Introduction
Teen pregnancy has been a controversial topic since the idea has been deemed as a societal unacceptance. Looking back at history, it was prominent that young girls immediately find a suitable husband while they still possess their youthful beauty. Now that such ideologies have transformed into a violation, there has been many studies that explain the downfall of teen childbearing. The evolution of education requires a full attention with no distractions in order to succeed before adulthood, having a child is considered a huge distraction in reaching full potentials of teenagers. It is also a risk in a teenager’s health and wellbeing, as well as the babies. One’s body is not fully developed at such a young age, therefore creating uncertainty of birth defects and a mother’s post birth effects. Influences of society and growing technologies can influence the birth rates of teens today. With the growth of social media, many nonprofit agencies use it as a tool for promoting health information. While teen mothers go through their own struggles facing realities, teen fathers have grown stigmas of unreliability and predator figures. These are only a few of the implication’s teen pregnancy can implicate the lives of the teen parents and surrounding loved one’s. Through a feminist perspective, we can see inequalities that teens and peers face when dealt with this specific social problem.
Literature review
Importance
In our expanding societies, it is important for everyone to know the challenges that they must face when trying to survive. The world is going to keep changing, while there are solutions arising for present problems, it will create new problems that the upcoming generations must be able to overcome. Having a child, while still considered a kid, can be a difficult circumstance. It can be mentally straining considering the responsibly it takes to raise a child as well as the responsibly it takes to keep up with schooling, not to mention the strength it takes to bear a child for 9 months. Pregnancy at a young age is not only exhausting, it also brings shame and embarrassment to the individual and the family which can lead to high stress levels that can factor in the teens inability to finish high school or even have the baby. A lot of decisions have to made when dealing with this process. When contraceptives fail, there is the choice of abortion, and if they don’t choose that they can opt for adoption. The decision to keep their baby and take on the challenge doesn’t only affect the teen parents, but also relationships with friends and parents. Having knowledge of at least a few of the negative outcomes is crucial when making such decisions. The liberal feminist believes that liberation for women is the freedom to determine their own social role and to compete with men on terms that are as equal as possible. The liberal feminist works to create and change laws to promote women’s opportunities (Peirce, 1990).
Search Process
When thinking about teen pregnancy, one of the first concerns is the educational aspect. Whether or not the teen will continue in school and if they will graduate and move onto higher education. Looking into the effects of the educational attainment of teenage parents is the most important prospect their families and their schools consider. The teens may need day care or other programs to help facilitate in earning their diploma, cheaper forms would be asking family members to watch the kid out of the kindness of their hearts; this would mainly be the grandparents. Examining the positive and negative impacts of the media should also be looked into considering today’s teens are very influential over their screens. There have been several shows that portray teen parents and their everyday lifestyles. Many of which leave out the father’s perspective and/or standpoint on the whole pregnancy itself. Their opinions of how it happened and their impressions of stereotypes of “Teen Fathers” are just as important as the mothers.
Critical Analysis
EDUCATION
Looking the educational consequences of teen childbearing, policy makers generally operate under the assumption that teen childbearing has negative consequences for woman and, as a result, organize efforts to prevent teen childbearing. The question “is teen childbearing indicated as endogeneity?” was asked in a 2013 study on educational ramification. In the study, women ages 24-34 (avg. 29) completed up to 14 years of education. Approximately 12% of those young women had birth before age 19 (Kane, Morgan, Harris, & Guilkey, 2013). It was found that teen mothers complete 2 less years of schooling than non-teen mothers with no other covariate included, sociodemographic covariates reduce difference by less than 1 year. Interestingly enough, Women living in two-biological families complete more years of education. Non-Hispanic black women exhibit 32% greater odds of having a teen birth relative to non-Hispanic white women (Kane, Morgan, Harris, & Guilkey, 2013). Young women residing with two biological parents exhibit lower odds than those residing in any other family type, as do women whose parents report higher levels of education. The study suggests that approximately a little over half of the sample would not have a teen birth regardless of values of control variables that this mass point would overwhelm the effects of observed covariates and result in a predicted probability of a teen birth for these women. The treatment effect of the heterogeneous across the sample because young women respond differently to the treatment of having a teen birth and because decisions to have a teen birth and continue ones’ education are jointly determined. A likely contender is favorable self-selection. For example, if the adolescents mother had a teen pregnancy that did not negatively affect the mother’s education outcomes, the daughter may be more likely to have a teen birth but also work to achieve her desired level of education. Several studies suggest that teen mothers often “recoup” educational losses in their late 20s and early 30s by going back to school or by gaining specialized employment training (Kane, Morgan, Harris, & Guilkey, 2013). The argument here is that having a child at any point is difficult and has consequences for women’s labor market participation and economic independence that can depend, in part, on the time of observation.
Is teen birth, in and of itself, problematic? In the 4 years of life, cognitive, behavioral, and health disparities between the children of teen parents and their peers take root and intensify, and policy dollars invested in early childhood programs, such as child care, pay off in improved outcomes throughout the life course. Public discourse suggests that the best place for a teen mother to be is at school or work, as evidenced by the debate around welfare reform and the resulting restrictions on underage mothers’ activities. Families supported by generous assistance programs tend to choose center care, but if supports are less available, they choose home-based care provided by kin or non-kin. Kin-based care is frequently more affordable, but also more unstable and unreliable.
CARE SETTING
In a study on child care arrangements, the question “Are child care arrangements related to the outcomes of teen parents’ children and their mothers?” Was asked (Mollborn & Blalock, 2012). Teenage mothers are in a life phase when the development of human capital is crucial for long-term outcomes. In this study, the research separates groups into categories of class-based child-care options. Children in the “prenatal care” class were more disadvantaged than those in the “paid home-based care”, free kin-based care” and “parental care” classes, on a variety of dimensions. The “prenatal care” class was overrepresented among children whose grandmother’s educational attainment was less than a high school degree and whose mothers had fewer years of education, no school enrollment and no paid work hours. “prenatal care” class are important to note; this class was underrepresented among African Americans and children whose fathers were teenagers and overrepresented among whites. Bias may result from the selection of families with higher incomes or better parenting skills into higher quality care settings. In sum, teen parent families selected into child-care classes in nonrandom ways, with more disadvantaged teen parents more likely to be in the “parental care” class. The “paid home-based care” class spent substantially more money on child care than other teen parents. Center care arrangements would be associated with increased cognitive and behavior scores among teen parents’ children compared to parental care. It was found that for reading scores, the positive association with membership in the “free kin-based” and “center care” classes were explained by the parenting and by factors influencing the selection of teen parents’ children into child care arrangements. The gain in socioeconomic measures and reduced fertility experienced by teen mothers in nonparental care classes might be a reason why teen parents’ children also benefited from these care arrangements. Families with limited resources often avoid higher cost care options in early childhood, resulting in diversity of care settings among teen parents, and that many children migrate into center-based care settings in the prekindergarten year. It was found that receiving various types of nonparental care was associated with modest improvements in child and maternal outcomes across a variety of domains (Mollborn & Blalock, 2012). These findings are consonant with literature on the effects of intervention programs for teen parents that include center-based child care, although less is known about non-center care settings.
It is possible that higher quality care settings might improve children’s outcomes more substantially? The result showed some types of nonparental care were more beneficial for children in teen-parent compared to non-teen-parent families (Mollborn & Blalock, 2012). The “paid home-based care” class was associated with significantly more positive reading, math and behavior scores among teen parents’ children then among non-teen parents’ children. The descriptive analysis founded little differences in “paid home-based care” quality or time spent in care compared to other nonparental care arrangements among teen-parents’ families, and supplemental analyses showed that its quality was not significantly different than for non-teen-parent families in the same class. Teen-parent families in the “paid home-based care” class spent substantially more money on child care than any other class, but the same was not true of non-teen-parent families. The higher the cost did not appear to translate into higher quality, but it may have captured unmeasured aspects of family resources. Future qualitative and quantitative research should focus on why different types of non-parental care predicted positive outcomes for this marginalized population of families. Findings identified three explanatory pathways:
1. The selection of disadvantaged teen-parent families into the “parental care” class
2. The duration of children’s exposure to nonparental care
3. The positive associations between nonparental care arrangements and maternal socioeconomic and fertility outcomes (Mollborn & Blalock, 2012).
