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Teen Pregnancy, Hollywood Style
"It seems like we keep removing taboos related to sex, and this year it was pregnancy," says Nancy Brown, who teaches a course on adolescent health and sexuality at Stanford University and writes a blog on the same subject. "And I hope next year it's sexually transmitted infections. Because that's something we still don't talk about." She gets frustrated when she watches movies pass up perfectly good opportunities to add a line or two about contraceptives or STDs. Like when Juno's dad, after he learns that his daughter is pregnant, tells her, "I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when." Brown suggests, "What would be a lot better there is, 'I wish I had talked to you about birth control when you were 12,' or 'I thought I raised you to use a condom'."
Condoms aren't the only things that teens and adolescent-health experts see missing from the plot. There's that third C that Jane Brown mentioned: consequences. While Juno and Jamie Lynn are celebrated as heroines, the teen moms NEWSWEEK spoke with recount a different reaction from their communities--being stigmatized and ostracized, one to the point where she dropped out of high school. "I guess I was too scared to be pregnant and in high school, it didn't really seem OK," says one teen, who ended up leaving her Atlanta-area private school.
Meghan Mellecker, a 15-year-old from outside Iowa City, had the support of her parents but trouble with her small town of 700. "There were a lot of people who looked down on it," she says. Her mom, Melody Hobert-Mellecker, says she quit a job at the family's church under pressure from congregants. "I had people calling the bishop's office asking how I could be a moral leader when I couldn't even be a good moral mother," she recalls. Ever since Meghan's daughter, Sophie, was born, Hobert-Mellecker says things have improved. But she watches as her daughter struggles with balancing being a parent and being a teen. "One thing that I see this summer, which is her first with Sophie, is how different it is from her friends," says Hobert-Mellecker. "They sleep in, hang out, stay up late. Meghan gets out of bed early every morning and it's hard for her to say to her friends, 'I can't hang out with you'."
Balancing parenting and work is hard enough for moms in their 30s; it's near impossible for 19-year-old Candi Johnson. She wants to go back to school (she dropped out of a GED program two months into her pregnancy) and wants to get a job, but is also responsible for her 18-month-old son, Shymir. Like the majority of teen moms, the father isn't in the picture, so she largely relies on her mother and grandmother for financial support. "Pampers cost $20, a little bottle of milk is $7," says Johnson, who lives in Queens, N.Y. "I want to be the best mom that I can, but it's hard, because I don't have the money or the education to give him everything that he wants." She doesn't see the financial strains or work-parenting balance mentioned at all in OK! Magazine. "She has all that money, she can pay for nannies, she can give her baby whatever she wants. It's so fake," says Johnson. "For me, its fun but hard. It's the best thing in the world but at the same time it's the worst thing in the world."
Amidst all the teen pregnancy media, researchers do see some encouraging signs. NBC's "Baby Borrowers" (slogan: "It's not TV, it's birth control"), gives real teens a taste of parenting; it attracted nearly 8 million viewers to its debut, about three times the viewership of "Secret Life." And while the storyline on TV may be incomplete, it does give parents a starting point to open their own discussion (47 percent of teens say their parents are the most influential in their decisions about sex, according to the National Campaign Study.) Jane Brown, at the Teen Media Project, remembers striking up a conversation with her 17-year-old daughter as they walked out of "Juno." "She thought, 'Isn't that romantic, she's left with the boyfriend, adoption looks easy'," Brown says. "We talked about how adoption can be a traumatic event, the fact that there was no contraception and why not, and that it's rare for the guys to actually stay." Brown just hopes she's not the only one talking.
© 2008
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Member Comments
Posted By: Krohn @ 11/02/2008 11:00:35 PM
Comment: The Wall Street crisis was planned the night of Obama's meeting at Bill Ayres home to put Obama in The White House. Together they put a beautiful plan into place.
This Strategy was first elucidated in the 1966 issue of 'The Nation' Magazine by a pair of radical Socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.
