To prevent pregnancy among adolescents, the Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB) supports state, Tribal and community efforts to teach abstinence and contraceptive education. This FYSB webpage highlights their Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention program and its grant recipients, including Personal Responsibility Education Programs which educate young people on abstinence and support pregnant youth or mothers under the age of 21.

Adolescence is an ideal time to help youth develop healthy relationship skills that support their lifelong health and well-being. Healthy relationship skills, such as the ability to communicate and collaborate with others and manage conflict, have shown to promote social and emotional health, including perceptions of self-worth, goal achievement, and success in the workplace. This Child Trends brief describes the potential benefits of integrating Positive Youth Development, a developmental framework that focuses on youth’s assets and strengths, into healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programming to inform the work of HMRE program directors and administrators, as well as the efforts of educators, employers, and a range of youth-serving staff.

This Jobs for the Future resource highlights Unlocked Labs, which is a program that offers technological education in corrections facilities and creates pathways to quality jobs for people who are incarcerated. To highlight the beneficial impacts these programs can have, three members of the Unlocked Labs team share their stories of how training and employment experience catalyzed their professional journeys from incarceration to well-paid quality jobs.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families. For such programs to be effective, it is critical that clients attend regularly, yet studies have found that HMRE program providers sometimes struggle to maintain high rates of participation. Identifying and exploring typical participation patterns in HMRE programming can increase understanding of this challenge and point to ways in which programs can promote and support regular participation. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief describes typical patterns of participation in three programs that were part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. The brief identifies distinct patterns of participation in each of these programs and provides profiles of the clients who participate in these distinct ways.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation digital report shares highlights from the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. This report describes the five grantees —in Georgia, Florida, Denver, Missouri, and Texas— and the services they provided. To capture the perspectives and experiences of the people most directly affected by the programs, this report also tells the personal stories of some of the program staff and participants who contributed to STREAMS.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) held the Linking Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Families to Employment and Economic Opportunities Meeting in August 2017. This meeting allowed TANF program representatives from around the country the opportunity to learn about promising practices and actionable implementation strategies to improve employment outcomes and economic independence among TANF families. This session offers popular curriculum models for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention program grantees, including abstinence education and Personal Responsibility Education Program, one of the largest federally funded programs designed to address adolescent pregnancy and prepare youth for successful transition to adulthood.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) held the Linking Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Families to Employment and Economic Opportunities Meeting in August 2017. This meeting allowed TANF program representatives from around the country the opportunity to learn about promising practices and actionable implementation strategies to improve employment outcomes and economic independence among TANF families. This session included the efforts of the Office of Adolescent Health to Coordinate adolescent health initiatives across HHS, including Teenage Pregnancy Prevention programs.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) held the Linking Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Families to Employment and Economic Opportunities Meeting in August 2017. This meeting allowed TANF program representatives from around the country the opportunity to learn about promising practices and actionable implementation strategies to improve employment outcomes and economic independence among TANF families. This session included the TANF efforts to reduce non-martial births, including abstinence programs, visiting nurse services, and services for youth such as teen pregnancy prevention, counseling, and after-school programs.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief highlights evidence on the impacts of the Teen Choice curriculum for youth in alternative schools in and around New York City. Because alternative schools provide supplemental services to address the specific needs of youth, these schools often find it difficult to fit pregnancy prevention programming into the regular school day. The program was delivered by trained staff from the program developer, Inwood House, with federal grant funding to the New York State Department of Health from the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), one of the largest federally funded programs designed to address adolescent pregnancy and prepare youth for successful transition to adulthood.

Sexually active adolescents are vulnerable to adverse health outcomes, such as unintended pregnancy. Empowering youth to make informed decisions, specifically decisions to avoid sexual risks, helps them avoid the potential negative consequences of adolescent sexual activity and contributes to their optimal health and well-being. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief presents a program model for sexual risk cessation. The model describes program inputs—the overall design, program features, and the infrastructure needed to support implementation—and implementation outputs—that is, aspects of staff, service delivery, and youth responsiveness—that can be assessed to know whether implementation occurred as expected. In addition, the program model specifies youth outcomes it intends to affect.