MEDIA INFLUENCES
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) launched its “teen pregnancy and social media” web page in 2011. Social media has become a popular venue for health education and social reform efforts, and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has spearheaded many of these methods. The National Campaign’s use of media reveals strategies that draw on and promote certain characteristics of adolescence as it is defined in popular US culture, such as distractibility, rebelliousness, preoccupation with trends, and an unwilling love of screens. The National Campaign works with television networks to produce shows that portray teen pregnancy as universally difficult and undesirable, while also accommodating the producers’ profit-making goals. They provide TV writers with information about the apparent causes and consequences of teenage sex and pregnancy. The recognize TV’s ability to generate a “cool factor” that a nonprofit could not. In this way, as long as sex and pregnancy are portrayed as having thorny results, teenage pregnancy prevention can become commensurate with the high levels of sex, drugs, and other content that help create a sense of intrigue, rebellion, or coolness and that draw adolescent viewers. Based in the reality that social media interfaces such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr increasingly shape the daily lives and identities of the majority of Americans, a growing number of nonprofit and governmental organizations utilize them for certain aspects of their missions. The National Campaign relies on the notion that teenagers typify a general trend toward a perpetually interlinked, screen-based society in which individuals publicly and semipublicly define themselves by selecting preprogrammed characteristics and by consuming and sharing online activities, media and information. These strategies make up a set of biopolitical technologies that help to construct a kind of cyber safety net based on the notion that social well-being is secured through appropriate sexual behavior, which is in turn secured through the dissemination of key information and proper values to teenagers.
Could exposure to these media images of pregnant teens and very young new moms have had an impact on how teens behave, leading to changes in the likelihood of becoming teen mothers themselves? In 2012, 29.4 out of every 1,000 girls between ages of 15 and 19gave birth in the United States, significant compared to other countries mainly having 5-10 out of 1,000. A study on media influences argues that teen motherhood is more appropriately considered a maker of social problem rather than a direct cause (Kearney & Phillip , 2015). It is likely to be true that children are off to a better start in life if they are born to older mothers. Especially if their married, acquire more education and earnings potential, and acquire the skills needed to be more effective parents during those additional years.
Sex education programs, abstinence only education programs, improved access to contraception are policies that help prevent teen pregnancy. A new policy being considered is the role of what might be a social media campaign in the guise of very popular reality tv show depicting the challenges of teen pregnancy and mother hood. It may have contributed to the sharp decline since 1991 w/ 61.8 per 1,000 girls who get pregnant.
The dominant discourse is that of the bureaucratic experts, who are most often portrayed by the media as advocates of teen mothers. Yet in reinterpreting the meaning of teen motherhood, these advocates have incentives to tell their own stigma stories about teen mothers (Deirdre, 2014). Focusing on the MTV hit series “16 and Pregnant”, the show highlights difficulties of raising a child at such a young age and have concluded from this coincident timing that show is at least partially responsible for recent decreases in teen childbearing rates. Others argue that the show glamorizes teen pregnancy, with its cast members essentially becoming “media stars,” whose lives are followed in the tabloids well after their show airs. Main analysis exploits geographic variation in measures of the shows viewership to investigate whether differential exposure to the show led to differential changes in teen birth rates. MTV describes the show as an “hour long documentary series focusing on the controversial subject of teen pregnancy. Each episode follows 5 to 7-month period I the life of a teenager as she navigates the bumpy terrain of adolescence, growing pains, rebellion, and coming of age; all while dealing with being pregnant.” The show aired on JUNE 2009-OCT 2013. The girls on the show are largely from high birth rate states with 15 of 47 from Texas, Florida and Alabama; 68 percent of the teen moms on the show are white, non-Hispanic. Most of them did not live in a two-parent household (38 of 47). Which is consistent with broader statistics of teens giving birth, 18 out of 47 girls reported opposition to getting pregnant, although non-report they were looking to get pregnant. Almost all of the boyfriends stuck around through the pregnancy (40 of 47), only 4 of the fathers were completely uninvolved, 24 of 44 of the relationships between the girl and her boyfriend either collapsed or were very strained by the end of the episode. If viewership had a very strong negative correlation with teens birth rates, we might suspect that the only people tuning into the show were those teens who were not at risk of becoming teen parents, which would make it unlikely that the show had a sizeable effect on aggerate teen birth rates. Perhaps the show is particularly appealing to individuals living in locations where teen childbearing is rising. The study concluded that 16 and pregnant had a sizable, casual impact on teen birth rates; 4.3 percent reduction in teen births between June 2009 and the end of 2010 (Daniel, 2014). The show was not specifically designed as an anti-teen childbearing campaign, but it seems to have had that effect by showing that being a pregnant teen and a new mother is hard. It strains relationships with friends, parents and the baby’s father, and means physical discomfort, potential health problems and sleep deprivation. Apparently, those images affected teen viewers motivation to avoid that outcome.
