Me and my two best friends growing up all got pregnant at 16. In 2009. The things we had in common: 1. our mothers were teen moms. 2. Unstable home lives. 3. Very poor. 4. We all survived csa. 5. Baby dads were all over 18. We didn't have a pact. Just a whole lot in common that lead to this. We were friends from kindergarten on and people really thought we did it on purpose. We absolutely did not.
I wish people talked about those things a lot of young girls have in common There are risk factors. Those are common in a lot of teenagers who get pregnant.
I think Precious is so important because it’s one of the few where the pregnancies aren’t because “omg teenagers are so horny or too curious and dumb” but just pure abuse. Many teen pregnancies are a product of abuse, not as a result of the former.
I think it tells a very important story as well. We need to listen to stories that don’t fit with our life experiences to expand our worldview. Too many of the teen pregnancy stories blame the teens saying they’re just promiscuous and babies are a punishment for premarital sex. People assume teen moms are just horny stupid teenagers. They don’t see as many of the stories of people who are SA’ed. People who are groomed by men much older than them then left. These girls all need support whether they got pregnant cuz they had consensual sex or were SA’ed.
@@mummytrollslet's not forget girls younger than 13 getting pregnant by family members. Incestuous molestation underage pregnancies are an unfortunate reality. I know a girl, who got raped by her dad and pregnant at 12. She miscarried. Let's not forget girls getting pregnant in Hollywood rape and forced abortions. 😢
Real !!! It’s the another face of the coin as well, Juno was a white girl socially beautiful with parents and people who support her and love her, she basically was a privileged girl, not all the cases in real life are like that
I'm actually pretty mad that a nice story about teen girls supporting each other to finish school despite young babies/pregnancies is turned into a salacious story about "trying to get pregnant"
All it tells me is that their sex education provision is woefully inadequate. This is the irony of conservative policies. They almost always make the situation worse while insisting that if they just do it more it will eventually get better because it's "common sense." Sex ed, crime, economics. All situations made worse by common sense conservative policies over the last 40 years, but they refuse to look at the evidence before their eyes.
@@terminallygraybut it shouldn’t have said it was based on a true story then when it really wasn’t. They just created a whole new story and caused so many problems for the REAL people who they said it was “based” on. Now most people will believe this version of events and judge these REAL people unnecessarily because they were told it was a true story. When you watch something that says it’s based on a true story that usually means the plot is true to life however dialogue is often made up, there may be characters that weren’t real and the entire thing will be exaggerated. Not bullshit everything!
@@parrotstories The small and overtaxed minds that are into this kinda stuff. They don't care about truth, they don't care about justice. All they want is CHEAP ENTERTAINMENT on tv. Giving television ANY KIND of credibility is like handing an alcoholic the keys to your liquor cabinet and expecting them to NOT steal a drink or 100. Spoiler alert ahead>> Not Gonna Happen !!!
I also think it's really important to point out that despite the popularity of teen pregnancy stories, they fail to mention that the vast majority of teen moms have a baby with a man significantly older than them. Young girls are left to shoulder judgement when they are often victims of grooming or at the very least an uneven power dynamic!! (edit: vast majority was definitely an overstatement but various studies still show a significant percentage!)
Also, if you consider the method of sex education being teached (Abstinence vs Abstinence Plus) you would find the Abstinence Plus method was more effective in teaching about sex and contraceptives and preventing teen pregnancies. While the Abstinence only method lacked the mention of contraceptives and is more "wait until marriage" based.
my cousin is having her baby soon and shes 21. tooo young i am disappointed and im 18 because she is my favorite cousin but i will still support. the only reason why i said im disappointed because 2 of my aunts gave birth in their early 20s. both my grandmas on my dad and mom side gave birth at 18 and 19
I got pregnant a month into being 19 by a 24 year old. I watched Juno while I was pregnant and just sobbed. While I wasn’t in highschool I feel like it was such a realistic depiction. I remember her saying she was wearing a “fat suit that she couldn’t take off” and it hit so hard for me. Almost a year later and my son is 7 months old and I love him more than life itself, but I can’t help but think how my life would have been different had I never gotten with that guy and gotten pregnant. I feel like having a baby before I was done growing up affected me a lot. I have so much respect for moms that make it work in highschool.
I had my first son at 18. Second with another man at 21. Shortly after my first was diagnosed with autism. My 3rd child another man’s Child at 25. I’m 31 now. It has gotten easier but it wasn’t an easy Road to walk. ❤ you got this
I saw a statistic recently that in America a 40% of the fathers responsible for pregnancies where the mother is 15 years old or younger were between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. I'm over half way thru the video but I just thought I'd add that bit of information. The problem is always presented as if it's the minor who is the problem when in reality it's adult men who are the problem. The movie Precious, therefore is likely closer to the reality of the "teen pregnancy epidemic" than any of the other media where the teen pregnancy is a by-product of relatively normal teen behaviour.
I'm mot sure if you know what statistics are, but 40 is less than 60. Assuming similar ages, girls have more power over men their age when it comes to consent. So yes, for that significant 40%, it's the men, and literally no one says otherwise. No 15 year old can consent to any adult. But for the other 60%, when colloquially "consentual" amingst teens, these girls have more power and thus hold responsibility.
@@SeanWinters wait. wait out of geniune curiousity what do you mean by "assuming similar ages, girls have more power over men their age when it comes to consent"? because if anything they have equal balance in consent??? nobody has "more consent" then their partner unless someone is being pressured into sex?
@@SeanWintersok despite how this comment is a little weird, 40% is still A LOT. just because it isnt the majority doesnt mean that it shouldnt be taken into consideration
@@sours-orchard I didn't think this was news to anyone, but I'll break it down for you. First, yes, let's talk about 2 15 year olds. Both too young for any adult(I'd say, too young for anyone including other 15 year olds). In the Western world, women control access to sex. Most men have a very low bar for their sexual partners, and women tend towards having very high bars. Whereas men control access to relationships. If a woman wants sex at any time, it's not that difficult. Most women could walk outside and just ask someone for sex, and she's likely to get men to accept. On the other hand, men control access to relationships, meaning that if a man is attractive enough, many women will desire to have a relationship with him, and it's up to him whether or not there is one, or if there's a "situation" or a "fling" or whatever substitute you want to use. In this way, 2 15 year olds, if they were to do "adult things", the girl has more "power" in this position, because the final say, most of the time, is going to be on her shoulders. Now, personally, I don't actually hold to this outdated idea of "power dynamics". When two people are in a relationship, the "power dynamics" can no longer be blamed on anything. Every adult holds equal responsibility in relationships. Still, my point is that assuming we're talking about the same age, if we're talking about who has "more power" in relation to consent, it's obviously more often the woman/girl.
@@sours-orchard Oh yes, the original point was that in 60% of teen pregnancies, we cannot pretend the girl is a victim, and the original post made it seem like every teen pregnancy was the man's fault. Ofc in the 40% it is, but it's not even in the majority, which again, is the subtext.
I went to a super small school in a poor area (only 90 kids in my grade alone). One of my classmates was a girl who constantly acted out, and never did any school assignment. Sophomore year comes and she becomes a pregnant minor. After that when the school found out the staff was all so helpful towards her, helping her prepare for a maternity leave and the assignments she’d miss. Many of the teachers were parents too and offered to donate baby stuff they no longer had use for. This support helped her turn her life around. She started paying attention in class, doing assignments, and when senior year and graduation came, she passed me in the class ranks. At our school the first 20 students with the best grades are honors students, I was placed 18. I can’t remember where she ended up placing, but it was higher than me, and I don’t think she’d ever have pushed herself to do better without that support. I heard she got accepted into one of the state’s highest universities, don’t know much after that, But I think she’s got it handled
contrary to the moral panic, i actually think watching 16 and pregnant is the reason so much of my generation and younger had sex way later or not at all. it was the opposite of glamorizing for me
I do think it may have caused a rise in teen pregnancies in the media but that was just cause youtube existed in the 2010s. I recomened watching camryn clifford's video on the rise of teen pregnancy youtubers. She talks from her experience as a teen mom
@@reechaaryal8094ironicslly there are studies that show it reduced teen pregnancies, the sex has always happened no matter if its now or 50 years ago. But st least now the kids have a better chance to have it safely.
Honestly I was like 11 or 12 when the show was on air and I knew a lot of teenagers who had kids in high school and many had sex in 6th and 7th grade. My sister was in 7th grade when a girl her age got pregnant and a girl a year younger than me had 2 kids by the age of 17
This comment is old but, I agree. I remember my Dad telling me I couldn’t watch it because he didn’t want me looking up to them. I think it did the complete opposite, and showed how hard it was.
I remember watching “I didn’t know I was pregnant” in elementary school. As a kid that was the most horrifying thing to me and I started getting paranoid 😭✋🏻 I didn’t use public bathrooms bc I was scared I would get pregnant if I accidentally sat on someone’s bodily fluids. TLC (the network) definitely capitalized off of the whole teen pregnancy panic.
omg same. I was never taught how pregnancy worked so I was constantly scared I was pregnant due to all the paranoia. I didn’t even have my period yet 😓
yh I went thru a phase where I was afraid I might be pregnant because when I was a toddler I used to share baths with this boy my age cause our mums were friends lol, I had no idea how pregnancy worked obviously 😆 I just knew you had to be naked with a boy
I have an aunt who has 9 kids, and when I was little I overheard someone say as a joke “Every time Sandy even hears the word ‘sex’ she gets pregnant,” and I took it completely literal, I was like “Oh well that’s why she has so many kids” Anyway I grew up in a red state with abstinence-only sex ed, so I did not get disabused of this notion until shockingly late
Me too. I had a very irregular period so I was constantly worried I might be pregnant even tho I was a virgin. Like, maybe I was drugged or sleep and I didn’t know? Crazy stuff.
I remember watching I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant when I was around 8-11 and being really confused about the controversy of teen moms, because I thought pregnancy just happened 💀 I couldn’t understand why it was such a shameful thing because I thought the girls had no choice and their bodies just went “oh yeah, we’re having a baby now”
having sex isnt shameful. thinking youre responsible enough to have a child while not being responsible enough to realise that you should actually be getting an abortion, however........
In the 30s my great grandmother Olive fell in love with a catholic. Her Protestant family didn’t approve. She became pregnant with a baby boy out of wedlock as a young woman. This wasn’t discovered until many years later when her children noticed she had a mysterious C-section scar. Still nobody knows what happened to the baby boy. Later, in the 60s Olive’s daughter Holly became pregnant at the age of 14. She was sent away for months to a facility to have her baby (Catherine) and returned without her. Her little sisters didn’t even know she was pregnant and it was hidden from everyone in the community. It wasn’t until Catherine was fully grown, married, and had tragically lost her adoptive parents that she reached out to find her birth mother. Teen pregnancy is not more common now, pregnant teens are just now afforded the support and dignity they need.
I agree. Hearing the stories from back in the day on how teen moms were treated and the forced adoptions (adoption can be wonderful when there’s consent) are heartbreaking. Those poor girls just had their babies ripped from them and were expected to go on like it never happened
girl excuse me while I rant, but Precious is something I am really passionate about As someone who has a background in social work, the scenes in Precious are incredibly accurate. You come into work and hear about absolutely horrendous trauma that no amount of schooling can prepare you for and start from scratch addressing it. The things discussed in that movie are all too real and happen on the daily to literal children, but social services funding is slashed every single year. Young girls like Precious are everywhere, but out of all age groups I have worked with, they have the strongest drive to succeed. It is amazing what love, passion, and assistance can do, and the end of the movie showed that.
1000% my mom worked in social work but not directly in health and human services. She was a section 8 caseworker and the stories she heard! She said she had no interest in watching precious because there were about five Precious’s in her case log.
It’s a really good movie but it’s very hard to sit through. It’s actually triggering for me. I managed to sit through it once and it really tore my heart out. I view it more as a child abuse story though and a very sad one at that.
I'm married and 25, my husband and I had a pregnancy scare earlier this year, so naturally I called my bestfriend to tell her I'm freaking out. She said it feels like I'm having a teen pregnancy and she wasn't wrong. It had the same vibe as a teen pregnancy even though it's been 7 years since I've turned into an adult 🤣 It's probably because we don't own a house to have kids in (we have a condo), a car (the neighborhood is walkable), and I didn't have a job at the time. Edit:Typo
😂😂... I get this, I am 22 and pregnant, and I honestly still feel a bit like a teen mom, because I am the first one of my highschool classmates to have a husband and a child and I have literally nobody around me being my age and pregnant - at the same time I have more than a half of my university studies done, and I think we handle our life quite well with my 23 yo husband, but the way the people look at me at the doctors appointments, etc., is just funny (maybe I look a bit younger :D)... I guess that (at least where I live) there's this stigma of irresponsibility attached to young parents, so I really get the pressure the teen mums must be facing.... But if I really was a teenager, I think I would taken this much worse.
