I don’t know what month/year I’d pick! First knee-jerk reaction would be 9 months. However…as someone mentioned way up-thread, Grandpa is not the normal person that teenage girls discuss sexual matters with and we’ve had no such discussions. Just sayin’, it wouldn’t be shocking to learn that she’s been sexually active for the past three years or so. If that’s the case, she’s obviously doing something right and hopefully she’ll continue whatever it is she’s been doing.
OTOH, if this is all new to both her and the boy, it’s back to nine months.
John, if it’s any comfort, there are three children in my house of about that same age and they’re all screwing up royally in various ways (one of them similar to your situation). This has been a fascinating thread.
Isn’t the pregnancy rate with no birth control (but not actively trying to get pregnant) only something like 8%? It’s not outside the realm of possibility for her to be sexually active, **and **not using birth control, **and **lucky.
The number has to have a time line associated with it to make sense. If your chances of winning a coin toss are 50% and you make 3 coin tosses then your chances are good that you will get the pregnant side of the coin. If couples could only produce a child in their lifetime with the odds of 8% then we would disappear as a species.
It’s not a **lifetime **odds of 8%, it’s 8% **per occurence **of sexual intercourse, and that’s without trying to get pregnant (e.g., timing sex to ovulation). So, while there’s a good chance that she’d get pregnant after three years of unprotected sex, it’s by no means guaranteed. You will note that I included “lucky” in my post.
My daughter has had an internet boyfriend for a few years now. She wants to meet him. We’ve told her that when she saves up sufficient airfare to fly her and one of us to Seattle, we’ll allow them to meet face to face.
8% per incidence, I’d think. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the odds of NOT getting pregnant should be 92% first time. Then 92% x 92% second time, or 84.64%. Third time, 92% X 92% X 92%=77.87%. By the eighth time, it’s about 50%.
According to this, the failure rate for the first year with the “ancient” rhythm method is 9%, the “modern” standard days method is 5% if used perfectly…but 25% with typical use. If you don’t even try to time it, the percentages should be higher still.
Wrong - percent effectiveness of contraception is measured in woman-years. So if you are looking at something with 98% effectiveness, 100 women use that method for a year, 2 become pregnant sometime during the year of use. That’s what 98% effective means.
It is possible to learn how to be an adult and be responsible without being thrown out onto the street at the age of 18.
I’m 22 now - left home at 20 after graduating from a tech school. Parents got me my first car, plates are still in dad’s name (but I pay them). You don’t think I don’t know how lucky I am? The money I save from not having a car payment goes into savings. I don’t run out and buy stuff like big-screen TVs or go out and party every weekend, which is why I have a good cushion now that I’m unemployed - it would have been enough for a down payment on a house even. I talk with my parents about how I should handle tax refunds and things like RRSPs.
But apparently because I can rely on my parents to help me out financially if I needed it I’m not truly a responsible adult…
Edit: I should probably state that I’ve seen this view a lot of times here on the boards - in this particular situation with the OP’s granddaughter, yeah she doesn’t seem to be ready to be a responsible adult. It was just that this thread made me grumpy enough to reply.
According to the Wikipedia thing I cited, 25% of those trying to time fertility miss it and get pregnant in a year. By your definition, that isn’t phrased correctly (it should be 75% to reflect who didn’t get pregnant). I don’t know where Shot from Guns got the stat…why can it only be phrased one way?
Mathematically there has to be an average number of tries before pregnancy occurs under given circumstances; maybe researchers estimated it in arriving at a different way of phrasing the stat.
The pregnancy rate w/o birth control is 85% in a year. And that’s an average, with 18 being a very fertile age. It doesn’t work very well to report pregnancy as a rate per single incidence, because both sex and fertility are not distributed randomly throughout the woman’s cycle. I doubt you could get people to sign up for a randomized controlled experiment where you drew a day and on that day, but that day only, you were to have that month’s sex.
