Why does NOT getting “maternity leave” preclude an education? If you were serious about getting that diploma, then wouldn’t you finish what school you could before you give birth, then take a semester off, then finish at the start of the new semester? I understand that the timing of a pregnancy may not fit in with a standard school year, but with new semesters in September and January, and summer school, it seems to me that you’d only end up a semester or so behind. Are they kicking out girls who had babies?
I think it’s fine - take a semester to bond with the baby, plan your next moves and generally heal from all of the physical and emotional trauma that comes from an unplanned pregnancy. Then go back in the fall and finish. What’s the problem?
I don’t want to look “surly” but I hate this idea that we should make teenage pregnancy easy. We shouldn’t try to make it harder, but women (and men!) have difficulties with having children and jobs and college and making it all work out. So you do as suggested above - put things off for a short while and organize your life accordingly.
No, I managed to make very poor decisions before I got pregnant. I dropped out my junior year (boy, I showed them!) and just hung around for a month or so until my mother made me get a job. Then I worked some standard menial jobs until I was 18, *then *I got pregnant.
My daughter was born in March, and I got my GED in April (and I got the "Einstein Award ) That fall, I was in college at my local Purdue campus. However…
between working full time, going to school, taking care of my daughter, and just generally growing up, I was going crazy, so I dropped out of college. I got a good job at a law firm, and proceeded to become a Grown Up.
My general guilt/shame/something has been hanging over my head for ten years. I went back to that same Purdue campus this past fall and started over again. I am still at the same job, and I am faring very well so far in school (although I feel like a dinosaur).
Writing this makes me think that maybe pushing a girl to keep on the “high-school-college-job” path is not the right way to go in many cases. Perhaps it’s a matter of forcing a situation that may not fit in a practical way. Sort of in line with the arguments about not always pushing college on kids, but including trade schools and the like… Hmmm…
I’m only so-so on the “maternity leave” plan; but I think that if you’d consider substituting “create an educational plan which may include independent study, tutors or other creative solutions to individual problems” (ie, create an IEP through already established channels) then I think the answer is that while time away does not preclude an education, it makes it much, much harder to go back to. As I suspect you know from personal experience; I know I do.
A maternity leave is preferable to a semester drop-out for me because then at least the girl is coming back into familiar classes with, I would assume, some continuity of teacher, classmates, etc. This would, of course, mean that she’d have to keep up with the work while she’s not in class, right? I’m guessing, anyway. These continuities and some amount of hand-holding would have made it a whole lot easier for *me *to keep up with school, anyway.
Dropping out and coming back a semester later is possible, sure. But you just lose track of the kids that way. They get used to not doing homework and they forget how to learn - at least I did. It’s just really, really hard to go back in, especially in high school, where now all your friends are ahead of you and you’re in classes with people you don’t know, which yes, really is a hardship on a 15 year old. Is it insurmountable? No, not really. But, again, why make it as hard as we can?
And, before anyone asks, I was knowingly but unshowingly pregnant at my high school graduation (after a triple birth control failure). I had a 3.8 GPA and was in the top 10% of my class; I did one semester of community college while pregnant and then left for about 2 years. Went back, dabbled, failed a bunch of stuff I stupidly didn’t Withdraw from and after about 5 years got an AA. Went to a “real” school, earned $20,000 in student loans and no credit hours. Did I mention I was really, really stupid at that time in my life?
Saturday I’m going into the local community college to have them look at my old transcripts, see if anything is useful, and enroll in the prerequisites for their 2 year RN program. That kid I was pregnant with at high school graduation? He turns 15 in about a week.
Okay, well I’m not going to play the guessing game to try and figure out which one that is. How often does a girl have sex without realizing that there’s a possibility that she could get pregnant (exceptions for rape, of course)?
The same thing happened to my mother in 1971. She was midway through her junior year. Apparently the school found out when her name appeared in the paper with all the other marriage licences issued. No tutor, no independent study, no coming back. Her only other option was still illegal.
CPS has a “Homebound” system for students who are unable to attend school due to injury, illness, or pregnancy. A teacher visits the home several times a week, bringing work for the students to complete and then the completed work is returned to the classroom teachers to be graded. I have had many students go on Homebound, many of whom were pregnant. And most of them ended up returning to school and eventually graduating.
I live in an area (rural Africa) where the vast majority of people have their first child as young teenagers. Our school systems don’t allow pregnant women in classes, and once you start missing years, it becomes hard to ever catch up. As a result, the high school enrollment rates for girls are very low. As you’d expect, this leads to increased poverty and all manner of social problems. Mothers are ultimately responsible for so much, and when a mother has, say, a primary school education, they are poorly equipted to look out for the health, safety, education, and general development of their children.
