I was excited when Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution approached me to develop a "family planning" module for low-income couples participating in healthy relationship and marriage education programs. After all, my first job out of social work school was with Planned Parenthood, I have a specialty in sexuality education, and I've spent the last 20 years or so developing programs to support low-income parents and families. It was a perfect assignment for me, bringing together several of my professional worlds.

Okay, I was excited, but I also knew it wasn't going to be easy. The rates of unplanned pregnancy are so very high among unmarried, low-income, African American couples -- the focus of this module -- and the reasons for these high rates are complicated. It helped when our advisory committee decided that the module alone could not be expected to change behaviors and that participating couples would need case management support to reach their goals related to pregnancy planning.

As we noted here earlier in the month, February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Month. For anyone who's interested in this topic (and anyone who's interested in teen and unplanned pregnancy prevention probably should be), I wanted to draw your attention to some content on the subject on our sister sites, stayteen.org and sexreally.com.

StayTeen's dating violence section has facts about dating violence, a quiz, and tips for what to do if you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship. Additionally, Youth Leadership Team member Maritza has a new post in StayTeen's Stay Out Loud section called "No Excuse For Abuse," in which she discusses the high profile case of dating violence perpetrated by pop singer Chris Brown against fellow singer and then girlfriend Rihanna and how it relates to young people who aren't famous but who may be dealing with similar issues.

Bristol Palin, "arguably the most famous teen mother in America" (according to ABC), will make her acting debut on ABC Family's Secret Life of the American Teenager next season. She'll be playing herself - a teen mom - who meets the show's lead character, Amy Juergens, at a music program for teen moms. (Amy got pregnant during a one night encounter at band camp two summers ago). There is going to be a lot of snark about this - a) because the show is made for young teens (not snarky grownups) and can be a bit over the top when it comes to sex talk, b) because Bristol and her family have asked for privacy and being on TV isn't very private, and c) because Bristol is now an advocate for abstinence. In fact, the mean grrls at Jezebel are already on the case. As a mean girl (and Jez fan) myself, I expected nothing less.

But instead of being mean about it I'd like to applaud ABC Family for putting this show on the air in the first place, sticking with this storyline beyond Amy's first-season pregnancy, showing a glimpse of what teen parenthood might be like for an upper middle class girl in the leafy green suburbs of TV land, exploring in its own Secret-Life way how a single teen pregnancy affects not just the girl (and guy), but also their families, their friends, their worldviews and their futures, and for incorporating stories about sex that include gossip, regret, condoms, masturbation, waiting, and even helpful parental advice. The viewers love it.

With Tiger Woods' recent mea culpa, it's easy to feel rather cynical and pessimistic about this institution we call marriage. Results in the just-released State of Our Unions report also give us reason to wonder whether marriage is on its way out, with the percentage of kids born outside of marriage rising from 18% to 40% just since 1980 and the number of kids whose parents are "just living together" rising from just under half a million to over 2.5 million during that same period. But this report also tells us not to count marriage out just yet--not only because marriage is still the most beneficial environment for families (that's old news), but because the upcoming generation is counting on it. For high school seniors, 71% of boys and 82% of girls said "having a good marriage and family life is extremely important" to them.

In data collected by The National Campaign, 47% of 18 to 24 year olds say they expect to marry and have a baby with their current partner. Here's the problem. They don't know how to get there. While most high school seniors are telling us how important a good marriage is to them, over half also said "Having a child without being married is experimenting with a worthwhile lifestyle or not affecting anyone else." (What?) And, of those 18 to 24 year olds who expect to walk down the aisle and then have a baby, we know a lot of them will have the baby first, and then never walk down the aisle. This doesn't mean we should give up on marriage. Quite the opposite--it means we need to talk to teens and young adults in a way that says--yeah, we get that you want love, and marriage, and the baby carriage...someday--let's talk about how (and when) to get there.

Just as we instruct young people to wash their hands to avoid the flu, we can help more teens avoid dating violence by teaching them to get smart about their love lives.

We can all agree that young people need to learn how to spot and improve unhealthy relationships and to extract themselves from dangerous ones. We have, however, overlooked a huge opportunity for reducing dating violence even further. We must change the focus to primary prevention...avoiding dating violence before it begins.

Think about this. What if we taught teens, as early as middle school and certainly in high school, what a healthy romantic relationship looks like? How to really get to know someone, not only by spending time with them but also by observing their behavior with others? What the foundational ingredients of good relationships are? How to develop high standards for how they want to be treated by a romantic partner (and how to treat others with that same level of respect and empathy)? What if they learned more about what real intimacy is and how it develops, and about the benefits of pacing their relationship involvement more slowly? Finally, how to break up respectfully?

What would that world look like? I think it would look like a world with less dating violence.

And I'm not just dreaming. Multiple evaluations of The Dibble Institute's relationship skills programs indicate that when young people learn these life skills, their incidence of dating violence decreases, as does their aggression (both verbal and physical) toward their peers.

To avoid the flu, we get vaccinated and we sneeze into our elbows. To avoid dating violence, we can start teaching young people not only what to say "no" to, but, more importantly, what to say "yes" to. We can teach them the skills they need for healthy romantic relationships, now and in the future.

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Kay Reed is Executive Director of The Dibble Institute for Marriage Education, an organization dedicated to helping young people learn the skills necessary for successful relationships and marriages. This piece was written in observation of Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Month, which began today, February 1.