If you are worried about your tax dollars funding the massive U.S. welfare state, encouraging young mothers to get an education is the most cost effective way to keep her off of public assistance, enabling her to provide a decent life for her child.
The alternative is to continue faith based - abstinence only - sex education. Shun the pregnant teen. Offer no support for the child. And eventually fill the jails with more throwaway kids. Now, this is tax dollars at work. Your tax dollars can help or punish. I suppose it boils down to morality.
I work at a food stamp office, and the first thing I generally say to a pregnant or recently become a parent client is “congratulations”… regardless of age, homeless or marital status, or other aspects of the situation. Is common human decency so difficult to grasp?
At what point does a pregnancy become “acceptable” enough to celebrate? When she’s 18? When she’s married to the father? Is there a yearly income amount that would satisfy your silly notions of when it’s right or wrong to celebrate a pregnancy? Isn’t an abandoned, impoverished mom’s life hard enough without some imperious person like you saying she doesn’t have the right to be happy or celebrate the birth of her child?
This kind of thinking has landed us in the moral vacuum in which we now live… in which some are valued more than others based upon income and other material characteristics. Boo on you for perpetuating this type of thinking fallacy.
In the end, my decision on this sort of thing is always based on present tense actual facts in a personal case.
I got a teenage girl, who is pregnant, and has not finished high school. Me, I want her to do a lot of stuff. Finish high school, get good medical care, eat well, stay off drugs. This girl, this time, right now. I find the argument that doing that, or assuring that that will happen is going to have a bad effect on my society to be . . . well dumb.
The argument implying that not letting her finish high school will be a deterrence to other girls is . . . well really cruel, stupid, and self righteous. And, of course, wrong. Wrong as in incorrect, wrong as in cruel, wrong as in stupid, wrong as in evil. Deterrence is a really badly failed principle for criminal laws, but the argument in favor of it is somewhat mitigated because we are, in that case discussing criminal behavior.
You want to keep little girls from having sex while they are in high school? Try increasing the amount of involvement between them, and their parents, and the social structure of their communities. Give them the love and support that a child needs. And if they get pregnant anyway, then love them all the more, and their babies.
The reflex for “who’s fault is it” management is pernicious.
But where else are you going to get the unskilled cheap labour pool once you build your fence at the border? A great way to ensure that you never run out of peons is to preach abstinence to teenagers and kick them out of school when they get pregnant. Hey, someone has to live at the bottom of the shit-pile – might as well the immoral ones who deliberately ignored the baby Jesus’ commandments. :smack:
The problem I have is how much “assuring” we need to do. To some extend high school is a great case of “you can lead a horse to water…” You can’t make someone get an education, you can simply make it available to them. And yes, you can make it easier for people, and that will encourage them to get it. But I think there are better use of limited resources that would be more valuable across a larger population - this one sounds VERY resource intensive.
Yes, I accepted help from my family - mostly, as you pointed out, baby-sitting and the occasional pack of diapers. That, in my view, is the ideal situation. Family helping family. So sue me.
I wasn’t trying to “prove anything”, except to myself - that I could do it, that my life wouldn’t be awful, that I could be a “grown-up”
You know what - I’m damned proud. Not that anyone who gets help should be ashamed, but I got a lot of self-worth out of it.
My point was not that poor girls should be skinned alive, or whatever you’re assuming. It was that I was uncomfortable taking a group of 7-8-9 year old girls, and saying "Look! If you get pregnant and have no money, total strangers will have a big party for you, with presents and balloons any everything! It weirds me out a little bit.
Had my niece not lost her baby, I would have planned and made invitations and salads and everything else. But, I don’t think you can force total strangers to celebrate another teenage mom…
How does one break the generational welfare cycle? One place to start is by moving heaven and earth to keep kids in school, such that they develop the skills necessary to move on up financially in the world, and such that they are inculcated in a culture in which education and employment are priorities.
Yahoo - you guys are right!! I love Jebus!! :rolleyes:
The original request was for new ideas to deal with teenage pregnancy and the resulting educational problem. So we have two options right now (possibly three depending on Colorado’s system):
The night school program
IEP’s
Losing a semester, and graduating a semester late
So, do we need to add another option, and it’s costs - including not only the costs in time and tax dollars, but also the opportunity costs of money and time being spent that may be better spent elsewhere? I’m sure there other places to spend education money that would help a larger sector of all kids - better materials, tutoring help, after-school programs.
I have several new ideas that may help. How about a free Depo shot clinic at the school? How about updating the Sex Ed classes to include information about how to deal with an unplanned pregnancy from a strictly practical standpoint - leaving out the emotional component, so if it happens, they have an idea of how to proceed? Hell, how about free abortions?
Well, it’s wonderful that your family actually helped you, but a lot of girls don’t have that. In fact, it’s still the case that a lot of people want to punish pregnant unwed girls.
Yeah, but there seems to me to be a difference between punishing them (you can’t go to school, we won’t take you back after a semester, we won’t offer night school, we won’t offer daycare, you can’t participate in activities or go to prom) and enabling them (personally, I think daycare is over in the enabling range, but its the sort of “making it easier” that serves a fairly large population and I think does far more good than the cost). This sounds like we are over into “oh, honey, let me do pretty much everything but your actual math homework for you” territory.
I don’t have a clue what the Denver schools are like, but my own district in Minnesota is stretched so thin meeting NCLB and IEP programs that we don’t have librarians, or art teachers anymore, the antiquated sewer pipes which we didn’t fix because of budget problems broke and flooded the building, and we have constant class size battles. It bugs me when my kids are in an elementary classroom with 38 people in it (they haven’t yet, we’ve had other classes that big) but sending tutors out to a student on “maternity leave.”
If “maternity leave” really means “you’ll have to get your work done on your own to your teachers satisfaction or you’ll repeat the semester” - that’s great, that’s simply not enforcing stupid mandatory attendance policies for these girls - that’s fair. That may mean your teachers have to send work back and forth with a friend, but that’s the way schools have taken care of extended illness for years - more work for the teacher, but most teachers figure out a system to deal with that fast. If it means tutors swinging by your home for four weeks, or graduating on time without having competency in the material - that’s more resources than I want to throw at this problem for the first, and frightening for the second.