Why would we want to see this happen in America?
On the flipside, these children are loved, and well taken care of, even if they live in what we’d consider grinding poverty. My friends live in mud huts with dirt floors and only own one set of clothes. But their kids are their lives, and they arn’t sorry they had them. Nor or they sorry they themselves were born. To go out on a limb, I’d say I see a lot less despair and depression here than I did in America. Poverty is not immoral. Living in poverty is not immoral. Reproducing in poverty is not immoral. If it were, most of humanity for all of history should have never existed.
For the vast majority of human history, teen pregnacy has been the norm. It’s not the end of the world- it’s how the human race has got by for millions of years. However, teen pregnacy doesn’t work well in our society. For the people who get pregnant as teenagers- for whatever reason- this is unfortunate.
But we don’t need to sit around making it even more unfortunate. There are plenty of consequences as is, without us manfacturing consequences.
I’ve been thinking about this further, and it just makes me very uncomfortable for two reasons:
The article the OP posted is filled with references to “support” that Colorado provides, including very expensive programs such as day care and night schools. Who is paying for this? Is it free to students, or is paid by the Colorado taxpayers? This is an unbelievable amount of money being spent on students who caused their own problem. I know that the argument is that we should get them their diplomas now, so they don’t cost more when they’re in poverty later. So I think, yes, there should be some help, but don’t they have to do their part?
If these girls have decided that getting their diploma is so damned important (and it is), why would they be falling through the cracks and not coming back next semester? If they do not, that means that, at some point, they’ve decided that a diploma is not so important after all. Dumb decision, but when do we let them be the adults that their pregnancy has made them, and pay the consequences of their actions (NOT the pregnancy, but the decision to stop going to school?)
My step-niece, 17, got herself pregnant this summer. Unlike when I turned up pregnant, she was not that upset about it. It certainly wasn’t part of the plan, but, based on the experiences of her friend who was 15 (!) and pregnant, it just didn’t seem like a huge deal to get all upset about. She knew how to finish school, apply for all of the state taxpayer funded programs and just generally got excited about decorating a nursery. WTF?
Is anyone else on this thread bothered by that at all? Regardless of your feelings about the specific Colorado program we’ve been discussing, do you recognize that, by removing all of the obstacles for teenagers, we may be dismantling a social check that has been effective in keeping pregnancies low?
Pregnancy hasn’t made them adults. It’s made them parents. Not all parents are adults. Only time and education makes people adults.
Okay. Why WTF? I don’t see the problem there. Is it the ideal path her life might have taken? Probably not. Does she seem to be dealing well with it? Yep. I hope she’s using those funds as a temporary measure and gets herself a job as soon as she can, of course.
I’ve got a friend who is 35 and single and miserable. She really wants to have a kid, but hasn’t found someone to have it with and can’t afford to do it alone. Her life hasn’t taken the ideal path it might have either. There’s lots of ways in which our lives can suck, being a pregnant teen is neither required or exclusive.
Bothered by teenage pregnancy? Yes, I am, quite a bit. I bothered because it’s so hard for teenaged girls to complete their educations, afford child care, and work (if that’s what they want to do) in fulfilling careers and be good parents at the same time. There’s two ways to solve that problem: reduce teenage pregnancy (which we’ve been doing, and continue to try to do) and make it easier for girls to complete their education, receive child care, etc. It’s not either-or.
I’m actually in *favor *of late teenage pregnancy medically. If we had some fantastic utopia where women could be both good attentive mothers and have fulfilling careers while having children in their late teens or early twenties, that would be a good thing. Younger women have healthier and easier pregnancies and deliveries as long as they have good prenatal care, with less age-related birth defects like Down’s Syndrome.
ALL obstacles? This is one, and a minor one, in the eyes of most teenagers. Remove obstacles like getting fat and losing your social life and the horrors of dating as a single mother, and then we’ll talk.
Wait, I thought you said a girl could just go back to school after taking a semester off. So how is school assistance a social check?
Or did you mean the shame and blame and hiding pregnancies and getting kicked out of school has been effective in keeping pregnancies low? I’d like a big ol’ cite on that, especially since, as has already been pointed out, pregnancy rates have been dropping for thirty years, ever since we’ve eased up a bit on the most overt shaming and labeling. There was, I admit, a small upswing in 2006, but it’s too soon to tell if that’s a statistical blip or a real trend. If it IS a real trend, then I hypothesize it’s because the last 7 years have seen an upswing in abstinence only education funding, restrictions on abortion funding and a *return *to “family values” which includes those good ol’ social controls of shame and shunning.