First, choose people who aren’t using any birth control of course. Second, rule out any women who have had a baby recently (hormonal changes and breast feeding would affect fertility). Third, rule out anyone who was “trying” to get pregnant…it could indicate possible underlying problems and/or the things people try to maximize their chances rather than letting nature run its course.
So we end up with a bunch of couples who are on average in somewhat normal health, having as much or as little sex as they want. Ask them to record the number of times they have coitus, maybe just a check mark on a calendar. Count the number of those who become pregnant, divide by number of check marks.
IANA experimental design guy, but I guess you could randomly assign to see if other factors are at play (e.g. see if there are more pregnancies in different climates, by various SES backgrounds, and so on).
Even though it’s not the sort of thing that Grandpa can do, I’d recommend doing what you can to get one of her parents to take her to get a Depo-Provera shot before she goes. At least that’s an idiot-proof form of birth control and would buy some time before the inevitable accidental pregnancy (I am in the health profession, and it never ceases to amaze me how efficiently the people least capable of taking care of kids manage to get pregnant).
That’s a great plan. Now imagine that your daughter is within a couple of weeks of turning 18 and the boy buys an airplane ticket for her. ONE airplane ticket. She insists on going. How would you deal with that?
So my granddaughter and her Nice Young Man[sup]TM[/sup] came up and spent the day. Rode an ATV around, rode a horse around, went fishing and caught a bunch of fish for dinner, visited, alla that.
If he were some local boy she was starting to date there would be little to complain about. He seems to be well above average in the personality and attitude department.
However!!! Seeing them together, watching how they act, they are ready to go to movies and concerts. They are light-years away from being ready to move in and establish a household.
We’ve printed out a bunch of things, some from sites posted in this thread, and they promise to read and consider them. I guess that’s all we can do.
Good thought about the Depo shot. I’d be willing to pay, but I don’t know if that will get done or not.
kushiel - Are you saying her grandfather should watch her descend into what is likely to be a spiral down into too-young parenthood and working-class poor lifestyle and say “Bravo, child! We love you and will support you in all you do! Just feel free to come to me when you need bailing out. My door and wallet will always be open to you to fix your dumb-ass decisions.”
Yes, children have to leave the nest, and yes, most parents help them get to the point where they’re self-sufficient. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t guide them away from obvious pitfalls, and let the child know that the results their stupid decisions are to be handled by the kid.
John Carter - I think that the car is effectively hers anyway, so you should title it in her name. I do think you should give her an estimated list of maintenance and costs of upkeep so she can understand that, like a horse, the expensive part of having a car isn’t the initial cost. She should already understand with horses that you have feed and farrier and vet costs associated. BTW - if she wants to come to TN, my TB needs to be ridden. He’s sweet, but he’ll be very fresh and I don’t bounce as well as I used to.
Of course it is. But if you’ve actually read all of this thread (or at least John Carter’s contributions), you’d know that this young woman is not anywhere close to as responsible as you seem to have been.
Pulled it out of my ass. Tol’ja I wasn’t sure about it.
… Please tell me that TB in this context means thoroughbred and isn’t your nickname for your husband.
I think you’re taking the wrong lesson from this thread. The problem is not the trip, the trip went fine, it’s the granddaughter IN GENERAL being foolish and immature. It sounds like John Carter has been trying to drive some sense into her for years with limited success. The boy is just the latest bit.
I think this underlines a common parenting problem. Rather then give children independence slowly and let them learn good judgment, a lot of parents instead try to “protect” their kids up until the last possible moment (often when they leave for college). Then the kid is both out of the parents’ power and also entirely unused to being responsible for themselves. Worst of both worlds.
The only good way to deal with the situation John Carter was in is to pray that you did a good enough job in the first 17 years of the kid’s life that things will turn out okay. Not much comfort if you’re seeing definite signs that the kid isn’t ready for independence, but it’s really too late for an emergency intervention. What can one do, after all? Threaten to disown them? Refuse to pay for college? I’ve seen both done, and they have amounted to “we think you might destroy your life, so we’re going to destroy it for you.” Quite the overreaction for, say, a tattoo :smack:
