Tyra is back on her grind. She has a new show coming out that is geared towards plus sized teens. Here’s what she told  media outlets last night:

“I want real teens to say…oh, I’m beautiful too.”

To enter in Tyra’s Fiercely Real Teen Model Search, you need to between the ages of 13 and 19, wear a size 12 or bigger, and be at least 5’9” tall.

The winner will get a one-year modeling contract with a major agency, a photo spread in a major fashion magazine, and a photo with Tyra on the cover of Tyra’s MagaLine.

Employee: “Working With Tyra Was Extremely Brutal”

Tyra to end talk show

The huge amounts of retouching that happen in ads and magazines these days has always been under huge scrutiny and how people are trying to actually get regulations and bans of how much retouching can be done. The main concern is young women who are getting floods unrealistic images of how they are expected to look.

Are these Beyonce’s hips???

Jo Swinson is the leader on the topic and here’s what the Daily Mail had to say:

The frontbencher is calling for a ban on all altered or enhanced publicity material aimed at the under-16s and wants new rules insisting advertisements aimed at adults disclose the level of airbrushing used.

Jo Swinson said: ‘Today’s unrealistic idea of what is beautiful means that young girls are under more pressure now than they were even five years ago. Airbrushing means that adverts contain completely unattainable perfect images no one can live up to in real life.

‘We need to help protect children from these pressures and we need to make a start by banning airbrushing in adverts aimed at them.’

Click here for the rest of the article.

Do you think there should be a ban on retouching in ads marketed towards teenage girls?

Click here for stories of skin lightening celebs in cosmetics ads

Daytime talk-show host, Tyra Banks will devote her entire show to discuss the topic of teen dating abuse tomorrow, the same day she appears on Oprah’s talk show dedicated to domestic violence. Tyra will reveal that she was the victim of “emotional abuse” in a relationship.

Click here to find out how to break free from domestic violence.

Here’s an excerpt from Tyra’s show:

Tyra says: “I dated a guy once years ago and he told me that he has this thing where he likes to break a woman down and then that makes him feel more in control. …. When I was in my emotionally abusive relationship … I’ll never forget I woke up in this hotel room in New York City and I just called him and I said, ‘I’m done.’ And I heard in his voice that he knew it was true and he just felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s telling the truth this time.’ And when you’re done you know you’re done.”

Read about another celebrity who was in an abusive relationship here.

Unsurprising news alert! A new study shows that listening to songs with sexual lyrics can lead to higher and more risky sexual behavior among teenagers. Says the Canadian Press,

High exposure to lyrics that describe degrading sex is associated with high levels of sexual behaviour in teens, a new study suggests.

The research, published Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, was conducted in three large urban high schools in the Pittsburgh area, and involved asking Grade 9 students about the number of hours a day they listen to music and their favourite musical artists.

“Music exposure is growing … there is now unprecedented access to music and it’s also becoming more direct, more explicit,” said co-author Dr. Brian Primack of the Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

“Adolescents are exposed to six to eight hours of mass media messages per day, and since it is such an important exposure, we need to know if this is affecting health.”

He noted, for example, that data have shown that up to 25 per cent of American teenage girls have sexually transmitted diseases.

STDs are particularly problematic in poor communities, Primack said, and that was a reason for focusing on three urban high schools where about half the kids take part in a lunch program – indicating they fall below a certain income level.

“We divided the cohort into three … those who were exposed to the lowest amount (of music with degrading references), those who were exposed to sort of the medium amount, those who were exposed to the most,” he said.

“And those who were exposed to the most were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse, and that’s even controlling for all of the other factors that we looked at that we thought might be related to uptake of sexual intercourse.”

Do you limit the kind of music your children listen to? Do you want to start? Send us a comment and let us know.

According to a recent medical study, teens whose mothers drank while pregnant may find the smell of alcohol more appealing than their peers do.

[From Telegraph]

Researchers found that teenagers found the smell of alcohol more appealing if their mothers had drunk while they were in the womb.

This attraction could increase their chances of suffering a drink problem in later life, researchers believe.