I was speaking in a legal sense, or at least in the sense of the idea that, by deciding to become pregnant, they are now expected to act like adults. We all know people who never act like adults, but there comes a time when they are expected to, and getting pregnant is one of those times.
Um…you don’t see anything wrong with her attitude? I don’t think she should be in sackcloth and ashes, but come on! It appears to me (and I know her pretty well) that she wasn’t upset. I see a tremendous difference between telling a teen “it’s okay” and “it will be okay”
Please note - my niece lost the baby about 2 months in…
I’m sorry for your friend, but she isn’t (so far as I can tell) asking for special treatment from the taxpayers, so I don’t see your point. Is it that life sucks sometimes? Well, duh…
But those things are hard for everyone! Men and women of all classes and creeds have to make very hard decisions about having children. I am not saying that teens should have no options; I’m not sure I agree that tailoring an additional educational program for another set of girls who have different “wants” is the way to go.
It’s for a different thread, but I also have a problem with people who put off children, with the attendant consequences. So we agree on something!
Right, this kind of proves one of my points. You said yourself that no education is “a minor one” for most teenagers. They are far more worried about their weight or boys or whatever. If they don’t come back to school, then at what point do we stop the hand-holding? They no longer have the luxury of being a school-girl/guy.
Please see my post #47 where I say that social stigmas may have been effective. If you read the post, you’ll see that I have been thinking about them - meaning I have not decided either way. I will provide no cite, because I’m not saying that is the case.
In addition, I feel that you are painting me with a pretty broad brush. You seem to see me as a “family values” kind of gal. And you couldn’t be more wrong about it. For example, see the same post, where I say that teen sex is pretty okay.
Sunrazor was looking for some discussion of this subject, and some “outside the box” thinking. My though is that, perhaps, too many allowances for behavior has the unintended effect, much like some of the welfare arguments.
At no point did I advocate “shame and shunning” If you recall, I’ve been through this, just as you have, and I do not appreciate the implication that I’m a red-state Christian scum bag.
What is your outside-the-box thought? Because more and more social programs don’t seem to be working…
That system has been in place for decades, you know - my husband spent much of his high school years in the hospital and the CPS’s willingness to accept hospital tutoring had a lot to do with him being able to get an education.
Now, what I found disturbing about the linked article in the OP was this statement:
If that is true - that young mothers were being pressured to attend school the day after hospital discharge I have to say that really is a problem. Especially with the trend towards discharging women sooner after childbirth rather than later. Have we forgotten than childbirth is major physical process? These girls really do need time to heal. Cripes - in the job world women get maternity leaves of 8-12 weeks in most jobs. After surgery you get at least a few days to recover at home - and a certain percentage of pregnancies DO wind up being surgeries called “cesearians”.
How can absence due to recovery from childbirth or cesearian be UNEXCUSED? WTF kind of double-standard is THAT? That’s holding teenagers to a standard that would be considered unreasonable for women out in the working world!
What do you do about young women who have pregnancy complications?
Now, as to what should be granted - perhaps these girls SHOULD take a semester off and come back to summer school or graduate a half a year late. And no, not all young mothers should be forced onto a career track, but they should have the OPTION to finish their high school education and continue on to college if that’s in their best interests. In other cases, raising the children early on then going to college later in life might be a better option.
Yes, pregnancy and childbirth is a life-changing experience That should NOT be glossed over. But having pregnant girls “disappear” from high school like in the old days doesn’t send a message I’m comfortable with.
First of all, saying “free to students OR paid for by taxes” makes no sense. The answer could be “yes.” Or there might be a reduced fee and the difference paid for by taxes. Either way, the choice is to pay (or help pay) for their education now, or pay to subsidize them via welfare or othe social support for the rest of their lives.
Regarding your step-niece: Better call out the angels and the wise men and the shepherds if she really “got herself pregnant.”
What would you prefer? Abortion? Shotgun wedding, marriage that may well be doomed to fail anyway? Or is it just that she should feel horribly guilty and ashamed? Or that she should hate the baby? Should the father of the child (and I am sure there really is one, somewhere) be forced to drop out of school be ostracized also? Do you really think that if she were upset about the situation, that she’d reveal it to you, her step-uncle? How do you know she didn’t cry herself to sleep for a week and then put on a brave face to the world and make the best of the situation?
