The "cool" kids, the kids everyone wanted to be like, were the ones who "did it." Supposedly, they were tough enough and strong enough to have sex and then walk away. They were able to "do it" for "its" sake. They didn't have to get involved in the maw of personal commitment, love and sharing. No, they could take their gratification and run, and they allegedly were the better for it.

Of course, this didn't quite square with what I'd seen when I was that age, nor with what I see now among my children's contemporaries. Those who "dared" didn't come back emboldened. They came back saddened. Disappointed. Less trusting in themselves and of others.

The sad anecdotal stories we've all seen are now backed by equally sad statistics in a new report by my colleagues at The Heritage Foundation. Researchers Lauren Noyes, Kirk Johnson and Robert Rector have compiled data that show sexually active teens are far more likely to be depressed and to attempt suicide than those who hold off until marriage.

Using results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, conducted in 1996 for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and 17 other federal agencies, the Heritage study reveals that more than a quarter of teen girls who said they were sexually active also said they had been depressed "a lot of the time" or "most or all of the time" in the previous week, compared to 7.7 percent of girls who said they weren't sexually active. More tellingly, 60.2 percent of girls who refrained from sex said they were "never or rarely" depressed, compared to just 36.8 percent of sexually active girls.

For boys, 8.3 percent of those who were sexually active reported problems with depression, compared to just 3.4 percent for those who weren't.

The in-home survey (given with parental permission) of 6,500 people 14-17 years old also asked if they had attempted suicide during the past year. Girls who were sexually active were three times more likely to say they had attempted suicide than those who weren't. Sexually active boys were nearly nine times more likely to have attempted suicide.

One could raise a chicken-and-egg argument here. Does sex cause depression, or does depression cause sex? And don't some kids in unhappy homes use sex to escape depression? But as the Heritage analysis points out, the differences in happiness between sexually active and non-sexually active kids are too large and too widespread for the depression to have caused the sex in most cases. They could've lashed out in any number of ways. Also, a majority of teens who had become sexually active admitted they'd started too soon and expressed regret. Continued...