David Horowitz summarizes it as:
"The strategy of forcing political change through an orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of Capitalism by overloading the Government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
unquote
Obama begin with ACORN by funneling millions into their organization. He then trained ACORN to stage protests in banks to force them to issue risky loans or they would be threatened to face racial charges. ACORN was trained to intimidate financial institutions into giving ???Ninja??? loans to people with NO assets, NO job and NO income, who couldn???t afford these loans.
That caused the housing bubble two years ago it was by ACORN's actions they were able to destroy our credit system.
As this played out, D-Barney Frank and D-Chris Dodd were able to cover up the millions of improvident loans to these bad risky house buyers. And Barney Frank and his chums successfully were able to block all of President Bush's attempts to put a rein on this problem.
So Fannie & Freddie was forced to purchase all these failed subprime mortgages.
Then both Frank and Dodd denied that there were any problems, and refused the Bush Admin. requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and they were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the 'minute they failed'.
Democrats then blamed Bush saying it happened on his watch knowing it would hurt the Republican Party in the election setting it up that Barack Obama could use this to his advantage.
Karl Marx once compared a Revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface.
Barack Obama is that Marxist mole !
Posted By: kjspanos @ 10/02/2008 11:14:42 AM
Comment: Movies and television share the commonality of including at least a section of 'teen pregnancy' in their scripts, but are they addressing the issue in the right way? I think not. When good ole??? ???June-Bug??? told her father and step mother about her pregnancy, the only thing they could say was "I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.??? If there is something missing in the staging of these reactions, it???s definitely reactions. Parents aren???t going to be as calm and cool with their baby, having a baby! They never wanted to see anything like this happen to their own child, and yet, in these movies and T.V. shows, these parents can???t seem to lay any sort of derogatory mark on the table. Maybe the reason why so many teen girls find themselves pregnant every year is because they aren???t actually showing the consequences that are the parents??? reaction or when the mothers choose to keep and raise that baby. Hollywood has turned not only pregnancy into a glamorous fashion statement, but teen pregnancy into alluring state of being. Teen pregnancy will continue to be glamorized as long as the media makes it so.
Posted By: cherbear @ 08/12/2008 5:12:16 AM
Comment: I had a very interesting conversation with a teen the other day. She told me that she was reading some of the various comments with regard to teens having babies. This 15 year old told me that she is very angry about the terrible comments aimed at teen parents, especially teenage moms. When I questioned her on why she felt angry with this topic, she exclaimed that it was, "none of an adult's business to police a teen's body when it comes to sex and babies because they are all just jealous of how teens can make babies faster and easier than old folks; let them all shut up and let us run our own bodies because we are smart people and in charge and more richer and mature these days!" Upon quizzing this little upstart on why she feels so empowered and opinionated on an ADULT decision to have kids, she replied that her 17 year old sister has twins(a girl and a boy) who complete the 17 year old's life and therefore she must follow the same path. I pushed harder for details, getting only her mushy and dewy account of her version on parenthood. When I reminded her of how expensive and important such a responsibility is in parenthood, she shot back with, "That's why we have the government, stupid! They are there to pay for everyone even if they are teens or illegals. That's why my parents and grandparents pay taxes and why my sister can have kids now and finish school if she chooses to later on ! Family first, school and all that jazz later. She's gonna be cool and neat just like Jamie Lynn Spears!" Aha! No wonder such resistance! There is her great example and idol! It's right out of the mouth's of babes. Of course, not all teens or kids will feel this way, but look at the ones who do. It's bad enough that kids/teens are underdeveloped in brain capacity via nature/biology. Now we may have somone such as Jamie Lynn as a fill-in for parents who don't educate and caution their children on sex before kids are 18 and over or married. This kid was wrong in seemingly every angle of her arguement and conclusions and also used a richer-than-most teen diva Jamie Lynn as an example of real life in her "world" (along with her older sister with the twins). Government exists for this? I'm stupid? Sorry baby girl lost. You probably have parents who could care less about your future or your sister's present path in life(perhaps like Britney and Jamie Lynn"s parents). I'm proud to say that at age 40, I was taught better than those how seem to have less morals, standards, and values. It's still safe to say that well, ...........some people are just too dumb to know how dumb they are!