Seriously, what do you want from your step-niece? To be sobbing her eyes out in shame 10 hours a day? Let’s look at these items:
“She knew how to finish school” - GOOD, she’ll continue with her education. This will give her a shot at a good job and a middle-class or better income down the line.
“apply for all the state taxpayer funded programs” - GOOD, she is making use of the support systems available. Would it be better if she hadn’t gotten pregnant and didn’t need them? Yes. But would it be better if she refused all help and really wound up in a tight spot, say, jobless, homeless, and without adequate education? No! For that matter, I’m in my 40’s and lost my job, is it wrong for me to accept unemployment benefits or look into food stamp eligibility due to severe lack of income? Or would you prefer I lose my home and possessions? We’re both making use of the social safety net. That’s what it’s there for - to help people survive difficult circumstances so they can get back on their feet and become taxpayers supporting the safety net.
“got excited about decorating a nursery” - GOOD, she’s taking a positive interest in the baby. It is NORMAL for women to look forward to having children and making a nice place for them to be. The fact she is decorating a nursery does not, to my mind, make her irresponsible, particularly in connection with her apparent desire to finish her education and make use of her support system. I’d rather see a girl acting like your step niece than crying hysterically, shamed into inaction, or worse.
But I think they *are *working. How are they not working if the teenaged pregnancy rate is going down? Isn’t that “working”?
I want to see a two-tiered approach. Step 1. Reduce teenage pregnancy. Step 2. Make life easier for those who get pregnant anyway.
I don’t think making things easier is going to lead to more girls having babies. We’ve been slowly making things easier for three decades now, and during that time, the teenage birth rate has steadily dropped.
I believe you that you’re not a shame and shunning family values red state kind of gal. It was your vague unquiet and opinion that your niece should be more upset and “your life, as you know it, is now ruined.” that gave me that impression, but your word is more important than my impression.
And I understand the tax concerns. But I think it’s shortsighted. My fantasy is that giving short term help with discrete goals is more useful than long-term welfare. And I don’t see a great financial cost to IEP’s or maternity leave programs at school - far less of a cost, certainly, than other welfare programs, and it might make those other programs less needed, which would save money.
That’s a really good point. I was terrified and spent a whole lot of my time crying. I was in a major clinical depression, but I hid it well. I hid it because I wanted everyone to agree with me that I was mature enough and smart enough to have this baby and that I wasn’t making a terrible mistake. Inside I agreed with them all that it was a horrible, horrible thing, but I was NOT going to let my mother be right about that!
Maybe I just see this differently, because my reaction and decision were so different…
I saw it as “yup. I just ruined my life” And, looking back, in a lot of ways, I did. I had to work hard to make sure I didn’t end up in a bad place. My thought is - if girls (and guys!) don’t see this as a huge, huge thing, they may not realize the very real consequences their subsequent decisions may have.
So, getting back to the OP, do you think having multiple programs could “soften the blow” and not have the impact that leads to good decision making down the road?
Re: my step-niece - I’m a girl, and being only (!) 31 and having experience with this myself, I talked to my niece about it a lot. We’re close, and I’m very close with my sister, so I also got all of the second-hand conversations relayed to me. (It was kinda funny, that my huge mistake had turned out to be good for two things - my daughter (of course) and as a mentor-ish of my niece’s unplanned pregnancy!)
I was just shocked that she did not see it as a big deal. And I mean, not really at all. She was far, far more upset about the guy (who split, of course) not really loving her, then the fact she was going to be a mother. I was also icked out that she thought it was okay to take advice from a fifteen year old pregnant girl. That’s not who I would take advice from…
So, we talked and talked, and, honestly, I tried to steer her toward getting her GED after the baby came and starting at Purdue in the fall of 2008. That’s what I did, and since she didn’t actually seem to be that intent on going back (there’s a whole back story there), I figured it would be a nice way to keep moving forward.
Re: the social services - I guess I’m not the most unbiased in this subject. I was a teenage mom, and I took zero dollars in social help. No WIC, no welfare, barely any Pell Grants, for crying out loud. My daughter and I lived on my $10,500 a year waiting tables. I borrowed money from my family twice - both times for car repairs, and both in the amount of about $200. Thank Og for medical providers who take small payments forever!
[QUOTE=Sateryn76]
Re: the social services - I guess I’m not the most unbiased in this subject. I was a teenage mom, and I took zero dollars in social help.{/quote]
Why the hell not? What were you trying to prove?
