Monet Stubbs doesn't hesitate to talk frankly about sex with her teenage brothers.

"I'll say, ‘wrap your willy and don't be silly,' and we'll laugh about it," she says. "I'll tell them, ‘I'm way too young to be anybody's auntie.'"

The 17-year-old student at School Without Walls says she is planning to go to college because she wants to pursue a career in health care. And joining the ranks of Rochester's teen parent population would interrupt those plans, she says.

After a long decline, the number of teen mothers in Rochester is on the rise. State and county public health data shows that 19 percent of the city's births in 2007 were to teen mothers.

The personal and financial costs are staggering. Monroe County spent $1,880,650 in September 2008 for family assistance as a result of births to teen mothers. The cost of food stamps for teen mothers in Monroe County is about $100,000 monthly.

The recent increase reflects a national trend, and is especially alarming considering the city's high level of childhood poverty in Rochester. More than 70 percent of the county's nearly 3,000 teen mothers live in the city. And many of those teen mothers have more than one child.

"We wanted to know - why here?" says Sheila Driscoll, director of Metro Council, a coalition of 35 local organizations working to prevent teen pregnancy. "What makes this problem so difficult?"

There are no simple answers to those questions, Driscoll says. "We are not talking to young people enough about healthy sexuality," she says. "And we don't do enough to show them that there are pathways to a more successful future. When you survey a 17-year-old girl about her goals and she says, ‘getting her driver's license,' that really tells you something."

Driscoll's staff met with five groups of city teens last March to gauge what young people like Monet Stubbs think about sex, and what advice they might have for preventing their friends from becoming teen parents.

"Teens are definitely living in a time when society is more accepting of casual sex, which makes it a lot more difficult to reach them with prevention-type messages," Driscoll says. "And a lot of kids are not using contraceptives consistently. That's partly because they think it's okay to have sex, and it's okay to be pregnant. There's not as much stigma associated with being a pregnant teen like there was years ago."

Many young girls believe that their boyfriends will leave them if they don't agree to have sex, Driscoll says. And they fear being alone; not having a boyfriend means not fitting in.

"A lot of it has to do with pressure," says Stubbs, who participated in one of Driscoll's groups. "If she's a young girl who has low self-esteem, anyone can get into her head."

Driscoll's staff found that Rochester's teen girls rarely visit a doctor or a clinic before they have sex. The girls tend to have sex first, Driscoll says, and then visit a doctor to determine if they are pregnant.

Even though teens may be sexually active, they often don't understand how their bodies function, says Shelby Williams, a classmate of Stubbs at School Without Walls.

"Boys will try to convince you that you can have sex without really doing it," says Williams, 17, who also participated in one of the youth groups. "They always think they can pull out in time. That's what they try to tell you."

Stubbs and Williams have friends and family members who are teen parents. And they've watched these parents put their plans on hold and struggle to get by. Williams' relationship with one of her best friends changed dramatically, for instance, after the friend had a baby.

"If some of us want to get together with her to go to the movies or something, she'll have to find a babysitter," Williams says. "And either she can't find one quickly or she needs the money for food and diapers."

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy out of Washington, DC, publishes "What Works," an annual report that looks at the most successful pregnancy-prevention programs across the country. Those tend to be sex-education programs targeted to reach specific demographics - particularly teens from minority groups.

The teens in Metro Council's youth groups says that more needs to be done to reduce teen pregnancy. Despite how controversial sex education can be, more is needed in schools to promote safe sex. And, they say, teens need to have easier access to free condoms and birth control.

"I'm amazed that people are always surprised by this," Driscoll says. "I think free condoms were much more available than they are today. We can't expect inner-city teens coming from poor families to walk into Wegmans and spend $5 or $6 on condoms when they don't have it."