Teen Pregnancy Rates

[ct3012]

The part of the question that shocked me was more to do with the aspect which was roughly worded as being "when they can easily avoid it in the first place", which just reeks of contempt of the irresponsible-youth-of-today. Had the questioner been less harsh in his wording, and not made it sound as though it's only girls between the ages of 12 and 17 that get pregnant and sponge off the country I wouldn't have been as shocked. It was almost as like the man couldn't say anything against single mothers who are on benefits, because they are only doing their best and clearly couldn't avoid getting pregnant, so instead he decided to set upon the people who perhaps are too naive to realise what they're doing will have serious consequences.

It's not that I'm a raging liberal-socialist who thinks that the teenage pregnancies are a product of the society we live in, ergo, the girls can't be faulted and must be supported, but I don't like when people go into a subject with a totally unbalanced view and clearly have splinters up their arse about their taxes. To deny one group of people benefits because they should have known better would open a floodgate for people wanting to take away benefits from people who have made mistakes in the past. We all know that contraception isn't always totally effective, and let's not forget one of the mindsets from when you're young that "it'll never happen to me". So yes it is their own fault, but these girls are extremely vulnerable and need all the support - financially and emotionally - they can get to help them make the most of the situation they've been given to give them the chance to provide for their child.

As for the Purity Ring thing, I just think it's an irresponsible and a head-in-the-sand stance to take on underage/pre-marital sex, that is just an easy way out for the parents so they can carry on thinking that their child is perfect and will always do what they say. If someone wants to do something, it's going to take a lot more than some scare-mongering and a cheap silver ring on their left hand to stop them from doing it.

For the record, I don't think that Teenage Pregnancy is just a stupid little problem that will work itself out. Coming from what could be described as a reasonably "deprived" area, I have known 4 girls from my year to get pregnant during secondary school, and there are currently 6 girls in my 17 year old sister's year who are either pregnant or have had a baby, and I think a lot of it comes down to the parenting these girls and the fathers of their unfortunate children had.

[LonelyPilgrim]

If you step back a bit and consider the demographic decline in all of Western Europe, the UK included, teenage pregnancy doesn't seem such a bad thing. Just to throw out some controversy...

[munchingfoo]

The problem isn't that 13 year olds are getting pregnant LP. The problem is, that a child is going to be raised by a child. This older child was brought up in a bad way and ended up having unprotected sex at 13. What chance does the younger child have to become a responsible member of society when it is raised by a mother who wasn't taught how to be a responsible member of society herself?

[Frank]

The problem is, that a child is going to be raised by a child.

I do wonder about this. In an 'age' of quite widely distributed knowledge, it strikes me as an amateur (as much as any living person is) in the field of sociology, I wonder whether the affect of the parent will be steadily reduced. That is: Schools are pretty decent and could be worse, the state's reasonably interfering, TV and the internet holds a significant sway over our development and our communal/developmental networks can be spread quite widely.

I wonder if the inner-city estate single-teenage-mum badly raising a child stereotype might be meeting its end. There's a bucketload of support nets out there (much more diversely than in the past [i.e. grandparents/siblings/neighbours])...

I'm almost inclined to tentatively step into line beside LP here and suggest that teenage pregnancy isn't as bad as it seems.

[munchingfoo]

The only person who has the potential for proper disciplinary control over a child below the age of criminal responsibility, with current UK laws, is the parent. A bad parent at that early age will produce an undisciplined child, a child that believes it does not need to follow rules because there is nothing to back the rules up with.

Have you taken a look at the little bastards out there recently? If that is the inevitable, then I'd rather get out of this sinking ship!

[Frank]

The only person who has the potential for proper disciplinary control over a child below the age of criminal responsibility is the parent. A bad parent at that early age will produce an undisciplined child, a child that believes it does not need to follow rules because there is nothing to back the rules up with.

Evidence, goos sir. I don't want common, pigeon or old wive's tale psychology and wisdom. I want cold, hard, unrelenting facts on what's actually an effective way to raise children.



On a more serious note: My point is that 'proper disciplinary control' is seemingly not the only factor which is relevent to a child being a prat or not. Many awful kids come from 'good parents' and many good kids come from awful parents. I'm not sure anecdotes or idle observation are helpful or telling (or accurate).

Have you taken a look at the little bastards out there recently?

The plural of 'anecdotes' is not 'evidence'!

Genuinely, though, I do think there's merit in the role of unprepared parents having an increasingly lower influence on a child's final output. I've little to support this, but I think it'd be fascinating to investigate...

[Thalia]

This paper looks at the teenage children of teenage mothers in Australia and doesn't find any negative effects that couldn't be explained by socioeconomic background, maternal depression or family structure: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_o ... 1b63c8d34e
This basically means that while children of teenage mothers are more likely to have adverse outcomes, this is a result of the background that most likely resulted in the teenage pregnancy, rather than the teenage pregnancy itself. The authors even state at the end that this is merely an increased risk - 86.1% of their sample of children with teenage mothers were not delinquent.

What I find more worrying is this paragraph that I found on wikipedia:
"A review of California's 1990 vital statistics found that men older than high school age fathered 77 percent of all births to high school-aged girls (ages 16-18), and 51 percent of births to junior high school-aged girls (15 and younger). Men over age 25 fathered twice as many children of teenage mothers than boys under age 18, and men over age 20 fathered five times as many children of junior high school-aged girls as did junior high school-aged boys. A 1992 Washington state study of 535 adolescent mothers found that 62 percent of the mothers had a history of being raped or sexual molested by men whose ages averaged 27 years. This study found that, compared with nonabused mothers, abused adolescent mothers initiated sex earlier, had sex with much older partners, and engaged in riskier, more frequent, and promiscuous sex. Studies by the Population Reference Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics found that about two-thirds of children born to teenage girls in the United States are fathered by adult men age 20 or older."

