Are you under the impression that the average pregnant teenager never hears anything but acceptance and excitement from everyone around her? I’m pretty sure most of them hear about the difficulties of parenthood many, many times over. Despite your apparent experiences, teen pregnancy is not particularly widely celebrated - most people tend to think it is a fairly negative outcome.
You’re saying all this as though you could walk up to the average pregnant teen and say “you know, this is going to be hard work and it will really change your life” and they’ll say “OMG, really? I never thought of that! The scales have fallen from my eyes!”. Most people aren’t this stupid - they already know these things.
Fair enough, but they should be no more berated than they would be if they broke a leg either. If you knew someone who broke their leg in a car accident that was their fault, would you call them up every day and remind them that it was all their fault and if they weren’t so dumb they wouldn’t be in this state? Or would you bring them flowers and act encouraging when they told you they were getting better? There is a hell of a lot of middle ground between congratulating and castigating someone, and I suspect that you are interpreting anything in short of outright denigration as congratulatory behaviour. Most people already know when they’ve screwed up. They don’t need you telling them over and over, especially if you don’t know them that well.
Again, you are probably misinterpreting supportive behaviour as excitement. Throwing a shower or announcing a birth are not synonymous with ‘congratulating’ or ‘celebrating’ the unexpected nature of the pregnancy, they’re just what you might do after you’ve accepted what is happening. They’re the kind of things a parent would do after the many long heart-to-hearts and agonizing decisions are over between them and their pregnant teen. I know it’s hard to believe, but many parents still love their kids and want to help them, even if they screw up.
Throwing a party is definitely celebrating. While the parents may still love their kids and want to help, the best help in cases like teen pregnancy is a tough love forcing the teenager to acknowledge cold, hard reality.
Even people in tough circumstances deserve some joy. Harsh reality doesn’t have to be a 24/7 proposition. The baby doesn’t have to be born into resentment and gloom. An afternoon celebrating the new life can also send the message that joy can be had if she does this right- becomes a good parent, meets her responsibilities etc, her life can be good.
Throwing a baby shower is celebrating the arrival of the baby, not the experience of getting knocked up. After discussion has occurred and the woman has decided to keep the baby, there’s no reason to keep punishing her and the kid. By your standard having a birthday party for the kid after its born would also be verboten since it celebrates teen pregnancy.
Tell me, once a parent has sat down with their teenage daughter and talked about all the options and talked about the difficulties of motherhood, if the daughter still chooses to keep the baby what should the mother do? Disown her kid? Berate and shame her? For how long? Forever?
Both you and **curlcoat **keep talking about having these talks and encouraging information, but it seems to me that you just want to decree that the person involved must abort. What happens when they make a reasoned, informed decision to keep the baby? Or is that not an acceptable outcome in your ‘pro-choice’ mindset?
I am well aware of that. One of the problems with some people here is that they seem to feel that everyone can completely hide their true feelings at all times.
That doesn’t appear to be the same thing as ending up having to raise a child one had no say in creating or keeping.
Obviously. Believe it or not, not every grandparent is thrilled to be presented with another baby to raise at a time in their life when they should be getting ready to retire and quit working. I find it amazing that parents are expected to be responsible for and make decisions for their children in every other way except when it comes to whether or not their minor child gets to make the decision to keep a baby.
A “bit”? It looks like you are trying to pretend that parenthood is mostly sunshine and roses.
Actually, it looks like a goodly number of people here seem to think that love and support will make everything OK, that their kids would of course become mature and a great parent if they just help out “a bit”. This must be why some folks celebrate every pregnancy, because they really do believe that a baby will fix anything that is wrong with a person or couple. No matter how many times it has been shown to be untrue.
Actually, the average teen tends to think they know everything about life, including raising a baby. Most mature first time mothers don’t really know what they are getting into, so why would anyone think a teen would? Shoot, teens think they are indestructible.
A broken leg is problem only for the teen, and to some extent their parents, and it doesn’t last 18 years. However, I AGAIN have NEVER said that I speak to any pregnant person about their choices AT ALL, just as I wouldn’t do anything like that to someone who broke their leg.
However, if it was my teen, I’d certainly talk to them about their driving skills, probably not allow them to drive for awhile, etc. If I ended up with a pregnant one that wanted to keep her baby, I’d make it very clear that the work would be hers since the decision is apparently all hers, and I wouldn’t be throwing parties or posting updates to Facebook. Because I personally would care more about people who are here more than the potential baby, meaning I would be very concerned with the future of the teen instead of selfishly celebrating a grandchild.
Wait. A shower - a party - isn’t celebrating the pregnancy?
Nope, not taking the responsibility away from her. I’m aware that children are commitments you can’t walk away from- I personally have four little commitments under five years of age, and I know pretty well how hard babies are- I’ve got two of them myself right now.