@@alzbetadrdakova402 this, that look from people in the doctors office is what i dread. i may be mid twenties but i look like i'm still in highschool. I had been to an obgyn as a young teen and even in that office the glares where intense even though thats not why i was there. i like the office i'm at now, there's no judgement. I think people see someone with a young face and think "that poor girl, she's throwing her life away tsk tsk, what kinda life is that poor baby of hers gonna have" when its none of their business. as you said youve gpt almost all your schooling done so they wouldnt know youre ready
Media like this and the intense focus on teen pregnancy made me (a person with an anxiety disorder) cripplingly afraid of pregnancy. People are crying and moaning about the fall in birth rates nowadays, but all that anti pregnancy programming doesn't just go away once people grow up I feel. I remember juno in particular making me feel pretty anxious, but hey that was just me, I was a skittish kid. My parents were particularly mad when the school did that project with the robot baby in my health class, as they felt it did nothing to fight teen pregnancy and just demonized babies, which was true honestly.
Yeah I think this whole phenomenon legitimately contributed to my phobia of pregnancy. I was constantly afraid that I'd get pregnant in 5th grade just out of nowhere.
@@darkvioletcloud I agree I have a huge phobia of pregnancy and of something growing in me and I attribute it solely to purity culture snd anti pregnancy propaganda like this it scared me so bad as a kid and I don't see myself wanting one at least anytime soo
Omg yes the robo baby! Both my mother (someone who's had 3 kids) and my sister (a pediatric a neonatal ICU nurse) said that baby was WAY too hard. Totally not accurate, didn't do anything helpful for my classmates or I, and was just a pain in the tail
Never forget the time Grace DOES have sex in secret life and her dad immediately dies in a plane crash, leading her to believe it’s punishment for her having sex
YES! I had been recently thinking about this show and how in reflection it just feels like purity culture? It feels like everyone in the show was punished for having sex.
I was gonna say, I could have sworn her father died right after? But I wasn’t sure since I haven’t watched it since I witnessed my sister watching it and I, a 9 year old at the time, tagged along 😂
oh my god how did i forget, secret life was INSANE for this?? there wasn’t a single character that ended up unscathed for having sex, it made it seem like a life or death issue when i was a teenager watching it. it’s saddening to see how manipulative & fear-mongering they were, now looking back
Juno is teenage girl with a developing brain, and people with developing brains make decisions based on feelings and not logic, this is why when she's confronted with him questioning her motives, that she doesn't know what to say-- and all of this happened with pregnancy hormones running through her as well. Even if she did have a crush on the guy it was up to him to be the bigger person (literally to be the adult with the fully-developed brain that he has) and push back, not creepily accept her advances. It really touched on how girls can be attracted to older men but really don't know what they're getting into.
her and cera are the same age but the older guy was definitely creepy but yknow...older creeps gonna creep unfortunately not uncommon. They dont care to be the "adult" they're always being """seduced""" by children. If you can be seduced by a child you should NOT be allowed near them.
Yeah when I was 14 I was pursued by a 28yo and when I was 21/22 by a 46 yo(I had just lost both parents and grandparent with no family). I can't have kids but he's controlled me with drugs and verbal/emotional abuse. I was in a dark place for a long time. The problem is, once it's happened to you, it's hard to get out. They tear you down so bad that you can't leave. I can't even buy groceries without getting cussed out and that's the only time I'm allowed to leave the house...
I am the child of a teen mom, and I remember telling people my mom’s age, thinking it was so cool how young she was because she was a cool, young mom. I remember being judged by other students in elementary school after telling them this and was so confused as to why, I just knew I loved my mom. I was so grateful that my mom was open when talking to me about sex and sex ed so that I knew about safe sex and birth control by the time I started doing it and never had a pregnancy scare.
i went to a pretty progressive high school but i still remember being taught sex-ed by my pregnant gym coach, and having a woman come in as a guest to speak about her abusive relationship with her ex. but then that same woman told me that it was "too inappropriate" when i tried to bring up "consent" when she was asking for vocabulary words to put on the board. it was just dumbfounding to have the 16 year old girl sitting behind me ask "what's consent mean" while the grown woman talking about recognizing abuse tells me that learning about consent is inappropriate and anti-abstinence. i was shut down, trying to suggest that these girls were most vulnerable to abuse by the people closest to them, like their boyfriends, especially if they never had a person look them in the face and say "even your boyfriend needs to get permission from you". makes me mad to this day.
Especially, because consent is not limited to sexual encounters. You could explain consent in a medical context (a doctor asking permission before doing a procedure) or any number of other examples. That is just so weird.
That Children Having Children article also mentioned that kids as young as 8 were having sex. It caused such a panic in my mother that she asked my 8 year old older sister if she'd been having sex, which she hadn't. Then when my sister said she hadn't done it and didn't even know the word our mom was talking about, my mother refused to speak to or look at my sister for months out of this irrational...i don't even know what. I do remember that article.
@@smokyquartz5817 well I’m not really comparing it to Precious, I’m comparing it to the hyperbolic cautionary tales that were part of the teen pregnancy panic. Precious is on a whole other plane, but does possess the same level of realism as Juno, just in a different life circumstance.
@@smokyquartz5817 Precious is way more realistic. Juno is the idealistic alternative that few people get to experience. Juno is the exception to Precious’s rule from what I have seen personally.
@@smokyquartz5817 as someone who loves both films, I say that they are both realistic in different degrees. Juno had support from friends and her parents, even the father of her child, while also having a woman she could rely on to raise her kid since she could not. Meanwhile, Precious literally had no one until she went to that school. She didn't have a support system, healthy parents, or even friends to go to. Her story is believable because not everyone has that chance of escape, meanwhile Juno is a more idealistic outcome.
Gurl stop u were talkin about precious lol. And I agree it is more realistic. It doesn’t give into stereotypes this is a lot of young girls reality still 30nyears later.
As a teenager during this time period, it felt to me like the obsession with "bad moms", Octomom, Kate from John and Kate, and the teen moms, Jamie Lynn and Bristol Palin, was all just kind of an excuse to make a hobby out of hating women/teen girls. "Look at all these bad women doing bad things and getting PUNISHED by being pregnant! Look at these selfish women having babies they can't afford and still getting plastic surgery! See teen girls, don't be a bad woman like these poor people, sex havers, these vain women, you don't DESERVE to be happy unless you are the perfect chaste obedient daughter, not vain but you must still be beautiful, don't be poor and on wellfare but don't spend extravagantly," etc. Not to speak for everyone, but some of the fascination definitely came from a want to learn how not to be these people because all you ever heard was how terrible teenage girls were and you needed desperately to be one of the good ones.
This comment said it better than I could have. Every single year while trying to compare myself to other teenage girls while also being told I was a terrible teenage girl, I always thought, “well at least I didn’t get pregnant!” And I even carried those thoughts into my adulthood for the first couple of years. I’m about to be in my mid twenties and even then I catch myself being shocked when people my age are getting pregnant and having kids because the effects of this whole thing have stuck with me so strongly. It’s absolutely wild how powerful this era was and how the fear still heavily lingers.
@@sam_ugh Same here. I would damn near boast and celebrate the fact that "I survived" all the way to graduation without getting knocked up like the majority of my classmates did. Even now like you as an adult, it would heavily shock and confuse me whenever I see old classmates on social media announce that they're pregnant. The teen pregnancy era really had a lasting effect.
My mom, who had her first child at 17, told me I can't have birth control for my periods because I'd just start having sex. Ny periods were getting bad enough I had to stay home on the first day and get taken out of school because I literally couldn't move. Top it all off I already miscarried my first pregnancy before I ever asked. She didn't know because I was terrified of becoming homeless and I was working on my escape plan before telling her.
I’m so sorry this happened to you. I feel like a lot of teen moms get horribly mistreated and judged when it happens to them and then go on to do the same type of abuse that was inflicted on them. A lot of the most judgmental women I have came across have ironically been teen moms. I hope you are in a better and safer place.
I hate the fact that in that the principal seemed to be horribly publicly shaming the girls. But not the boys of course! Because how could a pregnancy ever be a boys fault too?
It's because the principal is serving his best interests, which includes the probability that he was reacting to parents concerns ...OR... just tired of dealing with the situation at his school (whatever THAT was) so he made a move to make it look like "he is still in charge" - he is the chief authority figure - nobody is going to make me look bad even if, I have to make it up as I go along. It's tough for guys in these situations because it's a life changing situation and EVERYBODY is expecting him to be Superman. He doesn't know anything to begin with and is being poked and prodded to grow up instantly. One other point I HAVE TO put out there is; Sex is mostly a woman's domain. She chooses which guy gets lucky that day, she has the final say on what happens to the baby and Family court will pretty much give her what she wants or needs. In other words, the only thing guys are guaranteed is to get laid because he's "pick of the litter", the rest is up to fate and skill.
@@terminallygrayLMAOO WHAT? 40% of fathers who have kids with girls 15 or younger are BETWEEN 20-30 YEARS OLD. You gonna blame the girls for that too? Because sex is "their domain?"
You're right I was raped, by a 16 year old boy who overpowered me when I was 18 became pregnant with HIS child (miscarriage due to the stress and hell the 16 year old gave me) and when the time came he denied it pretty hard. I remember crying and begging for someone to help me while his pants were down or when I was 20, a creepy 30 year old wouldn't take no for an answer, He forced me to be in a relationships with him, of course no one believed me when I explain the situation, he had his friends and family KEEP AN EYE ON ME 24/7, he stalked me, i wasn't allowed to talk to my own siblings. It's tough for guys? Guys also have access to condoms, You know the united states is suffering from a fatherless epidemic, 1 in 4 kids don't have a father in their life or absent fathers. It takes two to tango, we should teach sex ed in school because is pretty obvious no one is teaches their kids about sex ed and it's easier to blame everyone except for the parents. @@terminallygray
@terminallygray I'd argue that a pregnancy is mostly on the man since all he had to do was wear a condom and/or not decide to nut into a woman to prevent one but go off I guess?
@@terminallygray " It's tough for guys in these situations"? yah it must be so hard to not have their bodies in danger and not be blamed even though it's a two person process. that "sex is a woman domain" is such word vomit. If he didn't wanna " be forced to grow up" he also should have used protection.
On the "Taboo pregnancy" obsession: Does anyone remember if the whole thing with the pregnant trans man who got like.... MASSIVE coverage on Oprah was during this time? Because this shot this into my memory but I can't place it to a time frame but it definitely fits into people being like invasively obsessed with pregnancies they see as weird/unnatural/amoral
I think the most wild thing I remember about it was a teen mum uk episode where a girl was 15 but she’d got pregnant at 14 and her boyfriend was in his twenties…… and it was just ignored?? That man had provably committed a crime and they just pretended it was all fine and alright Edit: commenters, I said provably not probably like it’s provably a crime aha
The majority of Teen Mom dads were like this. I believe the only ones who weren't out of high school when they impregnated the mom were Tyler, Adam, and Derrick.
The age of consent in the area she lived in might have been 14 at the time. I know it was around this time period when age of consent laws started to be adjusted. The age of consent was 14 in Canada until 2008, so it's possible.
I’m really glad you included Precious because even though her pregnancies weren’t necessarily the focus of the film, it still is a VERY valuable perspective on teen pregnancy, it can be far more complicated than as presented in Juno or other high school themed films.
I remember watching the reruns of Degrassi Junior High when I was in 6th grade at school in 1992 I remember the episode were Spike has sex with the boy she likes Shane then she finds out she's pregnant. I also remember watching the 80s movie For Keeps with Molly Ringwald about a teenage couple who have sex later finding out they're expecting a baby they also get married it's their Senior Year in High School they've had plans to go to College. We also watched the reruns of Degrassi High were they talked about teen pregnancy and abortion among other topics. Tyra Banks had a talk show were she talked to pregnant teens, parents and girls who want to have babies. The youngest girls who was on the show were both 13 one them was 3 months pregnant and they other 13 year old was 4 months pregnant.
i got addicted to drugs when i was 13 years old due to grooming by someone 12 years older than me. I had my daughter at 14. She's almost 3 now, I'm almost 18. my decision to keep her saved my life. if i had found out i was pregnant sooner, i would've had an abortion, and although it was rough finding out at 5 months, that factor of it changed my entire life. the sheer amount of hatefulness and lack of support from peers, teachers, etc. forced me to drop out. i didn't drop out because school was too hard, i didn't drop out because i didn't have time for assignments, i dropped out because school was straining my mental health and wasting my time. I have my GED now and plan to start college in the next couple of years. im the happiest i have ever been, my daughter, the support of my family, and my boyfriend + his family, are a big source of my happiness. almost 4 years clean, no longer need antidepressants, bought my own car, and i couldn't have asked for anything to go any other way.
I’m glad you’re so happy! Though I’m also sorry it sounds like you had to grow up so fast. I’m 17 as well, 18 in about 4 months, and I can’t imagine having gone through what you have already and being the mother of a toddler at this age! But I’m glad it’s all worked out for you in the end. Best wishes to you and your family.
omg, this is incredible. i’m so happy to hear about your improved mental health, as well as being clean from drugs. it’s fantastic that you have a supportive family and boyfriend. i wish luck to you, and you should feel extremely proud of everything you’ve accomplished.