[David Bean]

That does not sound very charitable. Surely the lack of a sex life at 14 should be commended, it addresses directly the cause of the problem that everyone in society acknowledges needs to be solved.

She wasn't 14, the previous commentator was exaggerating. It's hard to be precise but she was certainly over 16, else I should have thought Dimbleby would have been fired for even asking the question.

My question to you David would be what do you think the most crucial function of a government is? I personally believe its most fundamental role is to protect its citizens. New born children are its citizens, are they not worth protecting? The issue of Israel's incursion into Gaza to stop the rockets being fired into its territory from Gaza, is grounded on the same principle: that the most fundamental duty of the state is to protect its citizens. If it fails in that regard then it has lost its reason for being.

Of course, and I never said that I shared the viewpoint I was highlighting - I was just puzzled as to why the poster thought it was such an odd thing to be questioning. Nevertheless, there are other options. In the past it used to be that any girl who became pregnant had only her family to rely on or support, resulting in grave financial consequences and a very strong incentive to avoid getting pregnant at all costs; for all the lack of state-sponsored sex education in those days, teenage pregnancy rates were significantly lower for exactly that reason. Nowadays, for many people those consequences simply don't exist, and in some cases pregnancy might even be a ticket out of a worse situation, giving priority access to social housing and significantly improved state benefits. So it isn't just that young single mothers are irresponsible, it's that the system has led to a situation where becomming a teenage single mother may actually be a rational choice to make.

My point is that if you believe that your money could be better spent than on enforced charity towards people for whom you feel no particular kinship and whose situation is to some degree self-induced, and not only don't you think that your money being spent in that way is helping with the real problem but that it may in fact be making it significantly worse, why on earth wouldn't you want to question quite strenuously why, exactly, you were being forced to pay regardless of your views on the matter?

[Senethro]

That does not sound very charitable. Surely the lack of a sex life at 14 should be commended, it addresses directly the cause of the problem that everyone in society acknowledges needs to be solved.

She wasn't 14, the previous commentator was exaggerating. It's hard to be precise but she was certainly over 16, else I should have thought Dimbleby would have been fired for even asking the question.

Why? Does the reality of children having sex make you squeamish to the point where you can't think about the issues here?

[macgamer]

That does not sound very charitable. Surely the lack of a sex life at 14 should be commended, it addresses directly the cause of the problem that everyone in society acknowledges needs to be solved.

She wasn't 14, the previous commentator was exaggerating. It's hard to be precise but she was certainly over 16, else I should have thought Dimbleby would have been fired for even asking the question.

Why? Does the reality of children having sex make you squeamish to the point where you can't think about the issues here?

It is not a mental imagine that I want to entertain and I'm sure that would go for the majority of society. It is instead pity for their unnecessarily precocious loss of childhood and concern for their wellbeing generally.

Since this is a discussion about teenage pregnancy, the comment was an expression of my views and an attempt to advance the idea that the fewer children having sex the lower the rates of pregnancy and STIs rates will be. A view borne out (no pun intended) of a concern for their welfare.

However perhaps I'm just being squeamish.

[LonelyPilgrim]

It is not a mental imagine that I want to entertain and I'm sure that would go for the majority of society. It is instead pity for their unnecessarily precocious loss of childhood and concern for their wellbeing generally.

Could we please do without the antiquated Victorian notion of childhood on a pedestal? Children being irresponsible is as much to do with society telling them they don't have to be responsible because they are children as it does with bad parenting.

[macgamer]

Children being irresponsible is as much to do with society telling them they don't have to be responsible because they are children as it does with bad parenting.

I raised this issue earlier:

Perhaps society needs to re-evaluate its defence of that most sacred of 1960's principle's - free love or sex without consequences, because clearly society is finding it difficult to cope with those consequences.

[David Bean]

We do seem to be straying rather off-topic here. Sen, was your post a response to me, or to macgamer? I'm pretty sure it couldn't have been me, given that my point was that the girl was over 16 anyway, so the question did not arise.

But I do agree with LonelyPilgrim that childhood, at least as far as it would appear to have been constructed nowadays as a result of the Victorian era, is pretty much bunk. I'm particularly peeved any time anyone ascribes to children this bizarre notion of 'innocence'; children are much like adults, in that whilst many of them are kind, well-meaning and loving, many others are vicious, vindictive little brats. It's not clear to me how a sane person could either fail to realise this or, having realised it, still cling on to that ridiculous idea.

[mhuzzell]

This relates to pretty far upthread, but... don't Purity Rings statistically enhance one's chance of becoming teen-pregnant?

Though, those stats there are from the US, where the movement started. It's therefore presumably been mostly practiced by those who had the misfortune of Abstinence-only Sex "Education" -- which in itself raises the risk of pregnancy when the poor naive kiddies fall off the abstinence wagon (or slip and fall into each other's genitals).

[macgamer]

[...]children are much like adults, in that whilst many of them are kind, well-meaning and loving, many others are vicious, vindictive little brats. It's not clear to me how a sane person could either fail to realise this or, having realised it, still cling on to that ridiculous idea.

Children do undergo emotional development, which makes it more appropriate for sex wait until adulthood when they are more likely to engage in it with a greater degree of responsibility, which they currently lack.

[WashingtonIrving]

The plural of 'anecdotes' is not 'evidence'!

Frank this is probably the best thing you have ever said. I think you need to take this slogan to the masses. But why is it anecdotes instead of anecdote?