The supposed phenomenon of high school girls making a radical choice of motherhood over career. LINKY.
Two questions: first, is this real or UL?
Secondly, and why I’ve posted this in GD is, assuming this is real, what does this say about twenty-first century American attitudes towards motherhood? The young women in question apparently don’t want to have to go to college, they want what generations of young women wanted, expected or even once had little choice to accept: to get married to someone who’d support them and start having kids. In other words, is it no longer legitimate for a woman to want or hope for this? Any more than it would be for a man to hope to immediately marry a rich woman who’d support him as a stud muffin? Are women now supposed to get an education and a job of their own, and if they don’t they’re considered trailer trash? Is the college/job thing now as mandatory for women as it is for men?
It isn’t a complete urban legend although the U.S. is a big place and you can find examples of just about anything if you try but it isn’t new either. Prom babies or a reasonable equivalent happened (and I have to assume still happen) in the rural Southern area where I grew up. I graduated from high school in 1991 and it was common for graduating seniors to have a 2 for 1 combo - graduate high school in May and get married in June to the current high school boyfriend. About 1/3 of the white kids followed this model. I am 33 years old and my very best friend growing up has a child that would qualify under this scenario. His long-time girlfriend was a junior when we were seniors and didn’t like the talk of college or moving away so she quit taking the pill (she admitted this to me later) and now they are married and have a 15 year old son. It worked out Ok but the original thought process was pretty screwed up.
Here in Massachusetts, there is definitely high pressure for any reasonably intelligent female to go go college and have a career. This pressure goes up greatly as the town she is raised in becomes more affluent. In the richer towns, it is never mentioned officially as an option and I admit that housewife-hood has never occurred to me as a possible scenario for my daughters. If they really wanted it, I guess that would be fine but certain elements of society really shun that choice and the pressure really is there.
I don’t think it says anything about attitudes towards motherhood so much as attitudes towards irresponsibility and stupidity. These are teenage girls we’re talking about, not adult women with economic stability. A 17-year-old girl’s desire to have a baby and then leech off mom and dad is not the same as an adult with economic stability, life experience and little bit of a clue about what she’s getting into to be a stay at home mom.
I think it’s a response to the cultural myth of the “redeeming power of motherhood” which is the idea that because motherhood is the highest, most divine thing that a woman can achieve, she will automatically be rewarded for it in some vague cosmic way. The reverence and privilege that we give to mothers can, superficially, seem like a license to abdicate from every other responsibility if you manage to squeeze out some offspring.
My main problem with this phenomenon, if it does exist, is that these girls are essentially using their own children as excuses to shirk other responsibilities. If they’re not comfortable about going to college, that’s perfectly fine, but the way to deal with is to go to one’s parents and discuss the issue with them, NOT to get pregnant. Having a child also affects the life of the impregnator, and especially if a girl goes off of birth control for the purpose of deceiving their partner into more readily having sex with him, it shows even more disregard for other people involved in the whole deal.
If someone wants to marry and have children straight out of high school without persuing higher education and/or a job, then there’s nothing basically wrong with that, but they must ensure that their financial and familial situation is such that a child can be supported by it. One of the big reasons that so many more women/mothers work nowadays is that it is much harder to support a whole family on one income than it was in times past. So it’s not just some backsliding of marital/matriarchal responsibility in favor of gender equalization; it’s fast becoming an economic near-necessity as well.
Well, it’s harder to support a family on one income largely because of women in the workplace. The two go hand in hand.
I sort of find it disturbing that it’s not ok to go straight to starting a family after HS, that this is now considered to be some sort of defective ‘white trash’ choice. For a lot of people college is a waste of time. I don’t think society will suffer much with a few less Liberal Arts degrees. College is HIGHLY overrated, but the problem is that makes it necessary because people making hiring decisions will choose someone out of college over someone out of High School.