Being a preteen/middle schooler who’s mom had you at 18 was so weird during this era. I had to do so much damage control to avoid being bullied and the pta moms hated my parents.
yea my mom didn't have me as a teen but my brother. and it's annoying when ppl demonize the girls that go thru it. it's a harder life don't get me wrong, but it's not a death sentence
My mom had me at 26 but she always looked young and when I was a kid people would be like “oh that’s not your sister?” And my mom would go “no she’s my daughter, I got pregnant at 13.” She never understood why that joke was never funny.
Meanwhile my mom had me at 41 and I also have two older siblings and my older sister had her first child when I was almost 10 and the second when I was 12. Whenever I was out with those two kids I got shit for being a teen mom and got treated horribly by some people and in school I had people making comments about my parents being so old. That was definitely a weird phase of my life. Now I'm 30 and my nephew is 20 and oldest niece is 17 and everyone thinks I'm just their older sibling. That's definitely preferable but somehow they thought I could he their parent when I was 16.
I was an 18 year old who had my son and the age difference between me and my sons classmates parents are 20years. It definitely sucks, the school loves my son and he has tons of friends but I'm now struggling at a 27 year old trying to have any conversation with the 40yr old moms.
I’m 25 and feel like all the teen pregnancy stuff was so in my face and every where I looked. It didn’t glamorize teen pregnancy at all and I’m still scared to have kids tbh
As someone who was a small kid during this time I was OBSESSED with 16 and pregnant, teen mom, secret life of an American teenager, etc. and I can tell you that I’m 21 years old and still a virgin because I refuse to get caught lacking😂😂
Lmao same. I was also obsessed with the story times on UA-cam of teens finding out they were pregnant. I have no idea why I was so fascinated by it. Almost 21 now and still a virgin as well. My biggest fear is getting pregnant😭😭 like no thank you I’ve seen how much women struggle
Ben was so terrible, like I remember being in complete disbelief that he was Amy’s love interest like the scene I’ll always remember is him trying to comfort Amy after she called herself a wh*re and he says: “you’re my wh*re” I wholeheartedly believed the pilot of this show was a parody….Such a fever dream
I got pregnant in college at 19 and of course I got horrible things slung at me. My mother called me a useless college dropout (I never wanted to go anyway) and a whore, etc. All I could think is "how are you going to call me an adult at 18, but whittle me down to a worthless *teeeeeen mom* at 19?" I'm still in a successful relationship with my kids father. We own a home. Good jobs. Good life. Everyone said we weren't a good example, teens should be shamed for unintended pregnancies, I better not dare say "hey, your life is NOT over" or be supportive to young people who need it. They spoonfed me my ENTIRE LIFE that teen pregnancy was an epidemic and it was "babies raising babies 😭" and it was never even fucking true.
I hate when people think teens are so stupid and they won’t be able to work it out when they have kids young. My parents worked it out and you did too and I’m so proud of you! Best of luck for you and your family ❤️
Your mom was horrible, but tbf i still wouldnt support the normalization of teen pregnancy. Its just things that just happened, not shitd thats should be normalize
I also want to say the reactions to precious came from the fact that she wasn't a skinny conventionally attractive white girl who had a middle class family to fall back on. I think you're right to include it but it is a fundamentally different story than the others are.
I have never seen Precious because everything I've heard about it is heartbreaking af and stuff like that happens irl more often than we like to think. Someone reading this comment at some point might be living out their own Precious story (anyone who is; you WILL get through it! This is just a chapter in your life story, it will shape you, but it does not define you. You are amazing, beautiful inside and out, you deserve better and one day you WILL have better! You just need to work on your escape plan and you will get through this!)
i love juno. it’s such a sweet movie that confronts many real issues facing young people without making fun of them, it’s just compassionate and empathetic.
My grandmother got pregnant at 15, but because my grandfather was able to get a good job (which he had to hitchhike to for some time because they couldn’t afford a car), they’re now middle class and living a nice life. Whenever someone starts trash talking teen moms, my grandmother says “Oh, teen moms like I was?”, and when they hurry to be like “Oh not like you!”, she says “You’re only saying that because you know me now and I’m no longer the poor, pregnant girl from the trailer park”
My Mom told me I wasn't allowed to watch it. I was so busy at the time, I didn't watch anything really unless I was out with my boyfriend, and he had no desire to see it. As an adult, I watched it. I thought it was well done. Hated Jason Bateman's character, but thought Juno was wise beyond her years.
@@d.leighannbatemon3192 omg he plays some awful characters sometimes doesnt he, I also couldnt stand him in Juno, hes bordeline pedo in my opinion. of course its just his character but hes hard to watch, and really selfish.
Omg I'm SO GLAD you mentioned the Sims 2 teen pregnancy UA-cam Videos 🤣😭 I remember those videos SO WELL.. the "scene" aesthetic, the extremely dramatic fighting and crying scenes.. I was obsessed with those Sims 2 videos and also had the teen pregnancy Mod lol
when i was like 13 i’d have loads of teen pregnancies but now being 20 i have more teen fun like going out with friends and parties and stuff so it all changes with age for me
I think Precious resonates with a lot of Black people and people of color because it gave a peak into the life of what teen girls who come from low income households that deal with domestic violence and getting ebt. I know back in the mid 2010s BET used to play Precious a lot and families would laugh in some moments , cry, and allow us to have heartfelt dialogues about the problems with teen pregnancy and poverty that normally our community just sweeps stuff under the rug in the forms of comedy.
My high school had a daycare so it was common to be a teen mom at my school cuz girls at other schools in the district would transfer to my school when they got pregnant. It kept so many young women in school and I wish that was the type of resource that people would have seen as a response to this supposed “problem”
My school district actually has two day cares when I was in high school. Both High schools had one. One for babies and toddlers for staff and students. And the other was just preschool age and ran like a pre school mostly for staff or people who paid tuition. Both day cares are worked into the curriculum for child care and culinary classes. Culinary classes would prepare the meals for the preschool staff and students. The other schools day care would do the same for the toddlers and the rest of the school. It was a small school.
My mom didn't care lol. She was a teen mom that struggled herself, but never talked to me about safe sex. Or did anything to keep me from making mistakes in general really. When I was 14 and started dating a 21 yo, AND TOLD HER he took my virginity, she barely raised an eyebrow. Believe it or not that's not the worst case of her not protecting me. Just one of the many reasons I don't speak to her now. And a great lesson on how not to parent lol
It really sucks, but sometimes our parents show us how to parent by being "how not to" examples :( my husband's parents fall into that category unfortunately too
I am 24 years old and I am STILL terrified of teen pregnancy. I've had several friends tell me the same. It might not have been a huge thing, but my mom sure thought it was and made it very clear.
Going to high school during this time period was wild. Purity culture was out of control. My entire school had an assembly where they had some purity culture group gave us a lecture about waiting for marriage and abstinence.
At ours, they separated girls and boys then had a Christian couples therapist tell us that every time we had a sexual experience before marriage it would be like throwing a dirty diaper into our relationship. (yes she used real diapers to demonstrate). But not to worry, children, you can re-virginize yourself through Jesus. When one girl asked, "what if we aren't Christian?" instead of thinking that maybe there are other religions out there or physical/mental health reasons to abstain from sex, the lady just preached to us about why we should be Christian. It was so wild and if anything it made all of the kids at our school way more sexually curious.
My whole school district was abstinence-only. They did a poll my junior year and the data showed that an overwhelming majority of students WANTED to be taught a proper and comprehensive sex ed program. I wish schools listened to their students instead of middle aged adults who haven't even stepped foot in a school in 30 years.
Mine was the opposite. I was seen as the weird one for being virgin. At one point admins were calling all of these girls to the nurses office who were suspected to have been intimate or even associated with this specific "crew" of boys because they were the cause of an outbreak of some STI 💀
‘Purity culture was out of control’. Im assuming you would rather have thot culture out of control. Having fewer sex partners won’t kill you trust me. Being a wh0re is not a badge of honour. I know western culture glories being a loose woman but trust me having self control is a virtue.
I'm so glad you brought up the STORM of teen pregnancy sims videos. There's these series called "Just One" and "Unexpected" that intrawled me when I was in middle school.
I still have a soft spot for Just One. That series inspired me to make Sims 2 videos. I still like that it didn't really focus on the pregnancy, it was more about the relationship between the couple.
As someone who watched teen mom and the sims videos I obsessed over the idea. As a result I had my son at 18 pregnant at 17, learning from watching these girls drop out of high school I ended up finishing high school and now getting my dental assistant certification. And I am proud to say I am now married to the same man that got my pregnant and now pregnant with our second baby.
Teen mom here. I got pregnant when I was 16 and had my son when I was 17 in 2013. I’m 26 now and my son is 9. Let me tell you back in the day the stigma was SO high and I was treated like absolute trash for being a teen mom. Regardless of media or anything else that influences people, know that whatever or however it happened support the mom and don’t judge for choices that were not made by you. Trust me, teen moms are going through enough. Positive note: I’m super happy now and am gonna be a hot mom living my best life in my thirties. 😂🥳 Stay safe out there!
Girl I feel you!! I was a teen mom at 16/17 in 2017 and even then (4 years later) I got called absolutely ruthless names and rumors made up by girls that were also sexually active which made NO SENSE to me…..
I know a teen girl did an experiment where she pretended to be pregnant with a fake belly and everything. She managed to trick the students and even the teachers. And the first thing she mentioned was how AWFUL she was treated. She lost her friends, people started to trash talk and slut shame her. Though she managed to find decent true friends though and revealed the experiment later on. I mainly rmemeber how shocked everybody was, especially the ones who were mean to her.
Precious, please don't skip that part. Many of us black girls go through the same thing, or variation of such. Many of our mothers are mean, or weren't given the tools to be nice, or hate their lives and take it out on their kids. So many of us end up in foster care, or at family house, and end up getting raped and molested as we are children. Please don't skip this part
It’s a trigger warning. That message is there not for people who are “uninterested,” but for people who may have lived that out so they don’t have to relive their trauma(therefore unfortunately know all too well what happens in these scenarios)
THAT PART, my mom was a poor black single mom and she took the stress of providing for both of us out on me alot. for a lot of black girls, our first bully are own mothers.
“He’s kind of obsessed with having sex with her knowing fully well that she doesn’t want to until she’s married” the objective is he wants to conquer the unobtainable I’ve been straight up told this by guys when I was in HS and was strict catholic 🥴🥴 they want to be with a girl no one else has a chance with
I watched teen mom content in all forms from as early as I can remember. Then I got pregnant at 17 and I decided to keep my baby solely off the fact that these movies and tv shows and teen mom UA-cam made me feel it would be like a movie. Now I’m 24 and I have a 6 year old and while I’m so so glad I kept my child I do feel that it was irresponsible to make that decision because i wanted to emulate media. I am LUCKY I have a family who did not kick me out, were supportive in my decision and still to this day help me physically and financially. It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to admit that I only made that decision because of the media I was consuming as well and was not thinking about how many other lives were being affected by that decision, particularly my child’s life. I take being a mother extremely seriously and it’s a complete focus in my life, but I was lucky that I was able to finish high school and get some higher education and not have to worry about having a place to live or having food to eat. I was lucky my family didn’t disown me. I am lucky I also have a good group of other teen mom friends now, that also were affected by media and we all help each other cope but this is a real trauma a lot of people experienced. I believe that the teen pregnancy rates went down or stayed on the same downward slope, but there were absolutely girls who got pregnant on purpose, or only decided to keep their accidental pregnancies because of these shows/movies/reality TV. I was one of them
@@fixsationon7244 look up teen mom family vloggers on UA-cam, Instagram and tiktok too. It’s community for sure. In 2016/2017, when I got pregnant, there was a boost of them. I regretfully made videos as well (mine are all deleted), Most of us don’t vlog anymore, most don’t post about their kids anymore either. I personally deleted every video I made and went completely private. Some of them still post videos and are influencers by profession now but don’t center their kids anymore. Some of them do center their kids in their content though. There’s a huge community on UA-cam, tiktok, and Instagram.
We’re you able to find a teen mom group in your area?! Or is it online? I’ve been able to find one online but no idea how to find one that could be in person.
@@maddy53 it is online, but be careful of internet mom friends. The teen mom online community can be extremely toxic. I’ve had many friends over the years but my true friends that I’ve stuck with are actually the ones I met on UA-cam
i was FASCINATED by teenage pregnancy (and pregnancy in general) as a preteen for some reason and would read teen pregnancy fanfics n such and then i ended up not even having a boyfriend til i was 22 😂 so i would say there is absolutely no correlation between teen pregnancy and the media that depicts it, at least not for me
No, there is defiantly a correlation. Although it can be exaggerated, the media is depicting reality which is teens can get pregnant. It’s like how Euphoria exaggerates how mucha ex, drug use, and aesthetic living high schoolers do. It doesn’t happen to the degree shown, but it still happens.
