Friday, September 19, 2008

"I do." easier said than done.

There has been a lot of talk about teenage pregnancy lately. From last year's unlikely hit movie Juno to Bristol Palin's pregnancy teen pregnancy has found its way into our national discussion once again. Sociologists note the difficulties that teens face in both pregnancy and marriage. The NY Times recently printed an article about the difficulty that teens face in staying married. The article said,
Studies show that today teenage marriages are two to three times more likely to end in divorce than are marriages between people 25 years of age and older. The most comprehensive study on marriage and age that sociologists cite was published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2001, from 1995 data, and it found that 48 percent of those who marry before 18 are likely to divorce within 10 years, compared with 24 percent of those who marry after age 25.
This is not to mention the challenges of teen marriage which adds enormous complexity to the difficulty. Here is a program about the difficulties pregnant teens face and how to overcome them.

1 comment:

  1. Reading this blog made me think about my trip to England this year because in the area around my grandparents, many teenage girls see pregnancy as a way out of working. If they have a baby while they're a teenager, they get money from the government to pay for that child until it is 18, so the girls pop out a kid and think that they are set for money until that kid grows up. Walking around the streets made me feel almost like a snob even though that is where I'm from. Because teenage pregnancy is not something we are exposed to in our general area, it is shocking to walk around and see young girls like me carrying around babies as they go through their daily lives. I feel like even if I did grow up around there, I wouldn't see pregnancy as a way of life while I was a teenager just because I have more aspirations in life than being a mom before I can care for a child. It makes me feel bad for the girls back in England because they have no one there to say maybe that's not the best idea. They get money and they are forgotten. Hopefully something will change back there so that more children are born out of love and care than out of a need for money, or else I feel like a cycle will be created where the babies of teenage mothers will become teenage mothers themselves and just create more and more problems.

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