The study, carried out in pregnant rats, showed that by the time offspring hit adolescence they responded more strongly to the smell of alcohol on others if they had been exposed to it before they were born.

Steven Youngentob, from the State University of New York, who led the study, said: “These results highlight an important relationship between fetal and adolescent experiences that appears essential to the progressive development of alcohol abuse.”

His team believe that being exposed to alcohol in the womb trains the brain to make the smell of a tipple more appealing.

This happens to all mammals, including humans, they believe, because it is evolutionary important for a child to like foods eaten by its parents.

By contrast, rats whose mothers were not given alcohol while pregnant were not as attracted to the smell.

The study, published in the journal Behavioural and Brain Functions, also found that the teenage years were when attraction to the aroma of alcohol appeared to heighten.

The researchers believe this is crucial, as adolescence is a key time in which early patterns of behaviour which can lead to alcohol addiction can begin.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

[From Associated Press]

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) — Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s, the U.N. said Thursday, focusing its annual children’s survey on the health of their mothers.

Every year, 70,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19 die in childbirth or from pregnancy complications, UNICEF director Ann Veneman said at the launch of the organization’s annual report.

“This is not only a tragic personal loss for the family; it also leaves a long-term impact on the health and well-being of children and the development of communities and countries,” Veneman said.

The 160-page survey paints a bleak picture of the risks of teenage pregnancies, which are prevalent in the developing world.

“The State of the World’s Children 2009″ says that the younger a girl is when she becomes pregnant, the greater the health risks for her and her infant.

Worldwide, more than 60 million women who are currently aged 20-24 were married before they were 18, with the most child marriages being in South Asia and in Africa.

If a mother is under the age of 18, her infant’s risk of dying in its first year of life is 60 percent greater than that of an infant born to a mother older than 19.

In addition, the report says adolescent wives are susceptible to violence, abuse and exploitation. Young brides are often forced to drop out of school, have few work opportunities and little chance to influence their own lives.

“If young girls are not in school, they are more vulnerable,” South African Health Minister Barbara Hogan said at the launch. “It’s not just a health issue; it is about the status of young women and girls.”

To read the rest of the article, click here.

[from CNN Health]

As many as one in eight teens in the United States may take a virginity pledge at some point, vowing to wait until they’re married before having sex. But do such pledges work? Are pledge takers more likely than other teens to delay sexual activity?

A new study suggests that the answer is no. While teens who take virginity pledges do delay sexual activity until an average age of 21 (compared to about age 17 for the average American teen), the reason for the delay is more likely due to pledge takers’ religious background and conservative views — not the pledge itself.

According to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, pledge takers are as likely to have sex before marriage as other teens who are also religious, but don’t take the pledge. However, pledge takers are less likely than other religious or conservative teens to use condoms or birth control when they do start having sex.

In the new study, Janet Rosenbaum, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, analyzed the large chunk of data used in all the studies that have looked at virginity pledges: the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. In this survey, middle and high school students were asked about their sexual behaviors and opinions starting in 1995-96.

In the analysis, Rosenbaum compared 289 young adults who took virginity pledges in their teens with 645 young people who did not take such a pledge. The researcher was careful to only compare teens who had similar views on religion, birth control and sex in general, regardless of whether or not they took a pledge.

Five years after the initial survey the study subjects were aged 20 to 23. Eighty-two percent of pledge takers denied (or forgot) they had ever taken such a vow. Overall pledge takers were no different from non-pledge takers in terms of their premarital sex, anal and oral sexual practices, and their probability of having a sexually transmitted disease.

Both groups lost their virginity at an average age of 21, had about three lifetime partners, and had similar rates of STDs. “And the majority were having premarital sex, over 50 percent,” says Rosenbaum. Overall, roughly 75 percent of pledgers and non-pledgers were sexually active, and about one in five was married.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Do you think virginity pledges make sense? Have you made one yourself? Let us know!

A suggestive picture, a flirty message, what are teens really saying when they send a text?

It’s known to teens as sexting, and though it doesn’t always lead to a physical act, statistics show it’s quite prevalent among teens today.  Read here for more.