By age 17, the traditionally socialized teenage girl will have learned, from many and varied sources, that how she looks is more important than what she thinks, that her main goal in life is to find a man to take care of her financially, and that her place will be wherever he wants it to be. The non-traditionally socialized 17-year-old girl will have learned the basic tenants of feminism- that biological differences don’t explain all the differences in social status, roles and behavior; that these differences are socially created and must be removed; that real differences shouldn’t be grounds for assigning a lower status to female attributes; and that women shouldn’t be urged to think that they can find fulfillment only in relation to men and that their identity is given to them by their appearance in the eyes and minds of men (Peirce, 1990).
FATHER’S
Most research on teen pregnancy centers on woman as the main participants. In the study of educational ramification, it was said that they “examined only women because the burden of teen pregnancy falls more heavily on mothers (than fathers) and because young men’s reports of parenthood are unreliable” (Kane, Morgan, Harris, & Guilkey, 2013). Research analyzing teen pregnancy requires us to navigate multiple realities. The importance of these issues tells us little about how the men see themselves, or how they make sense of their experiences as teen fathers. Much of the literature on teen fathers relies on narrow conceptions of gender and masculinity. Young men who become teen fathers frequently face stereotypes that label them as fickle at best and predatory at worst. Focusing on the 26 teen fathers the study interviewed, none of the men blamed themselves for the pregnancy. These men draw heavily on norms of masculinity to construct themselves as not responsible for the pregnancy “cause every time I asked her if I should wear a condom she said no.” Contraceptives in the US has become increasingly feminized. Both men and women tend to think that contraception is the responsibility of the women and that it’s the woman’s fault when something goes wrong. A few of the young men tried to claim that their girlfriends were trying to get pregnant by telling the men no when asked to use a condom and refusal/complication with birth control. “The skills a young woman needs in order to use contraception effectively are precisely the skills that society discourages in “nice girls” who are expected to be passive, modest, shy, sexually inexperienced and dedicated to the comfort of others. When it comes to contraception, she is caught in a net of double standards” (Weber, 2012). If a guy hooks up with a girl, she is the one who let her guard down, explaining that sex means something very different for man and women. The real problem, as men saw it, was the women’s choice to not take the pill. Also, a critique of ‘postfeminist’ media cultures, suggesting teen presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of ‘sexy’ self-display, yet face repercussions, moral condemnation and ‘slut shaming’ when they do so (Ringrose, Harvey, & Gill, 2013). The men didn’t always blame the women per se, sometimes it was difficulties with the pill due to hormonal reactions and body changes. One boy stated, “you know how when they say it looks worse for a girl than a boy,” to explain inequalities toward the attention teen mothers get is more important that the attention fathers receive. The men of the study all had one commonality, they wanted to be seen as “good guys.” They relied on one of two primary cultural discourses to explain the pregnancy: boys will be boys and girl’s promiscuity. In hopes to have others understand the nature of a young man’s hormones toward girls who portray their body in a desirable way (Weber, 2012).
Summary
It is widely known the impacts that may happen when making such a decision to become a teen parent(s). In today’s society it is rather shameful to have a child when teenagers are still considered children themselves. As appose to times of the early 1900s where it was appropriate, and even encouraged, for young girls to be betrothed to suitable bachelors by the choosing of their parents. Times has changed for the better in the rethinking of wedding daughters as young as 14 years old. Now that research has taught society that the body is not fully developed until early/mid 20s, and that DOE curriculum education is required through the age of 18, people can now be able to create their own paths for their lives, while knowing the consequences that come along with them. That is, there is plenty of time in one’s life to create a family, when they’re ready. If we take on a feminist perspective, we can see how women can be blamed for the misuse or no use of contraceptives and the manipulation of their sexual portrayal in the media as the ones who initiate the temptation for males. However, it is really institutions that exploit and influence those images.