@@Spidertheidiot It's so weird revisiting a topic I was required to learn about at the age of 11, thinking that it's gonna happen sometime in the future. P.S.: I'm asexual, but kind of leaning towards the sapphic side (so probably 1/4 lesbian???)
@@robinwangai3303 How TF do you become 1/4 lesbian ?? Girls on 1 of 4 encounters and masturbation the other 3 ?? Was 1 of the 4 sexual encounters with a woman, 3 with "other" BUT then you decided to stop (cold turkey) never having sex again, making you asexual. I really try to understand Asexuality but when I meet an asexual they're too embarrassed to talk about it or pretend like I'm an ignorant person with prejudices about LGBTQ. They just know I'm hetero and assume the worst. I'm just asking questions (not trying to judge), That's how you get information. AND it's more genuine that has a human perspective to the answer. Google can only do so much.
I got pregnant As a teen, 14-15 actually… Ik. and Juno came out so closely after I birthed my son, it was so similar to my story … besides the fact that I kept my baby… craziest decision of my life, I was too young to understand. Way to young. Im now 29 & he’s 14!… & obviously I love my child. I lost out on so many opportunities in life, due to being a young mom….. things I didn’t see as opportunities at the time, but now it’s so obvious.. you can’t reply on anyone else to take care of your child, your parents can only do so much. The young father can only do so much…. Don’t rely on them… it’s not easy but once you’ve made the choice you can’t turn back. Like I said I love my child, but I would’ve cherished being a “regular teen” much more… then have my baby later. Idk I get mixed replies when I cmnt this stuff , but it’s my reality & my interpretations on such.
No one knows better than you about your life. Don’t ever feel ashamed for how you feel. It’s weird how sometimes when mothers become mothers, people think that’s all they are. Everyone is an individual with complex emotions. How we address these emotions is what makes us who we are. You’re an individual who is ALSO a mother.
And it's totally valid for how you feel. Women often get shamed for wishing that they didn't have children or had children later, even though they love their children very much - it's just the expectation put on women to be the sole caregivers and only that. I empathise with your experience and I hope you're able to seize more opportunities now that you're older
Its not surprising to me you feel that way. I do think it’s very difficult to have a baby so young and you do miss out on a lot of things. Life is long though and I hope you have a lot of wonderful opportunities come to you in your years now as you’re more free as your baby becomes an adult and you have more freedom
I remember this panic. I had just turned 15 and was in my freshman year. My abusive stepmom at the time suddenly had it in her twisted head that I was going to be a teen mom. Mind you- I had never had a boyfriend, gone on a date, or even expressed interest in guys. This led to traumatizing lectures about purity and the horrors of sex and pregnancy over weeks. I was also forced to watch Juno, and other teen movies of the time, with her added commentary. Turns out, I’m asexual, and my minimal interest in dating and revulsion from our sex “talks” wasn’t just because of the context. My dad divorced her before I figured it out, but I can only imagine that she would have found that to be as much an abomination as teen pregnancy. It would only right if I resisted the desire, not if I didn’t have it lol
As a 23 year old, I am absolutely SPEECHLESS when I think about how crazy it would be to have a baby so young. My mom had me when she was only 15!! when I picture my mom having a 5 year old child at only 20 years old, I can’t even imagine what that was like!
My mom went and saw Juno right after it came out, about 6 months after i was born. she was twenty and just about to go into college. She saw the movie and sobbed bc she didnt know if she shouldve just given me away instead, wondering if id grow up to be happy with her as a mom. Im glad she kept me, she's amazing.
Are you in the Midwest? In California I got married at 25 and everyone would comment how I was getting married so young. My husband and I moved to the Midwest and were shocked by how many people we met who were either married or co-raising a child at 18/19/20!
Nah, not really depending on how big the school is. I think my high school back in the day had like 2000 people. And the rates are like 16-18 per 1000 females ages 15-19.
Teen mom here (19) had my kid when I was 16 and I think it can be one of the hardest things I went through because I grew up watching teen mom because my own mother didn't want me to "end up like them" so when I got pregnant I hid it for 6 months because I didn't want to be kicked out. Once I let my family know it became one of the hardest things I had to go through because I was essentially raising my siblings at the same time.
I was a freshman in high school in ‘08, 14 years old. The week of homecoming, my parents sat me down & lectured me about abstinence and how important it is to wait until married for sex. I was given a purity ring that they called a promise ring- a promise to god 🤢 🤮 I was shamed for clothes, not allowed to wear makeup, or go to parties. You can imagine the shit show when I realized I was pregnant right before I graduated in 2011 at 16- I was forced to abort. It was so traumatizing & affected me so deeply that I ended up throwing away a full ride to law school because of the mental health issues that had arised. I’m now 28, married, with 2 kids- I have always been open about bodies & not shaming them for curiosity because I want to be able to provide support and sex Ed at home without my kids feeling ashamed or uncomfortable for being totally normal. So far so good ❤ ps I am no contact with my parents since 2011 :)
I’m shocked that your parents forced you into purity culture while also forcing you to have an abortion, I am so sorry you had no choice at the time and had to do that. Women should ALWAYS have the choice to decide what to do with their own body, I’m glad that now you have your own loving family. I bet your children are grateful to have a mom like you
I was a pregnant senior in 08 and had a baby 6 days after I walked in graduation. The baby's dad killed himself in 2010. So. Had your baby, not had your baby. Life's been rough either way hun.
Your parents tried to protect you the best way they could and knew .... Beside why are you not angry at the boy who got u pregnant and put you in thus situation in the first place.. .
Degrassi is actually such a groundbreaking show when it comes to issues like teen pregnancy because they also actually talked about and showed several characters who chose to get an abortion and at least one couple who decided to put their child up for adoption after they tried to raise the baby but had too many problems keeping themselves afloat. I also really liked that when everyone looked to Spike to tell people that abortion was right or wrong she basically told them that just because she had a baby at 14 it doesn’t mean everyone should and that people should be allowed to chose what’s right for them without judgement
I was born to a 15/16 year old birthmom and a 15 year old birthdad. I've never met either but knowing for forever that I was a result of two teenagers and knowing how much my birthmom went through just through her high school experience, giving birth, and finally choosing to put my up for adoption has really placed a new perspective on teen moms/teen pregnancies.
I just gave birth to my son a week ago and I’m 25. I cannot imagine being pregnant as a teenager, those poor girls. After going through my pregnancy and now a new baby, my husband and I want to foster pregnant teens once we raise our first set of kids just so we can give our full support and attention to the girl and her baby. A lot of people think it’s weird that that’s the demographic my husband and I could agree on to foster, but I have so much support with my baby and want to pay it forward to anyone else who will need that
my mom MADE me watch teen mom with her when i was younger to try to scare me out of getting pregnant. we both ended up getting attached to the show and the people and still watch it together to this day. i cant say whether or not it was effective but im 23 with no baby yet soooooo 😂
30 and childfree. I was forced to be my older sisters free childcare as a teenager and feel like I already raised two kids. Never doing that again. I was treated like a teen mom by random strangers a lot and they did not care to hear that I'm just their aunt because to them that just meant my sister must have been a teen mom then, she is 13 years older than me and had her kids at 22 and 25. So she was young but not a teenager. I'm only 10 years older than my nephew and he was a big child and they still thought that must be my son instead of I don't know my younger brother or something. Now people usually think that's the case because we look similar and the age gap makes sense for siblings.
My favorite movies were definitely Juno and Precious. I feel like they covered teen pregnancy and sexual abuse really well. I remember watching 16 and pregnant as a kid and I always hoped that they would continue school or shape up as most of them eventually ended up doing.
Oh God I remember having to watch Precious for a Social Work class in college. It's such a hard movie to sit through, but in my opinion it's super well done and the lead actress 100% deserves to win that Oscar.
I was pregnant in 2010 at age 20, and there were a couple of times where my mom literally introduced me by saying "and this is my daughter, she's not 16 and pregnant" lmao. The impact (and stigma) was very real
It's wild in hindsight that there was this common narrative of stupid little girls getting pregnant and not enough about how in about 40% of cases, the father is aged between 20-29 and should know better!
There were two camps of sexually active teens: “I have no clue how getting pregnant works and I don’t care to learn” and the second camp which was “I’m so scared of getting pregnant I’m taking plan b, wearing condoms, on birth control, and having my boyfriend pull out”. That was me. All that plan b i didn’t need to be taking.
Plan B is not cheap. Cheaper than a baby but still... I was the same, I mean a good rule of them is to use two forms of birth control. i.e. condoms and birth control.
You forgot the 3rd camp of girls that wanted to have babies like all their friends. Majority in my school were on purpose, i dont think there were any oopsies. Even this one girl tried to trap my brother with a fake test so then he would get her pregnant for real, but I saw through it! We told her mom and she took us all to the clinic and test came back negative, then bro said ✌️ and that girl got pregnant by this other guy the next month 😬 That girl was pissed we told her mom but aint no one messing with my baby bro 😤🖕
Yikes. Aren't you supposed to avoid plan b unless you absolutely have to use it? I've heard frequent use can cause internal scarring and can lead to difficulty getting pregnant later on
did not expect you to talk about the sims? when i played as a teenager myself i would make a family with a teenager and a parent and then have the parent adopt a baby and then move out immediately so the teenager would take care of the child as a single mom ajdhfkslajs why did i do that to them 😭
There was an entire sex panic for a while there. The "omg I had sex for the first time and something bad happened!" trope was getting really tired by the time it got to April Kepner which just pushed it over the top (to the point that even though the Grace episode aired nearly three years earlier, Grace is referred to as a "Kepner character"). Every time a character had sex on Secret Life it was like something bad happened and it reminded me so much of the fundamentalist purity culture I was in at the time and how "BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN TO YOUR AND YOUR LOVED ONES IF VAGINAL INTERCOURSE HAPPENS CONSENSUALLY OR NONCON OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE". The sex panic of the late '00s and early '10s was wild, especially if you grew up fundamentalist. I am no longer that and have had therapy to deal with the deprogramming but the sex panic is one thing that sticks in the back of my mind every now and then.
If it helps take away from the trauma, watch the coach teaching kids in "Mean Girls" where he's like "...or else you'll have sex and die". It made me chuckle cause it made fun of the sex panic and I, myself, am Asexual and not interested in sex but I'm sex positive, so it was fairly entertaining.
I think this moral panic was simply “projection” by boomers and Gen-X parents. Even though they would never tell y’all they were EXTREMELY debauched and careless from the late 1960s through the 1980s. Once HIV came on the scene, things have been simmering down for nearly 40 years but folks who want to be hysterical are still hysterical. It’s really just a way of punching down to already vulnerable people.
16 and pregnant came about as I was maybe 15 turning 16.. So somehow it ended up being a big thing. My aunt would constantly tell me if I got pregnant at 16, she’d kick me out. Most often I’d chuckle and secretly hope it didn’t happen. Wasn’t until I got older and realized how toxic and hurtful that was.
Unpopular opinion, but I do not think it’s a guardians responsibility to raise their child’s children. Assuming it wasn’t a case of rape, if a teenager chooses to engage and sexual activity and become pregnant, it is up to that teenager to raise their kid if they choose they want to have the child and not put the baby up for adoption.
@Diana what? only in the case of her being forced into sex would you consider helping her with the baby? how in the world is that fair? when you have a child you consider these things. a wise person once said "know thyself" and people like you maybe shouldn't have your own kids if you'd all of a sudden stop helping them and kick them out in their most vulnerable time of need. to be hoisted out into the streets young and pregnant, do you know how badly that would impact the life of your grandchild? just wow... i feel bad for your offspring even if they don't exist yet
@@carohigh505 nowhere did they say they would kick the kid out though. I think they're saying if the person was warned that if they get pregnant then they would be on their own. On their own could still mean living with family but having to get a job and figure out things like childcare and transportation on their own. What they're saying is that the grandparents in the situation shouldn't have to take on the responsibility of raising 2 sets of children at once, especially if they're warned about the consequences of having a baby. They're kids still yeah but they have to grow up quick if they want their kid to grow up well adjusted and happy. Some people refuse to grow up despite their kid being in their life too. It's a complicated situation
Diana, not wanting to parent the baby is one thing, although carving out a rape exception for that feels like sl*t shaming, but kicking a pregnant teen out onto the streets to only be able to support herself by selling her body is both illegal and highly immoral.