Having a baby to get out of college is ridiculous. If you don’t want to go to college don’t. If you want kids have them, but I don’t see it as a way to excuse getting out of college. The materialism rampant on both sides of the issue I find pretty disturbing. When people talk about financial stability we generally have a highly skewed notion of stability. We’ve become so used to standards of wealth that we have largely forgotten that most of our ancestors lived with a lot less than we are able to acquire today. Most of what we purchase with our wealth is completely and totally unnecessary. Most of us could save tons of money simply by not buying pointless crap like DVDs, Premium Channels or that ‘oh so cute little little plastic bauble that I just HAD to pick up!’, but we like them so we pay for them. At this time I can afford both my child and my cable, but if I needed to, I could axe cable and Netflix and have an extra $ 200 a month next month.
I see nothing wrong with someone wanting to be a housewife.
And in times past, the high school diploma became essentially a hiring requirement. The problem is, as more and more people acquire college degrees, the field gets more and more competitive, and perhaps in the future it may be that a master’s degree is required for one to get a decent job, even though it may be a waste of time. It used to be that you could
While it’s true that people do waste money on materialistic things, there are a vast number of families that don’t ever have time to worry about the choice between Starz and HBO, since they already may have to choose between medicine and food. It HAS become more difficult for some families to buy necessities - the blue-collar job market that used to support so many families in the past has been rapidly shrinking in the US, and many of the remaining jobs that one can be hired for that don’t require higher education only pay minimum wage or perhaps a bit more - hardly enough to support a whole family as the sole provider. Traditional manufacturing-supported communities have suffered greatly in the past few decades, such as here in North Carolina where communities once supported by the furniture and textile industries are becoming some of the poorest in the state, their major employers having moved out due to outsourcing. If the people left behind either don’t have a higher degree or the means to obtain one, finding a job comparable in hiring requirements and pay can be very difficult. Community colleges are an affordable choice on paper, but many people, especially those with children, find that they cannot devote time to obtaining a degree, caring for their family, AND holding down a temporary job at the same time. The situation is far more complex than people wasting money on material crap.
Neither do I, but they need to make sure that they are responsible enough to pursue that option. Not every woman should be expected to stay at home and take care of the children, and not every woman should be expected to pursue a career and hold off on starting a family. However, deciding on what course to take should be about more than honoring “tradition”, past or present. Just because one’s mother was a housewife doesn’t necessarily make it the right choice for her daughter. Practicalities of life may warrant finding other options, and not all high schoolers think about things like that as deeply as they probably should. It doesn’t really relate to age as much a maturity; back when most people started careers right out of high school, they were likely conditioned by that age to be prepared to start a family, and thus knew that a certain level of responsibility would be needed. Nowadays, with college being the default choice for high school grads, the focus of high school has shifted from preparing students for life to preparing them for college. I think the only point at which gender issues come into play here is that you pretty much HAVE to relay the same message to all students. You can’t really tell just the boys to prepare for college and the girls to decide between college and being a housewife (and with sex ed being a touchy subject for some school districts anyway, pretty much any discussion on family planning is limited to “don’t have sex before marriage, end of class”). We’ve moved beyond the times when young women were subtly nudged into preparing for domestic responsibilities after high school.
Really, there SHOULDN’T be anything wrong with being a housewife, much less right out of college, but how would you send this message to young people? Schools can’t really do it, for reasons I mentioned above, and it’s not a feasible life decision for some people, which may scare off others whose financial situation would otherwise permit it. The worst possible outcome would be that deciding to be an at-home mother became a rebellious act, as in the “prom babies” example, and that it where parents have to step in and make sure their kids are making the right choice. Sex may be taboo to talk about, but dicussing starting a family should be easy: don’t do it if you’re not prepared for it.
It doesn’t matter the income bracket of your useless crap. Maybe you are some kid in the ghetto buying Air Jordans or whatever. The poverty line here supports a consumerist lifestyle rather well. It is more complex than that, but cutting out the pointless baubles can really reduce a person’s expenditures.
