind the wheel.
About 8 out of 10 Americans ages 16 to 17 own cell phones. Of those, 34 percent said they have texted while driving and 52 percent said they have talked on a cell phone while driving, according to the CDC.
You may have witnessed the dangers of texting while driving on travel nurse assignments. In 2011, at least 23 percent of auto collisions – amounting to 1.3 million crashes – involved cell phones.
On average, 5 seconds is the minimum amount of time attention that is taken away from the road when one is texting and driving. Health officials and new anti-texting-while-driving campaigns look to put a stop to this dangerous activity.
Sexual behavior drops
As far as sexual behavior goes, the CDC showed that the percentage of students who reported ever having sexual intercourse fell slightly from 47.4 percent in 2011 to 46.8 percent in 2013. Almost 60 percent said they had used a condom during their last sexual encounter, reducing the risk for pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.
Even soda drinking and time spent in front of the TV have taken a plunge. The percentage of U.S. high school students who watched an average of at least three hours of TV on a school day has dropped from 43 percent in 1999 to 32 percent.
Yet those hours seem to have been replaced by sedentary behavior at the computer screen. From 2003 to 2013, the amount of students using a computer three or more hours per day for non-school-related work has almost doubled to 40 percent. Those working healthcare staffing professions can encourage students to get out and be active for at least 30 minutes per day.