Pregnant Teens

This article talks about a possible pact made by highschool students to get pregnant and then raise their children together. You might be asking yourself what this has to do with education. Well…they went to school together and some are saying the lack of sex education is to blame and not the reported pact. I say it is probably a mixture of the two along with a few other factors. I know for a fact in the schools I’ve taught in (high school and middle school) that there were many young girls who were participating in sexual activities. It was thought to be the cool thing to do and few of them seemed to have any concern for consequences. How do I know this? You can rest assured that I never asked and would have been much happier not knowing. However, kids seem to think that an adult does not exist if they aren’t looking or talking. I could stand in the hallway and hear all kinds of insane details about lives I’d rather no nothing about. When I was a new teacher I’d march the kids to a guidance counselor or contact a parent but that was frowned upon as interfering and I soon learned to stop. Parents don’t want to know and school officials don’t want to upset the parents. To my knowledge none of the dozen times I tried to intervene in my first year of teaching had any positive affect. Sad but true. The other way I or you or anyone else in the world can easily find out about the lives of kids is to go to myspace. Crazy the things the kids will put out there.

What is my point? My point is pregnant teens are pregnant because there is no reason for them not to be. Their parents aren’t talking to them, schools don’t talk to them, and there really aren’t any repercussions for becoming pregnant without any way to support themselves. What can we do about this? I don’t know. Part of me thinks we should force sex education into the schools and the other part thinks that is a parents’ job. Then there is the issue of repercussions. I know there are schools that now offer day care so students with children can take their child to class with them…I think that is making it too easy. But….don’t I want all of our children to be educated. The only solutions I’ve come up with are too radical to be plausible. How do you think we can decrease the instances of pregnant teens?