My daughter getting pregnant would also not happen in a vacuum- me saying what I posted above would come after eighteen years of living in our family, and her being thoroughly acquainted with the idea that pregnant and teenage isn’t a good idea. That would be me, as her mother, saying that we will help her if she has made a difficult choice. In my family, that’s what you do. My helping her wouldn’t take away the sheer plain hard, self-sacrificing work of raising a child.
[QUOTE=curlcoat]
Actually, it looks like a goodly number of people here seem to think that love and support will make everything OK, that their kids would of course become mature and a great parent if they just help out “a bit”. This must be why some folks celebrate every pregnancy, because they really do believe that a baby will fix anything that is wrong with a person or couple. No matter how many times it has been shown to be untrue.
[/QUOTE]
A baby won’t fix anything. No one is saying that. Having a baby can have a maturing effect. Lord knows it’s done it for me. But it’s not automatic.
I guess your experience is wildly different, but in my community (friends and family) if someone has a baby, they get meals dropped off, help cleaning, help with childcare with the older kids (if there are any) for the first month. None of this is indentured service. All of it is willing and voluntary, not to take away from the parental responsibilities, but because many of my friends and family and neighbours want to help. Illness, childbirth, post-surgery recovery, whatever. We help each other.
Plenty of people can hide many feelings very well from most strangers, which would include you. Again, just because you don’t notice it, doesn’t mean others don’t or that they are not hiding their feelings.
And this covers not just things related to this issue, but many others.
Again, people are not happy and celebrating pregnancy, they’re being supportive of the person making the decision and being nice to the person to be, so that their lives are not a complete fuck up. Hope springs eternal, and many times it has also been shown to be true. And at its core, it is better for life in general to go around in a more positive attitude than one full of pessimism. Negative begets negative, and all that.
And a baby shower is not really (as much) celebrating, as much as it is giving present to the mother (and family and baby) to be that will assist them in rearing the baby. Yes, it may be a party, but at its core, it is a way to give the family many things that they will need. It is at its core, support.
So you took what I said- If parents keep parenting the teen for the next 4 or 5 years you have the best odds she’ll grow and mature- and turned it into what you wrote? Helping out a “little bit?” Comments like show why you’re in no position to judge, if you thing “parenting” is helping out a little bit.
If you were in my class you’d not be doing very well.
This is why people get mad at you- not entirely your extremist positions, but your disingenuous debating style- you cherry pick comments, make interpretations that do not accurately reflect what the poser has said, and never had a moment where you learn something from someone else.
Yes, the girl, boy, man, or woman responsible for a bad idea pregnancy which will bring harm to the family (or any other action that is that potentially damaging to the family) should be made to leave with the clothes on their backs and never be allowed to return. In my family, in my community, this is how it’s done and I support this policy whole-heartedly. In America with such easy access to safe abortion, there is simply no excuse for such stupidity.
Not when the reasons for those tough circumstances are completely of their own creation. Celebrations like baby showers for bad idea pregnancies only reinforce the behavior and encourage it in others.
I’m sure my grandmother and mother would have loved to retire at 37, but unfortunately their employers don’t subscribe to the Curlcoat timeline of how Things Should Be. Every family has different circumstances.
In my particular case, my mother way trying very hard to adopt when I was in my teens and early twenties, and put a lot of money and emotion into a dream that didn’t work out. I probably could have saved her a ton of heartache if I had gotten knocked up!
I think you are demonstrating a fundamental understanding of how human relationships work. Relationships- parent/child, close friends, spouses, sister/brother- are not about maintaining as much distance as possible and having the minimal possible effect on the other person’s life.
When you are in a relationship (including as a parent) you are along for the ride, for better or for worse. Life throws a lot of crazy stuff at everyone. People make all kinds of choices that have huge consequences. That’s one reason why people enjoy being in relationships with each other- so they can support each other, be a part of each other’s lives. Not just for the good parts, but for the bad parts as well. It’s not about never being a burden- it’s about doing your best for each other.
Everyone who has kids recognizes that there is a nonzero probably that their kids will become teenage parents. They probably would prefer this didn’t happen, but helping support their kid through potentially tough times is a part of what parents take on.
When people say things like “For teens, the bad part of situation is not necessarily permanent. They grow, mature, hopefully finish school and become self-sufficient. If you can help them through that process, you can end up with an adult with a older child you is ready to step forward and take over their lives and do well.” it looks like they think the baby is going to make a mature adult out of that 15 year old, instead of a resentful child. For the most part, it seems that teens who get pregnant are in families that didn’t do a great job raising them in the first place, so to just hope that a baby will help the teen grow and mature seems to be fantasy.
Yes, very different - I live in a city of over half a million, surrounded by cities of the same size more or less. Friends and family tend to be spread out over great distances and while we help as much as we can with any problems that arise, after working all day and commuting for up to two hours each way, most simply don’t have time to do those sorts of things. I could do more of it now that I am disabled/retired but prior to that there probably would have been no way.
