Worry Just Will Not Seem to Leave My Mind Alone

                One out of ten births is to a teenage mother. It could be the fact that I am the mother of twin girls who happen to be teenagers, but it seems like this year all I hear about is teen pregnancies. It is terrifying! After hearing last week that a girl from our home town was pregnant I have to say I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I had predicted it seven years ago. I realize that sounds harsh and I guess it probably was, but all I did was asses the child’s situation and her personality and I knew what lay ahead for her.

She was the youngest child of a woman who had given birth to her first daughter as a teen. Her teenage sister was a mother already, and there were no men in the picture for any of the children. She was desperate for attention and even at a very young age was going about it in all the wrong ways. I had to stop letting my daughters spend time with her after an incident in which she tried to get  my daughter and another friend to all dress in bikini tops, shorts, and high heels to walk up and down the street, they were eight and nine year olds. I wish I had been wrong about how things would turn out for her and I have to wonder, if she has a daughter will she share the same fate?

                This week my daughters told me an old teammate of theirs is pregnant. I don’t know the teen very well, but I do know enough to know that her life is entirely different than that of the teen from back home. She has a father, it appears she has never been deprived of attention, and she is not poor. She seemed to be the typical American teen. So with just these two examples I see firsthand that teen pregnancies can and do happen to all kinds of girls.  That scares me.

                I could argue that we need better sex education programs or that we need to stop teaching abstinence based sex education, but that isn’t really what I wanted to do here. I wish our teens were better prepared for the hormone rush that comes along with being their age but at the end of the day you really just have to hope you have done as much as you can, and keep communication open. I wish I knew what happens at the homes of pregnant teens so I could learn from it but no one really knows what happens behind closed doors. All I can do is keep my girls focused on their future and their goals. Keep them informed about birth control and STD prevention and hope that they can come to me if they have questions.

                The sex education curriculum my girls have had wasn’t perfect, but it did involve something I thought was fantastic; it made the kids ask their parents questions nightly. It helped open a dialogue on many issues I hadn’t even thought about yet. We had already talked to our daughters of course, but this was just an extra tool to help cover things we hadn’t thought of yet. I think that homework must have really been good for some who hadn’t even began to discuss sex with their children yet. Even though according to the CDC teen pregnancy is down I can’t help but feel that every time I turn around I am either seeing or hearing about a pregnant teen. I guess it could have to do with the fact that I am the overly anxious mother of teenage girls…