It's finally making sense my crippling fear of pregnancy even though I'm not in high school anymore and never had any direct traumatic experience of it. I never realized how prominent teen pregnancy in media was when I was a kid. I remember those Sims videos were like crack cocaine for little me.
i didn't realize other people had the same super intense but also kinda irrational fear of pregnancy until this comment section, like i used to watch some of those shows with my mom or hear family members comment on teen pregnancy in general as a very small child so like i barely remember it happen but like it affected my feelings about pregnancy as whole even if i didnt remember where it came from
@@NightNekomata yep same, and it doesnt help that at the time i was having a hard time with reproductive isses that it worse. having horrible pains from endometriosis as a scared 13 year old AND having stuff like that on the TV was not helping. seriously even now i'm low key even scared of pregnant people. tokophobia is no joke
I'm just scared of sex in general. Im 22 I've never had a boyfriend and have social anxiety (steming from I'm guessing a combo of being told puberty is amazing and you'll be fine then proceeding to actually have my period and freak out cuz I hate messes. AND hyperhyrdosis which btw means excessive sweating leading to rumors in school I didn't shower leading to me not wanting to be physically close to people when I sweat which is always.) So I don't think I'll ever have the problem of being pregnant.
It's so refreshing to see that you did a clear timeline on this media. I grew up in the early 2000s to a teen mom (gave birth to me at 17 in 2004) along with her friends who were teen moms and their kids, and my mom was obsessed with every show and movie you discussed. I really was imersed in the teen parent panic and this whole era both in media and in real life. This is such a niche thing and its so refreshing and relatable to see how other people get this era. Also its so true that kids of teen parents and people who see these depictions are less likely to be teen parents. My friends who also grew up to teen parents in the early 2000s have such a realistic view on teen pregnancy. Its also so important to note that most teen moms baby daddies are ADULT men. My dad wasn't a teen father and none of my friends dads were teen parents either. So much focus is on shaming young girls sexuality when the root issue in teen pregnancy is groomers. Support teen moms and have real open conversations around sex education and abuse.
Precious made me sick. I’ll never forget when the mom tells the lady everything that happened to precious as a BABY and how she just let it happen :(( and how precious believed all the horrible things her mom would say about her
@@aphrodite8463 the book is really worth reading if you can stomach it. There's some lovely visual storytelling with the words being misspelled before Precious starts learning to read, and some things that were not clear/left out/changed
i feel like the most recent phase of this phenomenon was kylie jenner getting pregnant at 20 and i think it her and many young mom influencers kinda started crossing the line of glamourizing becoming a teen mom/young mom.
Definitely. And it’s okay to not be ashamed but it is definitely unsettling to see it flaunted, like using babies as some materialistic desire and trend
@@boccarerg I see so many women acting as if ovaries shrivel up the day they turn 30. There's so much medical misinformation out there. Currently, there is a campaign against the birth control pill. People are literally PAYING influencers to say that birth control is unhealthy.
What’s wrong with young adult moms? Teen pregnancy is the issue. A 20 year old can have their own place and may even be married. I got my own place at 19, married at 22 no kids but I definitely could if I wanted to.
I'm the result of a teen pregnancy. My mother is an older millennial, and I'm a younger gen Z, born 2007. Growing up, my life was very different compared to most kids. I love my mother, but seeing how much she struggled to raise me has just completely changed my perspective on life. Teen pregnancy is hard. My mother had to give those years up to raise me. Teen parents deserve all the support they can get. You never know someone's situation. I don't know everything about my mother's, but she did her best, even if in the end my childhood wasn't the best. I am nearly an adult now. And my mother isn't even in her 40s. It's crazy to think about to most people, but for me, it's just how it is.
I remember writing an entire essay on why 16 & pregnant and Teen Mom were encouraging teens to get pregnant just so they could be famous 😭 when in reality I watched those shows religiously and clearly did not have a desire to be a teen mom. It’s funny how “logic” works lol
I’ve only seen Precious once, but man, it was just heartbreaking! It was raw and so authentic. Many people are experiencing the life that was depicted in the movie Precious. This is happening in millions of people, all across the world. It’s real, and people need to recognize that, and confront it. SA is so prevalent because it’s rooted in secrecy.
Last semester I had parenting, which of course we discussed pregnancy, teen pregnancy, and even sexual diseases etc… during the end of the teen pregnancy section, we watched Juno and we had to take notes on what we would do and how we would feel. Majority of the class definitely learned that teen pregnancy ain’t no fun game even if we didn’t think of it in that way. Don’t understand why people think the movie is bad 😤
I was a freshman in 2009 and we had a daycare and a preschool at our high school. We could earn elective credit for helping take care of these kids. I took it twice and loved it. Seemed totally normal and in retrospect I think it’d be so helpful for more schools to have this sort of program
We have a course at our school called Understanding Children where parents from the community can bring their children to our High School and the students learn how to care for them and pay attention to emotions, communications, different stages of toddlers, etc
I appreciated so much that you included precious. It's a movie that shows teenage motherhood from a different side. The pregnancy pact showed rebellion whereas precious I found to be resilience. She went against all odds and put her children first, such a an impactful movie.
I was pregnant in 2020-2021 and I was 21, but I look much younger for my age (I'm 4ft 10 and kinda have a baby face) I got judged constantly in public for being a "teen mom" despite me not being one. I do think media at this time did have an effect on how teen moms are treated today.
I got called a teen mom when I would baby sit my little brother a lot of people thought he was mine it was awful and I was a virgin 💀 I was so upset I had to deal with living with a baby as a teenager it sucked but at least I got to experience what it's like without it being my own
I was in high school back then. My high school had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the US. 900 freshmen and 200+ graduated. All of the girls in my group were teen moms and three personal friends were teen dads.
There's a big factor that wasn't mentioned that is the growth of internet & social media during that time. Everyone was sharing everything, so naturally people saw & heard about it more than ever. Then the over saturation helped a generation of teens feed their curiosity, while showing them the downfalls so they could move on to other things.
Also the new pyramid scheme of young hot Mormon couples having baby after baby and vlogging their life on Instagram and UA-cam. Def falls under the desire to be a young hot mom.
So true... I'm 29 and just got married, always wanted to have one kid. But I feel like I've already missed out on some sort of chance. I know I haven't, but all that "young, hot mom" rhetoric really gets to me. 😢
When I was graduating high school, my teacher commented how amazing it was that our year managed to go through 4 years of high school without any student getting pregnant. Then I went college, where I was in the class with this girl who was a teen mom. At first she kept to herself, THEN the teen mom thing got hot. And my god did the ugly fly. I never went through the high school drama phase, but this girl manage to let me experience it in college. She was an over the top drama queen and roped a class of 90 people into her drama (some of whom are men in their mid 40s). She was glorifying teenage pregnancy like crazy, she said things like her baby would be 18 and she would still be in her mid 30s and be a "hot mom". Shopping together on the arms of her handsome son. And people would mistake her for a cougar with her hot young boyfriend (ew). She was suggesting it was trendy and genius idea and that other people should do it too. Her close friend circle was chiming in and agreeing for heavens sake. I was just stunned, it was so disgusting how she went about glorifying it and sucking everyone into her drama. I wasn't even close to the center of her drama vortex, but I got sucked in regardless. I don't give a f*** that she was teen mom, I wish she kept to her self.
I remember during this time someone in my 7th grade class got pregnant. As a class we were like sat down in our class and told about it and basically told not to talk about it. Very strange.
Strange parallel, a classmate’s mother died of an OD and our school went about it the exact same way. Weird but unsurprising that they’d treat pregnancy the same way they’d treat death
My theory (as a preteen in 2011, and a teen with my own obsession for a short bit) is that the obsession with teenage pregnancy is related to being a better parent for some. I grew up in an abusive household with a terrible relationship with my mom, and i was absolutely obsessed with teenage pregnancy media. I wanted to know the girls stories, i wanted to know what they had been through, i wanted to see how they handled those trials and worked through to where they were after. As a young teen, I was drawn to the idea of having a baby of my own (even though im STILL a virgin lmao) and although i still dont really know WHY i felt that way, my main guess is that it was because of my poor relationship with my mother. I've always loved kids, but as i grew older i was more and more determined to be a better parent than my mom was to me. I wanted a child of my own so i could prove myself, so i could show her how to be a REAL parent, etc. It could also be because i basically parented my own mother from the ages of 8-present (i still havent left the household so i can't say things have changed)
this shows/histories made me feel the same way!! it didn't make wanna have one but it encouraged discussions on better planning, ways to help the teens once they are in that position, to think in the health repercussions, how it will influence the baby's life ... in a way it also helped me to destigmatize the issue bc the majority showed how much they struggled, in comparison to the narrative provided (and massively spread) from religious groups or naive people: always idealizing and simplifying pregnancy, without acknowledging and often avoiding talking about the hardships involved, hardships that one may face being a teen or an adult. Accidental pregnancies, poor choice making and bad parenting (at that time specially, but still to this day) are experiences that the majority associate with only teen pregnancy, they blamed it solely on the "teen" factor, they choose to forget that unplanned pregnancy, lack of economic stability, irresponsible parents are a thing in adulthood too!! Kids, unfortunately, can suffer in any environment and upbringing, it seems to me that some want to feel superior by judging them, just to ignore how shitty parents they really are or bc they are jealous that the youth are more informed and have more choices/resources available that the ones they, back then, used to have.
Happy Milaween everyone!!! Hope you enjoy!
Jumpscare warning for when my video glitches around 12:20 😧😧
i actually found that kinda funny tbh 😭
Don’t forget to vote ✊
You spoil us 😍
Thank you for posting 🖤🖤🖤
good film, great video. I'd listen to you talk about anything tbh, lovely cadence.
Me and my two best friends growing up all got pregnant at 16. In 2009.
The things we had in common:
1. our mothers were teen moms.
2. Unstable home lives.
3. Very poor.
4. We all survived csa.
5. Baby dads were all over 18.
We didn't have a pact. Just a whole lot in common that lead to this. We were friends from kindergarten on and people really thought we did it on purpose. We absolutely did not.
Are all your children friends now ?
Your kids would be my age, hope they’re all okay. You’re a wonderful person 🫶🏾
@@Riaah_love you're 14??! I guess I was also watching these types of videos when I was that age but now that age seems like a baby to me.
@@lo17107 14 but I’m attending college early, plan to enter some form of psychological field and these videos help!
I wish people talked about those things a lot of young girls have in common
There are risk factors. Those are common in a lot of teenagers who get pregnant.
I think Precious is so important because it’s one of the few where the pregnancies aren’t because “omg teenagers are so horny or too curious and dumb” but just pure abuse. Many teen pregnancies are a product of abuse, not as a result of the former.
I think it tells a very important story as well. We need to listen to stories that don’t fit with our life experiences to expand our worldview. Too many of the teen pregnancy stories blame the teens saying they’re just promiscuous and babies are a punishment for premarital sex. People assume teen moms are just horny stupid teenagers. They don’t see as many of the stories of people who are SA’ed. People who are groomed by men much older than them then left. These girls all need support whether they got pregnant cuz they had consensual sex or were SA’ed.
@@mummytrollslet's not forget girls younger than 13 getting pregnant by family members. Incestuous molestation underage pregnancies are an unfortunate reality. I know a girl, who got raped by her dad and pregnant at 12. She miscarried. Let's not forget girls getting pregnant in Hollywood rape and forced abortions. 😢
This so many people missed the whole point of that movie and that saddens me so much it talked about so many problems
Real !!! It’s the another face of the coin as well, Juno was a white girl socially beautiful with parents and people who support her and love her, she basically was a privileged girl, not all the cases in real life are like that
Oh, yes! That is such a great movie
I'm actually pretty mad that a nice story about teen girls supporting each other to finish school despite young babies/pregnancies is turned into a salacious story about "trying to get pregnant"
Sadly, that's the world we live in. I hope people fight that and bring more light into this dark world.
@@terminallygraywhoosh
All it tells me is that their sex education provision is woefully inadequate. This is the irony of conservative policies. They almost always make the situation worse while insisting that if they just do it more it will eventually get better because it's "common sense." Sex ed, crime, economics. All situations made worse by common sense conservative policies over the last 40 years, but they refuse to look at the evidence before their eyes.
@@terminallygraybut it shouldn’t have said it was based on a true story then when it really wasn’t. They just created a whole new story and caused so many problems for the REAL people who they said it was “based” on. Now most people will believe this version of events and judge these REAL people unnecessarily because they were told it was a true story. When you watch something that says it’s based on a true story that usually means the plot is true to life however dialogue is often made up, there may be characters that weren’t real and the entire thing will be exaggerated. Not bullshit everything!
@@parrotstories The small and overtaxed minds that are into this kinda stuff. They don't care about truth, they don't care about justice. All they want is CHEAP ENTERTAINMENT on tv.
Giving television ANY KIND of credibility is like handing an alcoholic the keys to your liquor cabinet and expecting them to NOT steal a drink or 100. Spoiler alert ahead>>
Not Gonna Happen !!!
I also think it's really important to point out that despite the popularity of teen pregnancy stories, they fail to mention that the vast majority of teen moms have a baby with a man significantly older than them. Young girls are left to shoulder judgement when they are often victims of grooming or at the very least an uneven power dynamic!!
(edit: vast majority was definitely an overstatement but various studies still show a significant percentage!)