Except, they aren’t strangers. If I know enough about them to know whether or not getting pregnant was a good idea, they can’t be strangers. Even if it was strangers (tho how this would happen IRL I don’t know) if they are throwing a fancy shower, it seems to be more than hiding feelings of disappointment or whatever.
Sure, but being a Pollyanna isn’t a good thing either.
Support and gift grabs can be done without parties. There is simply no way I can see that having a party isn’t celebrating a pregnancy.
Well, since I wasn’t responding to what you wrote, I’m thinking that perhaps you should quit judging. If you didn’t say “a bit” and I didn’t quote you, then why in the world would you assume I was talking about you?
What class?
And this is why people like you should just stay out of it if it’s going to make you mad. It should be obvious by now that I have zero understanding of why people get so excited about babies, so when I interpret something wrong, the thing to do is to try to help me understand if you can discuss the subject without getting emotional about it. I’ve learned all kinds of things from this board, but learning doesn’t happen when someone yells “that’s just the way it is stupid”.
I’ll try it again. Someone who has no business having a baby gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby. Why do you support that decision? I don’t mean why do you give her baby clothes or whatever, I mean why do you automatically hope it will work out for the best instead of trying to actually create a better decision?
Grandparents seem to be the absolute worst for this. My ex-husband sired a child with a girl he was sleeping with while we were still married (tho headed for divorce - the news of the pregnancy made me hurry it up). It wasn’t someone he was really attached to, it was just a convenient fling whenever he had to be in her city on business, a city that was about 5 hours away. He gave her money for an abortion, and the next time he was down there, she hadn’t done it and was now 6-7 months pregnant.
When he told his mother, she went completely out of her mind. The excitement she showed over this impending grandson was far more than what she had shown at either of her sons’ weddings, when her one son graduated college or when her other son was accepted to the police academy. She drove down to where the girl lived and took her shopping, she chattered about names, she was really excited when she found out it was going to be a boy, etc. All this over a baby she might or might not be able to see very often if at all, since her son had broken off “relations” when he found at there hadn’t been an abortion and was very resentful that he would be paying support. My ex-sister-in-law essentially broke off contact with the MIL because of this, at least for a few years until I lost touch with her.
Do you think that was a proper response to this pregnancy, which as far as she knew broke up her son’s marriage and was something her son didn’t want? Was this just “support”?
The hell? What does one’s employer have to do with this?
See, this is why I can’t get straight answers on this subject. People over react, stick things in that have zero to do with the subject or anything I’ve said and (willfully?) misinterpret what I actually have said.
Again, what are you talking about? Are you trying to say there are people who would be happy to start over raising babies at 40-50? If so, that has already been established, just as there are people who would not want to have to do that.
Three for three - what does this have to do with the subject?
And? Are you saying that the parent is supposed to be happy that their teen is pregnant? Is doing drugs? Has been arrested for drunk driving? I have never implied that a parent should kick their teen to the curb for getting pregnant.
Well, everyone gets to make their own decisions about how their family works, I guess. But many people do not go for such scorched-earth policies when it comes to their own flesh and blood.
Raising teenagers is hard, and you don’t always get exactly what you signed up for. If things go pear-shaped I suppose you can just boot the kid out on their ass and divorce yourself from their problems. But some parents, crazily enough, want to stay in touch with their kids and support them even if they screw up.
I can get behind the idea of sitting your kid down and talking to them and making sure they know all their options. But I can’t get behind the idea of saying “you have to have this abortion, or I no longer love you and you’re no longer welcome in this family”. What else do you kick a kid out for - failing school? Being gay? Totalling the car? Becoming ill or disabled? All those things could ‘potentially damage’ the family.
Do you notice how you purport to be concerned about the young woman and her child, but the words you say in this story are actually all about yourself, your broken marriage, and your ex-husband?
IMHO it sounds like are projecting your own personal desire to see this particular young woman and her child to suffer shame and scorn, and your own little wish to see her life ruined.
I don’t think she’s saying that parents are “supposed” to be anything but supportive of their daughter.
First, not all parents of pregnant teenage girls are happy about the pregnancy. Also, not all parents care about being grandparents. My brother has 3 kids and our mother just about can’t stand them.
Second, parents can and should should discuss the available options. They can encourage the daughter to either put the baby up for adoption or get an abortion and explain why being a young mother is a bad idea because of the expense, the time, and the life disruption a child brings. Hell, they’re allowed to be disappointed and angry with her because see previous paragraph.
Third, if the girl decides to keep the baby after all that, there is fuckall the parents can do to force her to give up the child.
Fourth, the parents can either support her decision (be it grudgingly or enthusiastically) or they can yell and scream and rant and rave, throw her out, possibly alienate her for good.
My opinion, based on people I know who have gone through this cycle: most families will decide to support the daughter and put the best possible light on it for outsiders rather than risk breaking up their family over it.
For the record I’m 36, childless, never want kids, don’t particularly like kids much.