Well, one of the problems is that the level of college has devolved to where we don’t really see college people as adults, but as kids. We expect college students to be immature. I blame the lack of a tradition that provides some sort of ‘coming of age’.
Well a commitment to freedom is something I’ve always been a fan of, though I think most people are into that in buzz-theory rather than in practice. Having a kid as an act of rebellion is just stupid and cruel IMO. We should definitely have a more frank notion of sex in the modern era, people would treat it with much more respect if we weren’t constantly warring about what kind of sexuality people ‘should’ have.
If a young woman is not ready for the pressures and responsibilities of college, how can she be ready for the pressures and responsibilities of parenthood?
Yes, the workforce proportionally has more women than it did in the past, but this doesn’t really have any bearing on the fact that you still need a higher education to obtain the best jobs out there. As I mentioned before, traditional blue-collar jobs have decreased a great deal in the US, and have largely been replaced by jobs that require a higher degree in order to make the same amount of money. Women or no women, when you take blue-collar jobs out of the equation and replace them with white-collar jobs, the importance of higher education goes up. People who don’t want to pursue college have had their viable options decreased in the past few decades. Perhaps more emphasis on technical colleges is the solution, which would prepare people for specific decent-paying jobs better than traditional schools in some cases. To use another NC example, some high schools in the state have adopted a program wherein students can elect to take another year of high school which would be comprised of junior-college level technical courses, and graduate with not only a diploma but an A.D. This is being hailed as a good alternative for students, especially those whose families cannot afford to put their kids through normal 4-year programs.
I don’t disagree that anyone can get sucked into a cycle of buying useless things, but I hesitate to think that the majority of the people working two or three jobs nowadays are doing so simply to buy expensive sneakers. Cutting out the crap might free up some extra money for food, or maybe even down payment on a car, but it ain’t gonna cover all the utilities, rent, and medical care. Lack of health insurance can cripple a struggling family pretty damn badly. Interestingly, in a sociology class I once took, the professor put forth the assertion that lower-class families have traditionally been the ones where working women have most been accepted as the norm, since everyone was expected to contribute to the family income in order for the family to be able to survive. And people haven’t always been spending money on cable or X-Boxes; some families found out long ago that being a housewife was sometimes economically inviable.
True, and one of the things that bugged me about some of the people I graduated from college with was the notion that several of them seemed to be planning on going to grad school simply because they didn’t WANT to have to find a job after graduation, not because they had some burning desire to advance the research of their field. You CAN find a decent job with a B.S. or B.A. It may not be something that you particularly want to do, but it helps pay the bills a lot better, in most cases, than a grad school stipend. If you want to do research, go ahead and do it, but don’t use grad school to bide your time until you find your dream job. Let the people who actually want to go to grad school go instead.
I think one of the reasons that housewifery has a stigma on it nowadays is that it was once an expected life decision. There were many societal pressures put on women to stay home and have kids, but schools at the time still didn’t have much to say on the matter other than perhaps encouraging the girls to take Home Ec instead of Calculus or Advanced Physics. Nowadays, with that societal pressure largely gone, and schools restricted from nudging students into a specific path based solely on gender (which is a good thing), starting a family young isn’t even brought up as an option, thus it is never discussed, and hence there is the danger that some people will have an overly-romantic vision of it and thus go in with their eyes closed. Probably a good number of the proponents of no sex ed in schools would like to see their kids forming stable marriages as soon as possible, but it’s naive to think that this will automatically happen for most people. If you’re not going to allow the schools to teach about sex and responsible family planning (birth control and all), then by all means at least teach your own kids about responsibility and how it relates to raising a family. “The Talk” should be about a lot more than waiting until you’re married to have sex, like, for example, waiting until you’re ready to get married.
The only apparently independent use of the term “prom baby” in this sense which I could find in four pages of google results was here, and I don’t actually believe this is an independent use. The language this guy uses about the “grandmother in her forties” is suspiciously reminiscent of the Dear Abby letter.