I be seeing them have baby daddies a year younger than them. What you smoking
@@saraha.1336 idk why you feel like you need to defend PEDOFILES
@@saraha.1336 the person said majority, not all
Not a teen mom but I’m 22 and my BD is a deadbeat 36 y/o so this is probably true
Also, if you consider the method of sex education being teached (Abstinence vs Abstinence Plus) you would find the Abstinence Plus method was more effective in teaching about sex and contraceptives and preventing teen pregnancies. While the Abstinence only method lacked the mention of contraceptives and is more "wait until marriage" based.
My mom was a pregnant teen and constantly threatened to kick me out if I ever got pregnant. Until I turned 20 now it’s “where are my grandkids” wth
I don’t get why parents see their kids as baby cannons but at the same time will preach about how you shouldn’t have kids too young
Still too young😂
my cousin is having her baby soon and shes 21. tooo young i am disappointed and im 18 because she is my favorite cousin but i will still support. the only reason why i said im disappointed because 2 of my aunts gave birth in their early 20s. both my grandmas on my dad and mom side gave birth at 18 and 19
@@fckbllz9924 righttt
My mom still thinks I’m not ready at 21 when she had her first child at 18🥱😴
I got pregnant a month into being 19 by a 24 year old. I watched Juno while I was pregnant and just sobbed. While I wasn’t in highschool I feel like it was such a realistic depiction. I remember her saying she was wearing a “fat suit that she couldn’t take off” and it hit so hard for me. Almost a year later and my son is 7 months old and I love him more than life itself, but I can’t help but think how my life would have been different had I never gotten with that guy and gotten pregnant. I feel like having a baby before I was done growing up affected me a lot. I have so much respect for moms that make it work in highschool.
proud of you
I had my first son at 18. Second with another man at 21. Shortly after my first was diagnosed with autism. My 3rd child another man’s
Child at 25. I’m 31 now. It has gotten easier but it wasn’t an easy Road to walk. ❤ you got this
That's almost exactly what happened to my mum lol, hopefully the dad isn't abusive like in my mum's case tho
genuine question, why you decided not to abort?
hope u and ur son are doing well !!
I saw a statistic recently that in America a 40% of the fathers responsible for pregnancies where the mother is 15 years old or younger were between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. I'm over half way thru the video but I just thought I'd add that bit of information. The problem is always presented as if it's the minor who is the problem when in reality it's adult men who are the problem. The movie Precious, therefore is likely closer to the reality of the "teen pregnancy epidemic" than any of the other media where the teen pregnancy is a by-product of relatively normal teen behaviour.
I'm mot sure if you know what statistics are, but 40 is less than 60. Assuming similar ages, girls have more power over men their age when it comes to consent.
So yes, for that significant 40%, it's the men, and literally no one says otherwise. No 15 year old can consent to any adult. But for the other 60%, when colloquially "consentual" amingst teens, these girls have more power and thus hold responsibility.
@@SeanWinters wait. wait out of geniune curiousity what do you mean by "assuming similar ages, girls have more power over men their age when it comes to consent"? because if anything they have equal balance in consent??? nobody has "more consent" then their partner unless someone is being pressured into sex?
@@SeanWintersok despite how this comment is a little weird, 40% is still A LOT. just because it isnt the majority doesnt mean that it shouldnt be taken into consideration
@@sours-orchard I didn't think this was news to anyone, but I'll break it down for you.
First, yes, let's talk about 2 15 year olds. Both too young for any adult(I'd say, too young for anyone including other 15 year olds).
In the Western world, women control access to sex. Most men have a very low bar for their sexual partners, and women tend towards having very high bars. Whereas men control access to relationships. If a woman wants sex at any time, it's not that difficult. Most women could walk outside and just ask someone for sex, and she's likely to get men to accept.
On the other hand, men control access to relationships, meaning that if a man is attractive enough, many women will desire to have a relationship with him, and it's up to him whether or not there is one, or if there's a "situation" or a "fling" or whatever substitute you want to use.
In this way, 2 15 year olds, if they were to do "adult things", the girl has more "power" in this position, because the final say, most of the time, is going to be on her shoulders.
Now, personally, I don't actually hold to this outdated idea of "power dynamics". When two people are in a relationship, the "power dynamics" can no longer be blamed on anything. Every adult holds equal responsibility in relationships.
Still, my point is that assuming we're talking about the same age, if we're talking about who has "more power" in relation to consent, it's obviously more often the woman/girl.
@@sours-orchard Oh yes, the original point was that in 60% of teen pregnancies, we cannot pretend the girl is a victim, and the original post made it seem like every teen pregnancy was the man's fault. Ofc in the 40% it is, but it's not even in the majority, which again, is the subtext.
I went to a super small school in a poor area (only 90 kids in my grade alone). One of my classmates was a girl who constantly acted out, and never did any school assignment. Sophomore year comes and she becomes a pregnant minor. After that when the school found out the staff was all so helpful towards her, helping her prepare for a maternity leave and the assignments she’d miss. Many of the teachers were parents too and offered to donate baby stuff they no longer had use for. This support helped her turn her life around. She started paying attention in class, doing assignments, and when senior year and graduation came, she passed me in the class ranks. At our school the first 20 students with the best grades are honors students, I was placed 18. I can’t remember where she ended up placing, but it was higher than me, and I don’t think she’d ever have pushed herself to do better without that support.
I heard she got accepted into one of the state’s highest universities, don’t know much after that, But I think she’s got it handled
That’s a great story, I imagine some teens treated poorly if pregnant and I’m glad their are caring adults out there that can help them.
that says so much about your school and community. that is amazing that she got the support she needed and excelled because of it! the best outcome.
We had an 8th grader who was pregnant at my school
Awe I’m so glad she was able to turn her life around for thr better, it truely shows that when given support even a little helps so much !
Maybe if they had supported her before she never would’ve gotten pregnant
contrary to the moral panic, i actually think watching 16 and pregnant is the reason so much of my generation and younger had sex way later or not at all. it was the opposite of glamorizing for me
I do think it may have caused a rise in teen pregnancies in the media but that was just cause youtube existed in the 2010s. I recomened watching camryn clifford's video on the rise of teen pregnancy youtubers. She talks from her experience as a teen mom
@@reechaaryal8094ironicslly there are studies that show it reduced teen pregnancies, the sex has always happened no matter if its now or 50 years ago. But st least now the kids have a better chance to have it safely.
Honestly I was like 11 or 12 when the show was on air and I knew a lot of teenagers who had kids in high school and many had sex in 6th and 7th grade. My sister was in 7th grade when a girl her age got pregnant and a girl a year younger than me had 2 kids by the age of 17
This comment is old but, I agree. I remember my Dad telling me I couldn’t watch it because he didn’t want me looking up to them. I think it did the complete opposite, and showed how hard it was.
It’s true the percentage literally DROPPED after 16 & pregnant started
I remember watching “I didn’t know I was pregnant” in elementary school. As a kid that was the most horrifying thing to me and I started getting paranoid 😭✋🏻 I didn’t use public bathrooms bc I was scared I would get pregnant if I accidentally sat on someone’s bodily fluids. TLC (the network) definitely capitalized off of the whole teen pregnancy panic.
omg same. I was never taught how pregnancy worked so I was constantly scared I was pregnant due to all the paranoia. I didn’t even have my period yet 😓
yh I went thru a phase where I was afraid I might be pregnant because when I was a toddler I used to share baths with this boy my age cause our mums were friends lol, I had no idea how pregnancy worked obviously 😆 I just knew you had to be naked with a boy
I have an aunt who has 9 kids, and when I was little I overheard someone say as a joke “Every time Sandy even hears the word ‘sex’ she gets pregnant,” and I took it completely literal, I was like “Oh well that’s why she has so many kids”
Anyway I grew up in a red state with abstinence-only sex ed, so I did not get disabused of this notion until shockingly late
it worked so well that I'm 30 and still afraid of teen pregnancy
Me too. I had a very irregular period so I was constantly worried I might be pregnant even tho I was a virgin. Like, maybe I was drugged or sleep and I didn’t know? Crazy stuff.
I remember watching I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant when I was around 8-11 and being really confused about the controversy of teen moms, because I thought pregnancy just happened 💀 I couldn’t understand why it was such a shameful thing because I thought the girls had no choice and their bodies just went “oh yeah, we’re having a baby now”
Hahaha, that's adorable
It’s a reverse period lol
lmao me too
having sex isnt shameful. thinking youre responsible enough to have a child while not being responsible enough to realise that you should actually be getting an abortion, however........
Dont have unsafe sex abortion it should never be a thought if you are careful.
In the 30s my great grandmother Olive fell in love with a catholic. Her Protestant family didn’t approve. She became pregnant with a baby boy out of wedlock as a young woman. This wasn’t discovered until many years later when her children noticed she had a mysterious C-section scar. Still nobody knows what happened to the baby boy. Later, in the 60s Olive’s daughter Holly became pregnant at the age of 14. She was sent away for months to a facility to have her baby (Catherine) and returned without her. Her little sisters didn’t even know she was pregnant and it was hidden from everyone in the community. It wasn’t until Catherine was fully grown, married, and had tragically lost her adoptive parents that she reached out to find her birth mother. Teen pregnancy is not more common now, pregnant teens are just now afforded the support and dignity they need.
I agree. Hearing the stories from back in the day on how teen moms were treated and the forced adoptions (adoption can be wonderful when there’s consent) are heartbreaking. Those poor girls just had their babies ripped from them and were expected to go on like it never happened
girl excuse me while I rant, but Precious is something I am really passionate about
As someone who has a background in social work, the scenes in Precious are incredibly accurate. You come into work and hear about absolutely horrendous trauma that no amount of schooling can prepare you for and start from scratch addressing it. The things discussed in that movie are all too real and happen on the daily to literal children, but social services funding is slashed every single year. Young girls like Precious are everywhere, but out of all age groups I have worked with, they have the strongest drive to succeed. It is amazing what love, passion, and assistance can do, and the end of the movie showed that.
1000% my mom worked in social work but not directly in health and human services. She was a section 8 caseworker and the stories she heard! She said she had no interest in watching precious because there were about five Precious’s in her case log.
IIRC, the book the movie is based off of was written with several real life stories as reference.
You said everything I was thinking. Thank you
Just watched the movie after readinng your comment, and it's gotten me even more motivated to foster teen moms
It’s a really good movie but it’s very hard to sit through. It’s actually triggering for me. I managed to sit through it once and it really tore my heart out. I view it more as a child abuse story though and a very sad one at that.
im 22 and im still scared to become a teen mom... they really made a number on us
I'm married and 25, my husband and I had a pregnancy scare earlier this year, so naturally I called my bestfriend to tell her I'm freaking out. She said it feels like I'm having a teen pregnancy and she wasn't wrong. It had the same vibe as a teen pregnancy even though it's been 7 years since I've turned into an adult 🤣
It's probably because we don't own a house to have kids in (we have a condo), a car (the neighborhood is walkable), and I didn't have a job at the time.
Edit:Typo
@@AlexisXavier LMAOOO i would probably freak out too ur good
lmao same, i'm not going anywhere near any of that 🤣
😂😂... I get this, I am 22 and pregnant, and I honestly still feel a bit like a teen mom, because I am the first one of my highschool classmates to have a husband and a child and I have literally nobody around me being my age and pregnant - at the same time I have more than a half of my university studies done, and I think we handle our life quite well with my 23 yo husband, but the way the people look at me at the doctors appointments, etc., is just funny (maybe I look a bit younger :D)...
I guess that (at least where I live) there's this stigma of irresponsibility attached to young parents, so I really get the pressure the teen mums must be facing....
But if I really was a teenager, I think I would taken this much worse.
@@alzbetadrdakova402 this, that look from people in the doctors office is what i dread. i may be mid twenties but i look like i'm still in highschool. I had been to an obgyn as a young teen and even in that office the glares where intense even though thats not why i was there. i like the office i'm at now, there's no judgement.
I think people see someone with a young face and think "that poor girl, she's throwing her life away tsk tsk, what kinda life is that poor baby of hers gonna have" when its none of their business. as you said youve gpt almost all your schooling done so they wouldnt know youre ready
Media like this and the intense focus on teen pregnancy made me (a person with an anxiety disorder) cripplingly afraid of pregnancy. People are crying and moaning about the fall in birth rates nowadays, but all that anti pregnancy programming doesn't just go away once people grow up I feel. I remember juno in particular making me feel pretty anxious, but hey that was just me, I was a skittish kid.
My parents were particularly mad when the school did that project with the robot baby in my health class, as they felt it did nothing to fight teen pregnancy and just demonized babies, which was true honestly.
Yeah I think this whole phenomenon legitimately contributed to my phobia of pregnancy. I was constantly afraid that I'd get pregnant in 5th grade just out of nowhere.
@@darkvioletcloud I agree I have a huge phobia of pregnancy and of something growing in me and I attribute it solely to purity culture snd anti pregnancy propaganda like this it scared me so bad as a kid and I don't see myself wanting one at least anytime soo
yessss.