And be honest - from the moment you were pregnant were you a completely self-sufficient human being living in and paying for your own home, paying all your utilities, food bills, diaper bills? Or did you live with mom and dad for at least a little while? What did you do about baby-sitting? Did you hire someone, or rely on mom and dad and relatives? That’s not “social help”? It’s not governmental help, but it sure as hell is help.
I just don’t get people who are so proud that they refused help - sure, it’s great if you don’t need it, but it’s not a badge of honor to be so blessed, either. Maybe if you had accepted some of that help you and your daughter might have had it just a little bit easier. Maybe you were earning enough money that you didn’t qualify anyway, so good for you. Just because YOU could do it doesn’t mean your step-niece can. She should at least be aware of what help is out there, what resources she has, and it is HER decision to accept or decline help.
And frankly, your suggestion she drop out of high school and get a GED is not the best advice - it may be, due to other circumstances, her best option but to be honest, in this society, a GED is NOT as good as a high school diploma. If you have a GED and you go on to get a degree that largely (but not entirely) erases the stigma but the IDEAL is for her to get a high school diploma. A GED-followed-by-college is a second choice. A GED with no college degree, however, is definitely inferior to a high school diploma with no college degree.
[QUOTE=Sateryn76]
Re: the social services - I guess I’m not the most unbiased in this subject. I was a teenage mom, and I took zero dollars in social help.{/quote]
Why the hell not? What were you trying to prove?
And be honest - from the moment you were pregnant were you a completely self-sufficient human being living in and paying for your own home, paying all your utilities, food bills, diaper bills? Or did you live with mom and dad for at least a little while? What did you do about baby-sitting? Did you hire someone, or rely on mom and dad and relatives? That’s not “social help”? It’s not governmental help, but it sure as hell is help.
I just don’t get people who are so proud that they refused help - sure, it’s great if you don’t need it, but it’s not a badge of honor to be so blessed, either. Maybe if you had accepted some of that help you and your daughter might have had it just a little bit easier. Maybe you were earning enough money that you didn’t qualify anyway, so good for you. Just because YOU could do it doesn’t mean your step-niece can. She should at least be aware of what help is out there, what resources she has, and it is HER decision to accept or decline help.
And frankly, your suggestion she drop out of high school and get a GED is not the best advice - it may be, due to other circumstances, her best option but to be honest, in this society, a GED is NOT as good as a high school diploma. If you have a GED and you go on to get a degree that largely (but not entirely) erases the stigma but the IDEAL is for her to get a high school diploma. A GED-followed-by-college is a second choice. A GED with no college degree, however, is definitely inferior to a high school diploma with no college degree.
I have to agree with Sateryn, seems like a ridiculously expensive approach. Why not give them leave, then delay graduation by a semester and have them retake the classes they missed? That’s what happens with my job when I go on maternity leave, or college, my progress gets delayed by the amount of time I take leave.
Granted, that would probably mean less of these young women finish high school. But I think women that are motivated to make a better life have avenues to do so (GED, night school) and the ones that aren’t aren’t going to be truly helped regardless of how much money we throw at them.
I’d rather use limited education funding somewhere else.
I will tell you what really bothered me the most: Having to give a final exam to a student who was in labor. If I had it to do all over again, I would have refused and required an order from the school board. Can you imagine the possible consequences of the principal’s decision? (The full class was present.)
And be honest - from the moment you were pregnant were you a completely self-sufficient human being living in and paying for your own home, paying all your utilities, food bills, diaper bills? Or did you live with mom and dad for at least a little while? What did you do about baby-sitting? Did you hire someone, or rely on mom and dad and relatives? That’s not “social help”? It’s not governmental help, but it sure as hell is help.
I just don’t get people who are so proud that they refused help - sure, it’s great if you don’t need it, but it’s not a badge of honor to be so blessed, either. Maybe if you had accepted some of that help you and your daughter might have had it just a little bit easier. Maybe you were earning enough money that you didn’t qualify anyway, so good for you. Just because YOU could do it doesn’t mean your step-niece can. She should at least be aware of what help is out there, what resources she has, and it is HER decision to accept or decline help.
A suggestion she drop out of high school and get a GED is not the best advice - it may be, due to other circumstances, her best option but to be honest, in this society, a GED is NOT as good as a high school diploma. If you have a GED and you go on to get a degree that largely (but not entirely) erases the stigma but the IDEAL is for her to get a high school diploma. A GED-followed-by-college is a second choice. A GED with no college degree, however, is definitely inferior to a high school diploma with no college degree.
) That fall, I was in college at my local Purdue campus. However…