I have a question about the whole "kicking her to the curb" idea. What does the law say? I know that in my state parents are responsible for the care and upkeep of their children until age 18 and there are consequences for parents who don't do that. Teenage mothers are considered adults for the purposes of healthcare and decision-making for their child, but I'm not sure if they are legally emancipated or not. If I sent any other 15yo out into the street with no means of support, the law would be on me like white on rice!
So what happens when a parent *does* kick the girl out at 15? Do they send her to foster care? Does CPS come knocking at her parents door? Who is responsible for the girl's housing & schooling if her parents wash their hands of her? Does she just live in the streets and alleys with her newborn while her parents are living it up in their nice warm home? What does the law say about this?
Teaching in a public school, I've seen a number of "kicked out kids" over the years -- we do see it all. Typically this situation has to do with drugs and rule breaking, and the parents have tried this and that without seeing any positive effect. Typically it's a boy who's 17-18-19, though I could give other examples as well and a few of them have to do with pregnancy.
Realistically, these kids don't end up on the streets -- the posters who've expressed concerns about them becoming prostitutes are really off base, though I have taught a couple high school seniors who were strippers. Yes, really. High schoolers tend to have friends or parents of friends who'll take them in, at least temporarily. This is especially true when it's a pregnancy situation; after all, the girl didn't get pregnant by herself, and often she'd end up with the boyfriend's family.
As for the law, yes, you are required legally to provide the necessities of life for your child 'til he or she is 18. Technically, if your child turns 18 during his or her senior year of high school,
you can kick him out before graduation without legal issues. If a 15 year old (pregnant or not) ended up in foster care, the state would attempt to either reconcile the family and get the child back in the house OR would initiate TPR (Termination of Parental Rights). You cannot have the state support your child AND maintain your parental rights. However, this isn't something that happens in real life. Teens who are in the foster care system tend to enter as children. Teens without stable homes tend to bounce between families of friends, and
usually it has to do with drug use. It would be better for a hypothetical 15-year old to go into foster care; foster kids do get some limited help beyond 18 to help them "transition" into the world of adulthood. The kid sleeping on his friend's couch doesn't get that.
On the other hand, you ARE NOT LEGALLY required to provide one single thing for your child's child -- not even the first diaper. You cannot be in trouble with CPS for refusing to care for a child who isn't yours, even if that child is your grandchild.
To extend the topic . . . 16-17 is, in my opinion, a very unfair age for parents. If your child runs away from home (say, she goes to her boyfriend's house, tells his mom that you're mean to her, won't feed her, make her do all the housework), the police
will not bring her home. But if you put her out before she's 18, Social Services will come after you for support or TPR. Like I said, unfair to parents.
My opinion is that if more parents were a little tougher with their "support" there wouldn't be a pregnant teen to throw out. Maybe if more girls knew that their parents wouldn't be there to support them financially they would choose abortion, or adoption over becoming a parent themself. IMO, that is the best option.
I don't completely disagree. Pregnant teens do get enough financial help from "the system" to get by. They won't be living high on the hog, and all the statistics show that neither the mother nor the baby is likely to go far in life . . . but they won't starve. In the past, when becoming pregnant outside wedlock was a real TRAGEDY and it was SHAMEFUL to the whole family, girls tried harder to avoid getting into that situation. A male friend of mine made a comment not long ago: "When I was a teenager, the phrase 'Baby Daddy' didn't exist. You could be a boyfriend, but if your girl got pregnant, you became a husband."
We've become so compassionate today that we don't have any cautionary tales to make girls say, "I'd better be careful and think about my actions!" This has become something of a no-win situation. You don't want to hurt the children, but you do want to stop the slightly-younger-girls from making the same mistakes.
Again, unconditional love does not equal supporting whatever anyone does, financially and otherwise.
I do agree that you can love your child while saying, "I do not support this decision you are making". I'm not necessarily thinking of pregnancy as I type this, but that's true too.
I'm thinking of the parents who bail their children out of everything they get into: Failing to do their homework, getting into fights, experimenting with drugs . . . and eventually kids who experience no consequences for these things work their way up to bigger problems. So I do agree that loving your child unconditionally DOES NOT always mean supporting them through whatever decision they make.
In fact, I can give a personal example: I told my just-graduated daughter last summer that she needed to get a summer job and save half her earnings. I explained that we'd cover her tuition, dorm, and major expenses, but we expect her to cover her own books and her own spending money. I explained that her life would be MUCH EASIER later if she put away some money into a nest egg and could draw it out during her college years. She hemmed and hawed about "her last summer" and didn't work before her senior year. Same story this year: I told her in early May that she needed to start looking, but she just wouldn't. At this point, it's too late. So she is going to college with a dorm room and a meal card -- and very little money. She has made a mistake, and we're not going to be enablers. She's going to be unhappy when her friends are going out to dinner, etc., but we aren't going to support the mistake she's made. She has to reap the consequences of her actions (or, in this case, in-actions).