Omg yes the robo baby! Both my mother (someone who's had 3 kids) and my sister (a pediatric a neonatal ICU nurse) said that baby was WAY too hard. Totally not accurate, didn't do anything helpful for my classmates or I, and was just a pain in the tail
anti pregnancy propaganda is so based if you put it like that
Never forget the time Grace DOES have sex in secret life and her dad immediately dies in a plane crash, leading her to believe it’s punishment for her having sex
YES! I had been recently thinking about this show and how in reflection it just feels like purity culture? It feels like everyone in the show was punished for having sex.
That show needs its own video because it was something else
I was gonna say, I could have sworn her father died right after? But I wasn’t sure since I haven’t watched it since I witnessed my sister watching it and I, a 9 year old at the time, tagged along 😂
oh my god how did i forget, secret life was INSANE for this?? there wasn’t a single character that ended up unscathed for having sex, it made it seem like a life or death issue when i was a teenager watching it. it’s saddening to see how manipulative & fear-mongering they were, now looking back
Has any television moment ever been more iconic that “he died a horrible death because I had incredible sex”?
Juno is teenage girl with a developing brain, and people with developing brains make decisions based on feelings and not logic, this is why when she's confronted with him questioning her motives, that she doesn't know what to say-- and all of this happened with pregnancy hormones running through her as well. Even if she did have a crush on the guy it was up to him to be the bigger person (literally to be the adult with the fully-developed brain that he has) and push back, not creepily accept her advances. It really touched on how girls can be attracted to older men but really don't know what they're getting into.
This really hits home as someone who only liked older men as a teen. I didn't date until I was 20 and now my bf is slightly younger than me.
They can't know better at that age
:( and most decent humans know to give yourself boundaries with teenage children. But sadly not all.
her and cera are the same age but the older guy was definitely creepy but yknow...older creeps gonna creep unfortunately not uncommon. They dont care to be the "adult" they're always being """seduced""" by children. If you can be seduced by a child you should NOT be allowed near them.
🙌🏼🙌🏼
Yeah when I was 14 I was pursued by a 28yo and when I was 21/22 by a 46 yo(I had just lost both parents and grandparent with no family). I can't have kids but he's controlled me with drugs and verbal/emotional abuse. I was in a dark place for a long time. The problem is, once it's happened to you, it's hard to get out. They tear you down so bad that you can't leave. I can't even buy groceries without getting cussed out and that's the only time I'm allowed to leave the house...
I am the child of a teen mom, and I remember telling people my mom’s age, thinking it was so cool how young she was because she was a cool, young mom. I remember being judged by other students in elementary school after telling them this and was so confused as to why, I just knew I loved my mom. I was so grateful that my mom was open when talking to me about sex and sex ed so that I knew about safe sex and birth control by the time I started doing it and never had a pregnancy scare.
Same honestly people were surprised and sometimes weried out but I really didn't care I loved her and for what she did for me
Your mum sounds like a wiser and more loving parent than a lot of people who have kids as adults.
“Support teens who are pregnant, not teen pregnancy”
🙌🙌
@kiwi this is such a weird response to that
@kiwi ok.
@kiwi you sound almost jealous?
@kiwi 😭
i went to a pretty progressive high school but i still remember being taught sex-ed by my pregnant gym coach, and having a woman come in as a guest to speak about her abusive relationship with her ex. but then that same woman told me that it was "too inappropriate" when i tried to bring up "consent" when she was asking for vocabulary words to put on the board. it was just dumbfounding to have the 16 year old girl sitting behind me ask "what's consent mean" while the grown woman talking about recognizing abuse tells me that learning about consent is inappropriate and anti-abstinence. i was shut down, trying to suggest that these girls were most vulnerable to abuse by the people closest to them, like their boyfriends, especially if they never had a person look them in the face and say "even your boyfriend needs to get permission from you". makes me mad to this day.
Especially, because consent is not limited to sexual encounters. You could explain consent in a medical context (a doctor asking permission before doing a procedure) or any number of other examples. That is just so weird.
That Children Having Children article also mentioned that kids as young as 8 were having sex. It caused such a panic in my mother that she asked my 8 year old older sister if she'd been having sex, which she hadn't. Then when my sister said she hadn't done it and didn't even know the word our mom was talking about, my mother refused to speak to or look at my sister for months out of this irrational...i don't even know what. I do remember that article.
I love Juno for how straightforward and realistic it is. It’s not overly dramatic. It has well rounded characters and doesn’t give in to stereotypes.
It's realistic depending on who you are. For most people Precious is more realistic.
@@smokyquartz5817 well I’m not really comparing it to Precious, I’m comparing it to the hyperbolic cautionary tales that were part of the teen pregnancy panic. Precious is on a whole other plane, but does possess the same level of realism as Juno, just in a different life circumstance.
@@smokyquartz5817 Precious is way more realistic. Juno is the idealistic alternative that few people get to experience. Juno is the exception to Precious’s rule from what I have seen personally.
@@smokyquartz5817 as someone who loves both films, I say that they are both realistic in different degrees. Juno had support from friends and her parents, even the father of her child, while also having a woman she could rely on to raise her kid since she could not.
Meanwhile, Precious literally had no one until she went to that school. She didn't have a support system, healthy parents, or even friends to go to. Her story is believable because not everyone has that chance of escape, meanwhile Juno is a more idealistic outcome.
Gurl stop u were talkin about precious lol. And I agree it is more realistic. It doesn’t give into stereotypes this is a lot of young girls reality still 30nyears later.
As a teenager during this time period, it felt to me like the obsession with "bad moms", Octomom, Kate from John and Kate, and the teen moms, Jamie Lynn and Bristol Palin, was all just kind of an excuse to make a hobby out of hating women/teen girls. "Look at all these bad women doing bad things and getting PUNISHED by being pregnant! Look at these selfish women having babies they can't afford and still getting plastic surgery! See teen girls, don't be a bad woman like these poor people, sex havers, these vain women, you don't DESERVE to be happy unless you are the perfect chaste obedient daughter, not vain but you must still be beautiful, don't be poor and on wellfare but don't spend extravagantly," etc. Not to speak for everyone, but some of the fascination definitely came from a want to learn how not to be these people because all you ever heard was how terrible teenage girls were and you needed desperately to be one of the good ones.
And of course, "don't DARE even THINK about abortion to remedy all of this, suffer with it because it's what you deserve"
This comment said it better than I could have. Every single year while trying to compare myself to other teenage girls while also being told I was a terrible teenage girl, I always thought, “well at least I didn’t get pregnant!” And I even carried those thoughts into my adulthood for the first couple of years. I’m about to be in my mid twenties and even then I catch myself being shocked when people my age are getting pregnant and having kids because the effects of this whole thing have stuck with me so strongly. It’s absolutely wild how powerful this era was and how the fear still heavily lingers.
Wow, Tama Hero is here.
@@sam_ugh Same here. I would damn near boast and celebrate the fact that "I survived" all the way to graduation without getting knocked up like the majority of my classmates did. Even now like you as an adult, it would heavily shock and confuse me whenever I see old classmates on social media announce that they're pregnant. The teen pregnancy era really had a lasting effect.
Bruh Kate Gosselin was like 28
My mom, who had her first child at 17, told me I can't have birth control for my periods because I'd just start having sex. Ny periods were getting bad enough I had to stay home on the first day and get taken out of school because I literally couldn't move. Top it all off I already miscarried my first pregnancy before I ever asked. She didn't know because I was terrified of becoming homeless and I was working on my escape plan before telling her.
I’m so sorry this happened to you. I feel like a lot of teen moms get horribly mistreated and judged when it happens to them and then go on to do the same type of abuse that was inflicted on them. A lot of the most judgmental women I have came across have ironically been teen moms. I hope you are in a better and safer place.
That is horrible. What makes me angry is that the father of the baby does not get kicked out of his house.
Babe wake up new Mila Tequila vid dropped
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Me af
Babe I'm up
i’m up i’m up!!
legit just woke up 😂
Im up, im up!!
I hate the fact that in that the principal seemed to be horribly publicly shaming the girls. But not the boys of course! Because how could a pregnancy ever be a boys fault too?
It's because the principal is serving his best interests, which includes the probability that he was reacting to parents concerns ...OR... just tired of dealing with the situation at his school (whatever THAT was) so he made a move to make it look like "he is still in charge" - he is the chief authority figure - nobody is going to make me look bad even if, I have to make it up as I go along.
It's tough for guys in these situations because it's a life changing situation and EVERYBODY is expecting him to be Superman. He doesn't know anything to begin with and is being poked and prodded to grow up instantly. One other point I HAVE TO put out there is; Sex is mostly a woman's domain. She chooses which guy gets lucky that day, she has the final say on what happens to the baby and Family court will pretty much give her what she wants or needs. In other words, the only thing guys are guaranteed is to get laid because he's "pick of the litter", the rest is up to fate and skill.
@@terminallygrayLMAOO WHAT? 40% of fathers who have kids with girls 15 or younger are BETWEEN 20-30 YEARS OLD. You gonna blame the girls for that too? Because sex is "their domain?"
You're right I was raped, by a 16 year old boy who overpowered me when I was 18 became pregnant with HIS child (miscarriage due to the stress and hell the 16 year old gave me) and when the time came he denied it pretty hard. I remember crying and begging for someone to help me while his pants were down or when I was 20, a creepy 30 year old wouldn't take no for an answer, He forced me to be in a relationships with him, of course no one believed me when I explain the situation, he had his friends and family KEEP AN EYE ON ME 24/7, he stalked me, i wasn't allowed to talk to my own siblings. It's tough for guys? Guys also have access to condoms, You know the united states is suffering from a fatherless epidemic, 1 in 4 kids don't have a father in their life or absent fathers. It takes two to tango, we should teach sex ed in school because is pretty obvious no one is teaches their kids about sex ed and it's easier to blame everyone except for the parents. @@terminallygray
@terminallygray I'd argue that a pregnancy is mostly on the man since all he had to do was wear a condom and/or not decide to nut into a woman to prevent one but go off I guess?
@@terminallygray " It's tough for guys in these situations"? yah it must be so hard to not have their bodies in danger and not be blamed even though it's a two person process. that "sex is a woman domain" is such word vomit. If he didn't wanna " be forced to grow up" he also should have used protection.
On the "Taboo pregnancy" obsession: Does anyone remember if the whole thing with the pregnant trans man who got like.... MASSIVE coverage on Oprah was during this time? Because this shot this into my memory but I can't place it to a time frame but it definitely fits into people being like invasively obsessed with pregnancies they see as weird/unnatural/amoral
Omg, *YES!* I remember hearing about that years after it was huge in the media
Yeah, about 2007 or so.
Oh my god yes! Thomas Beatie was his name. That story was a fundamental development in my young brain for pretty much exactly the reasons you listed
That story was all over UA-cam at the time. I remember it was some of my first exposure to trans culture as a kid
I think icarly even referenced it
I think the most wild thing I remember about it was a teen mum uk episode where a girl was 15 but she’d got pregnant at 14 and her boyfriend was in his twenties…… and it was just ignored?? That man had provably committed a crime and they just pretended it was all fine and alright
Edit: commenters, I said provably not probably like it’s provably a crime aha
The majority of Teen Mom dads were like this. I believe the only ones who weren't out of high school when they impregnated the mom were Tyler, Adam, and Derrick.
that man did* commit a crime
That man committed a crime.
The age of consent in the area she lived in might have been 14 at the time. I know it was around this time period when age of consent laws started to be adjusted. The age of consent was 14 in Canada until 2008, so it's possible.
@@IndiaMyers oc mentioned that it was Teen Mum UK & the age of consent in the UK is 16 & has been since 1885 (pretty wild actually)
I’m really glad you included Precious because even though her pregnancies weren’t necessarily the focus of the film, it still is a VERY valuable perspective on teen pregnancy, it can be far more complicated than as presented in Juno or other high school themed films.
She’s a pop culture historian. These videos could be used in anthropology classes or some shit
No cause actually bro this video should be shown in sex Ed (u can learn a lot from it)
@@Dayz2005 What can you learn ? How to make crappy movies for teens ??
I remember watching the reruns of Degrassi Junior High when I was in 6th grade at school in 1992 I remember the episode were Spike has sex with the boy she likes Shane then she finds out she's pregnant. I also remember watching the 80s movie For Keeps with Molly Ringwald about a teenage couple who have sex later finding out they're expecting a baby they also get married it's their Senior Year in High School they've had plans to go to College. We also watched the reruns of Degrassi High were they talked about teen pregnancy and abortion among other topics. Tyra Banks had a talk show were she talked to pregnant teens, parents and girls who want to have babies. The youngest girls who was on the show were both 13 one them was 3 months pregnant and they other 13 year old was 4 months pregnant.
i got addicted to drugs when i was 13 years old due to grooming by someone 12 years older than me. I had my daughter at 14. She's almost 3 now, I'm almost 18. my decision to keep her saved my life. if i had found out i was pregnant sooner, i would've had an abortion, and although it was rough finding out at 5 months, that factor of it changed my entire life. the sheer amount of hatefulness and lack of support from peers, teachers, etc. forced me to drop out. i didn't drop out because school was too hard, i didn't drop out because i didn't have time for assignments, i dropped out because school was straining my mental health and wasting my time. I have my GED now and plan to start college in the next couple of years. im the happiest i have ever been, my daughter, the support of my family, and my boyfriend + his family, are a big source of my happiness. almost 4 years clean, no longer need antidepressants, bought my own car, and i couldn't have asked for anything to go any other way.