I think either Abby’s been had, or else, the father who wrote the letter has been had by his daughter and her friends. (Oh, you know I didn’t mean it that way.)
And I suppose it’s now harder for a white man to support a family on one income because of all those African-Americans in the workplace. And it’s tougher for a Christian to support a family on one income ever since they started letting Jews in. What’s your point?
Well, what you just said reinforces what the OP is talking about. You’re concerned that it’s fiscally irresponsible for a woman to go straight from high school to marriage without having some kind of fallout plan. Fifty years ago, a lot of women went to college to get an MRS degree–sure they had some college, but they never graduated and so, were in the same high-school-degree-only boat. Many others worked a retail or secretarial job for a year or two until they could snag a husband. Neither job is rare or requires enormous skills (for low-level secretaries, anyway).
The point is–lots of women entered marriage with zero valuable job skills and very low earning potential, but that was the norm. Rather than tut-tut that they weren’t adults with economic stability, the magazines and newspapers tut-tutted when girls didn’t get married soon enough, because they were sure to lose their married friends and end up badly.
I think that’s what the OP is getting at. Has it become completely unacceptable for the woman to be a purely domestic partner?
What does one do with merely a HS degree these days? Work in a Starbucks?
People who say college is a waste of time, in my experience, are usually people who either never went to college or wasted their entire 4 years there studying BS (BullShit, not Bachelors of Science) majors and partying only to not find a job after graduating. College gives you a 4 year opportunity to network with what will hopefully become your professional peers, join activities and clubs you would not normally be exposed to and develop your professional skills and experience. If you choose to squander that, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Speaking to both of you now- There is nothing wrong with a woman being purely a domestic partner. The reason these “Prom Mom’s” are looked down on is that
a) the implication seemed that they were intentionally becoming pregnent in an attempt to trap the father and their parents into supporting them
b) are using the child as an excuse to hide from the responsibilities of going out and support themselves
c) expecting to be taken care of financially by someone else their entire lives
d) people do get divorced and it’s good to have something to fall back on
I think msmith537 nailed it pretty well, with one exception. I read the link in the OP, and I didn’t get the impression that these girls expect to marry the baby’s father and set up housekeeping. Unless Dear Abby left out quite a bit of the original letter, the girls hadn’t given any thought to the implications of early motherhood beyond using it to get out of college.
So I don’t think it says anything about the acceptability of motherhood/homemaking as an option for young women. Rather, it says much about teenage “irresponsibility and stupidity” (to quote Diogenes the Cynic).
It may also say something about a (perceived) lack of options for teens who are done with high school but who aren’t ready for college. There aren’t a lot of good jobs out there for someone with only a general high school education (there may be good opportunities for someone with a vocational/technical education, but that presumes some planning early in one’s high school “career”). A year or so of travel is kind of classic, but this requires money and a significant degree of responsibility as well.
These girls aren’t talking about marriage. Their plan is to just get pregnant, not get married – not that getting married right out of high school is such a hot idea either, but at least it doesn’t involve an innocent baby.
If this is common ( and I’m not at all sure it is) the young women in question are apparently missing one piece of the puzzle- the person who wants to marry them and support them. Nearly all graduating seniors will be 18 within a few months after graduation. At that point, the only real control the parents have is financial- I can’t make my kids attend college or keep them from getting married after they turn 18, but I can make it clear that financial support from me is contingent on college attendance. They want to marry someone who will support them? I can’t stop them. They want to get a job and move out? I can’t stop them. These girls ( in whatever small numbers they exist) aren’t getting pregnant to get out of going to college. They’re getting pregnant so that they neither have to go college nor support themselves because they believe ( accurately or not) that if they get pregnant they will be able to continue their high school existence while mom and dad pick up the financial responsibility ( and probably much of the child-rearing responsibility).
Does it happen? Of course. I knew people who tried it 25 years ago. Is it common? I don’t think so, and certainly not among girls who just spent 4 years trying to get into an Ivy League college.