"Her choices", not anyone elses.
In theory it's "her choice",
but if she's counting on her parents to help raise the child -- either by providing financial help or by babysitting or whatever -- then they absolutely have the right to say what they can/can't/will/won't do: Won't get up during the night, will pay for medical but not clothes or diapers, will babysit for work but not social events, won't let the boyfriend sleep over, will let the child live at home X amount of time, whatever. Few of us have limitless resources, and they have every right to tell the teenaged mother what resources they are able to share with
her child. Helping a child raise her child could have very serious consequences on a parent's own life, and it's okay to say what you are able to give.
How is the 30-year-old who just lost her job, got pregnant unexpectedly and has no supportive family or anything else have any more choice than the 15-year-old?
Are you kidding? The 30-year old, even if she has just lost her job, has many more resources than the 15-year old. Her education is complete and she has work experience; she is qualified to find another job (whereas the teen has years of schooling ahead of her before she can begin working at all). Since she's been working, she should have some savings to tide her over 'til she finds a job. With luck, she may have a severence package from her old employer, and she may have COBRA insurance to bridge the gap between jobs. A typical 30-year old has a home or apartment, furnishings for that apartment, a credit rating, a car. And most importantly, the 30-year old has enough maturity to reason through what it will take to raise a child on her own. Even if she has no children yet, she has an inkling of what daycare, insurance, food, etc. will cost. The 30-year old who's just lost her job and has no family STILL HAS RESOURCES. The 15-year old has essentially none and must depend upon her family for almost everything. The difference between the two is huge.
You do realize that there are so many more opportunities for pregnant teens than to just drop out and quit highschool?
Yes, we have options for pregnant teens, but I can't say that I've seen the stellar results that you're describing. It's not about the programs: It's about the teens. Taking care of the baby turns out to be more than they expected. The emotional fallout between them and the baby's father, their parents, the loss of friends . . . it turns out to be more than they expected. And if I had to list the #1 thing my high school students
don't do well, it'd be their time management. As a whole, they absolutely STINK at utilizing their time well, and girls who have to fit a baby into their lives really have to be able to categorize their time, if they want to juggle school and a baby.
For almost all the teen moms, no matter how much support they have, school isn't top priority. In my experience, girls who are already high school seniors tend to "hold it together" relatively well -- perhaps because they're older (there's a world of difference between 15 and 18; believe me, my two girls ARE 15 and 18) and more mature, perhaps because they usually have only a few classes left to complete. But younger girls just fall to pieces and rarely finish, no matter how much support they have.
I didn't say there were not programs that exist some places. I was making an analogy to dropping out. However, statistics say teen girls who decide to be parents have a dismal educational record. It's something like only HALF of teen mothers get a high school diploma.
In all fairness, there's another side to that coin: In my experience, most of the girls who get pregnant and keep their babies aren't our most stellar students in the first place. Their academics and study skills were shakey in the first place, and when faced with the challenge of raising a baby, they don't graduate. Often these girls were already behind in their classes, and once they become pregnant and miss a bunch of days, they say, "Well, I won't be able to make it. I'll just quit."
I'm sure that someone will give an example of a girl who was #1 in her class, and I'm sure that those students are out there -- in fact, as I think waaaaay back, I can remember ONE girl from when I was a fairly new teacher -- but by and large, our top students are either not having sex, or are paying more attention to birth control (
that's the likely scenerio), or are choosing abortion over keeping the baby. But I don't see these stronger academic students -- the ones who would've finished strong in school and graduated on time -- I don't see them pregnant.
The reason I "believe it is better" is that, on average, adopted children have higher rates of depression, institutionalization, and other awful things, than children who remain in their birth families.
True enough -- adoptive children do have to go through the "my mother didn't want me" concept, a difficult thing the majority of us don't have to face.
However, you're comparing adopted children
to all children raised by their birthparents -- no one keeps statistics on the babies whose parents
considered adoption but didn't go through with it; thus, you're including all the children who were raised by adult two biological parents in a house with a white picket fence. In this hypothetical situation, the teenaged mother doesn't have the option to give her child that optimal two-parent childhood. If abortion is off the table, her options are 1) adoption or 2) becoming a single parent during her sophomore year. If you compare the stats for adopted children and children raised by teen mothers . . . well, adoption starts looking pretty good.
I didn't manage to cut-and-paste it, but I'm also not buying the idea that
the majority of all pregnancies are unplanned. Teenaged pregnancies, sure. But ALL? No.
). I wouldn't lock her in a closet and pretend she wasn't in the room with me when she walked in or anything like that. As a PP said, maybe that's just my kneejerk reaction now, maybe I would actually react differently if I were in the situation.
You do realize that the year is 2012, not 1912. I just don't believe that. Period. One reason being is that is sounds illegal.
