But there were fewer extra-maritally pregnant friends going through this fifty years ago.

Were there really fewer pregnant teens back then? I think more likely you didn't hear about them. Girl married boy in a shotgun wedding (hence avoiding the "extra-marital" part), or girl got a backstreet abortion (and maybe died), or girl had kid and it was raised as her "sister" or "cousin" (and in some cases it could have been her half-sister, since sexual abuse was virtually unreported, and unreportable), or girl had kid and it went to Barnado's or whatever your equivalent is. And no-one said zip about the pregnancy. Look further back, like 100 or more years, and teenage pregnancy was the norm. Also compare to places like Romania where birth control wasn't available, and look at the orphanages there. Kinsey put the boot into the 1950s folk myth of straitlaced-ness fairly comprehensively - it turned out that all this stuff *was* going on, but no-one dared to speak out in case the rest of their town-full of hypocrites turned on them.

Anyway, Trubrit started the thread. Age of son suggests she's probably 40ish, so the comparison is with schools in the 1970s, not the 1950s.

And it's pretty ironic for me that the Flower Power generation and their kids are saying how shocked they are that kids today are experimenting with sex and drugs! As Greg says, it's selective amnesia.

Graham.