Memphis High School Dealing with Pregnancy Boom

[Schneed10]

There are a million factors at play. Poor parental guidance, lack of sex education, the typical stuff. But also:

- Lower-income areas often have single parents raising kids. So it's the world the teenage girl grew up in; if mom can raise me all by herself why do I need to be married to have a child? It never occurs to them, it was just the world they were brought up in.

- You know what they say about idle hands. These kids usually are not keeping busy enough. Parents should have them joining the yearbook club, or playing sports, or playing an instrument, or cheerleading, or choir, or dance, or theater, whatever. Just have them doing something to keep them busy.

- You know how high schools are, there are popularity tiers. All it takes is for two or three of the tier 1 girls in school (they're usually the attractive ones) to get pregnant at the same time, and all of a sudden at that school being pregnant is in style. Or at least any stigma is removed from it.

- I do think Firstdown is right, where there's shame coming from the peer group, the stigma remains strong, even when a few of the popular girls get knocked up.

- And then sometimes kids just screw up. You can be an honor student with a loving mom and dad at home, the whole nine yards. But the condom breaks, or a momentary display of indiscretion and going unprotected leads to pregnancy. They're kids, sometimes they do dumb things, even the bright ones.

I'm scared to death for the time when my girls reach their teenage years. I'll be the dad sitting on the porch in a rocking chair in the dark, with a shotgun on his lap.