You are awesome, your daughter is lucky to have you!
I’m glad you’re so happy! Though I’m also sorry it sounds like you had to grow up so fast. I’m 17 as well, 18 in about 4 months, and I can’t imagine having gone through what you have already and being the mother of a toddler at this age! But I’m glad it’s all worked out for you in the end. Best wishes to you and your family.
omg, this is incredible. i’m so happy to hear about your improved mental health, as well as being clean from drugs. it’s fantastic that you have a supportive family and boyfriend. i wish luck to you, and you should feel extremely proud of everything you’ve accomplished.
wishing you all the best! so happy that you are on a new path for yourself and your family 🫶🏻
so glad to hear that you're okay and that things got better
Being a preteen/middle schooler who’s mom had you at 18 was so weird during this era. I had to do so much damage control to avoid being bullied and the pta moms hated my parents.
yea my mom didn't have me as a teen but my brother. and it's annoying when ppl demonize the girls that go thru it. it's a harder life don't get me wrong, but it's not a death sentence
My mom had me at 26 but she always looked young and when I was a kid people would be like “oh that’s not your sister?” And my mom would go “no she’s my daughter, I got pregnant at 13.”
She never understood why that joke was never funny.
Meanwhile my mom had me at 41 and I also have two older siblings and my older sister had her first child when I was almost 10 and the second when I was 12. Whenever I was out with those two kids I got shit for being a teen mom and got treated horribly by some people and in school I had people making comments about my parents being so old.
That was definitely a weird phase of my life. Now I'm 30 and my nephew is 20 and oldest niece is 17 and everyone thinks I'm just their older sibling. That's definitely preferable but somehow they thought I could he their parent when I was 16.
Interesting. It was seen as a more cool thing where I grew up. Having older parents was seen as more lame
I was an 18 year old who had my son and the age difference between me and my sons classmates parents are 20years. It definitely sucks, the school loves my son and he has tons of friends but I'm now struggling at a 27 year old trying to have any conversation with the 40yr old moms.
I’m 25 and feel like all the teen pregnancy stuff was so in my face and every where I looked. It didn’t glamorize teen pregnancy at all and I’m still scared to have kids tbh
As someone who was a small kid during this time I was OBSESSED with 16 and pregnant, teen mom, secret life of an American teenager, etc. and I can tell you that I’m 21 years old and still a virgin because I refuse to get caught lacking😂😂
I love the relatability of this statement 😂😂
Lmao same. I was also obsessed with the story times on UA-cam of teens finding out they were pregnant. I have no idea why I was so fascinated by it. Almost 21 now and still a virgin as well. My biggest fear is getting pregnant😭😭 like no thank you I’ve seen how much women struggle
i didn’t have sex until 19 and took heavy precautions beforehand 😭 nexplanon my beloved, i would rather get uterus out than get pregnant
I feel so relieved to be asexual. I have a legit phobia of being pregnant
@@junibeeb so true bestie, this is doubly so for me because im also trans lmao
Ben was so terrible, like I remember being in complete disbelief that he was Amy’s love interest like the scene I’ll always remember is him trying to comfort Amy after she called herself a wh*re and he says: “you’re my wh*re” I wholeheartedly believed the pilot of this show was a parody….Such a fever dream
That was the most hilarious scene ever 🤣 also when Grace was like "my had a horrible death because I had incredible sex"
And then Ben not understanding why Amy, someone who got pregnant from their first time, was not ready to have sex again
Ngl I liked the show so much I rewatched it many times but mostly the first two seasons really. But I was 12 to like 16 when I was really into it.
Doesn’t Amy choose to not stay with her baby daddy and Ben? Because from what I remember that’s how they ended the show? 😂
@@MissPachie I think so, last I remember is Amy going to music school or something like that
I got pregnant in college at 19 and of course I got horrible things slung at me. My mother called me a useless college dropout (I never wanted to go anyway) and a whore, etc. All I could think is "how are you going to call me an adult at 18, but whittle me down to a worthless *teeeeeen mom* at 19?"
I'm still in a successful relationship with my kids father. We own a home. Good jobs. Good life.
Everyone said we weren't a good example, teens should be shamed for unintended pregnancies, I better not dare say "hey, your life is NOT over" or be supportive to young people who need it. They spoonfed me my ENTIRE LIFE that teen pregnancy was an epidemic and it was "babies raising babies 😭" and it was never even fucking true.
I hate when people think teens are so stupid and they won’t be able to work it out when they have kids young. My parents worked it out and you did too and I’m so proud of you! Best of luck for you and your family ❤️
Your mom was horrible, but tbf i still wouldnt support the normalization of teen pregnancy. Its just things that just happened, not shitd thats should be normalize
I don't support teen pregnancies, but shaming teens when they have kids doesn't help anyone.
Nine*teen*. That's definitely pushing the cut off.
I also want to say the reactions to precious came from the fact that she wasn't a skinny conventionally attractive white girl who had a middle class family to fall back on. I think you're right to include it but it is a fundamentally different story than the others are.
this comment should be up top
I have never seen Precious because everything I've heard about it is heartbreaking af and stuff like that happens irl more often than we like to think. Someone reading this comment at some point might be living out their own Precious story (anyone who is; you WILL get through it! This is just a chapter in your life story, it will shape you, but it does not define you. You are amazing, beautiful inside and out, you deserve better and one day you WILL have better! You just need to work on your escape plan and you will get through this!)
i love juno. it’s such a sweet movie that confronts many real issues facing young people without making fun of them, it’s just compassionate and empathetic.
My grandmother got pregnant at 15, but because my grandfather was able to get a good job (which he had to hitchhike to for some time because they couldn’t afford a car), they’re now middle class and living a nice life. Whenever someone starts trash talking teen moms, my grandmother says “Oh, teen moms like I was?”, and when they hurry to be like “Oh not like you!”, she says “You’re only saying that because you know me now and I’m no longer the poor, pregnant girl from the trailer park”
My mom wouldn’t let me watch Juno when it came out bc she was worried I would get pregnant… little did she know I’m a lesbian lmao
little did you both know, but so was elliot page at the time!
My Mom told me I wasn't allowed to watch it. I was so busy at the time, I didn't watch anything really unless I was out with my boyfriend, and he had no desire to see it. As an adult, I watched it. I thought it was well done. Hated Jason Bateman's character, but thought Juno was wise beyond her years.
@@d.leighannbatemon3192 omg he plays some awful characters sometimes doesnt he, I also couldnt stand him in Juno, hes bordeline pedo in my opinion. of course its just his character but hes hard to watch, and really selfish.
@@ilexdiapason Isn't Elliot trans?
@@robinwangai3303He is trans. However, he identified as a lesbian before coming out as a trans man.
Omg I'm SO GLAD you mentioned the Sims 2 teen pregnancy UA-cam Videos 🤣😭 I remember those videos SO WELL.. the "scene" aesthetic, the extremely dramatic fighting and crying scenes.. I was obsessed with those Sims 2 videos and also had the teen pregnancy Mod lol
Those videos were so weird. I honestly don't get the obsession with Simmers wanting teen pregnancy.
I'm 25 and STILL obsessed with sims teen pregnancies
when i was like 13 i’d have loads of teen pregnancies but now being 20 i have more teen fun like going out with friends and parties and stuff so it all changes with age for me
@@jalapeno1119 i think it was just weird, dramatic and taboo for a lot of us who were kids/tweens
and half the time either the teen mom or the baby in the videos would straight up DIE...
I think Precious resonates with a lot of Black people and people of color because it gave a peak into the life of what teen girls who come from low income households that deal with domestic violence and getting ebt. I know back in the mid 2010s BET used to play Precious a lot and families would laugh in some moments , cry, and allow us to have heartfelt dialogues about the problems with teen pregnancy and poverty that normally our community just sweeps stuff under the rug in the forms of comedy.
I agree. Having a dialogue over things that just aren't discussed is the first step to breaking the cycle
My high school had a daycare so it was common to be a teen mom at my school cuz girls at other schools in the district would transfer to my school when they got pregnant. It kept so many young women in school and I wish that was the type of resource that people would have seen as a response to this supposed “problem”
That’s actually amazing
Mine has a pre school but I don’t know anyone that has gotten pregnant
My high school had the same thing but there were no teen moms in the district so all the kids were from the teachers lol
My school district actually has two day cares when I was in high school. Both High schools had one. One for babies and toddlers for staff and students. And the other was just preschool age and ran like a pre school mostly for staff or people who paid tuition. Both day cares are worked into the curriculum for child care and culinary classes. Culinary classes would prepare the meals for the preschool staff and students. The other schools day care would do the same for the toddlers and the rest of the school. It was a small school.
@@charitychristman4253 the way the food situation was handled is pretty damn smart
My mom didn't care lol. She was a teen mom that struggled herself, but never talked to me about safe sex. Or did anything to keep me from making mistakes in general really. When I was 14 and started dating a 21 yo, AND TOLD HER he took my virginity, she barely raised an eyebrow. Believe it or not that's not the worst case of her not protecting me. Just one of the many reasons I don't speak to her now. And a great lesson on how not to parent lol
I'm so sorry that happened to you, I hope you're in a better place
Damn that sucks, I’m so sorry. Hope you’re doing well.
☹️ hope you’re in a better place ❤
It really sucks, but sometimes our parents show us how to parent by being "how not to" examples :( my husband's parents fall into that category unfortunately too
I am so sorry to the little girl in you. You deserved so much better. Sending you the biggest mom hug ❤
I am 24 years old and I am STILL terrified of teen pregnancy. I've had several friends tell me the same. It might not have been a huge thing, but my mom sure thought it was and made it very clear.
Going to high school during this time period was wild. Purity culture was out of control. My entire school had an assembly where they had some purity culture group gave us a lecture about waiting for marriage and abstinence.
Same! We had to sign chastity pledges after our assembly
At ours, they separated girls and boys then had a Christian couples therapist tell us that every time we had a sexual experience before marriage it would be like throwing a dirty diaper into our relationship. (yes she used real diapers to demonstrate). But not to worry, children, you can re-virginize yourself through Jesus. When one girl asked, "what if we aren't Christian?" instead of thinking that maybe there are other religions out there or physical/mental health reasons to abstain from sex, the lady just preached to us about why we should be Christian. It was so wild and if anything it made all of the kids at our school way more sexually curious.
My whole school district was abstinence-only. They did a poll my junior year and the data showed that an overwhelming majority of students WANTED to be taught a proper and comprehensive sex ed program. I wish schools listened to their students instead of middle aged adults who haven't even stepped foot in a school in 30 years.
Mine was the opposite. I was seen as the weird one for being virgin. At one point admins were calling all of these girls to the nurses office who were suspected to have been intimate or even associated with this specific "crew" of boys because they were the cause of an outbreak of some STI 💀
‘Purity culture was out of control’. Im assuming you would rather have thot culture out of control. Having fewer sex partners won’t kill you trust me. Being a wh0re is not a badge of honour. I know western culture glories being a loose woman but trust me having self control is a virtue.
I'm so glad you brought up the STORM of teen pregnancy sims videos. There's these series called "Just One" and "Unexpected" that intrawled me when I was in middle school.
I remember "Just One" OMG my sister and I loved that story lol.
take care and teenaged are the reason I wanted the sims in the first place
I still have a soft spot for Just One. That series inspired me to make Sims 2 videos. I still like that it didn't really focus on the pregnancy, it was more about the relationship between the couple.
Enthralled?
As someone who watched teen mom and the sims videos I obsessed over the idea. As a result I had my son at 18 pregnant at 17, learning from watching these girls drop out of high school I ended up finishing high school and now getting my dental assistant certification. And I am proud to say I am now married to the same man that got my pregnant and now pregnant with our second baby.
respect✊
Teen mom here. I got pregnant when I was 16 and had my son when I was 17 in 2013. I’m 26 now and my son is 9. Let me tell you back in the day the stigma was SO high and I was treated like absolute trash for being a teen mom. Regardless of media or anything else that influences people, know that whatever or however it happened support the mom and don’t judge for choices that were not made by you. Trust me, teen moms are going through enough. Positive note: I’m super happy now and am gonna be a hot mom living my best life in my thirties. 😂🥳 Stay safe out there!
Girl I feel you!! I was a teen mom at 16/17 in 2017 and even then (4 years later) I got called absolutely ruthless names and rumors made up by girls that were also sexually active which made NO SENSE to me…..
I know a teen girl did an experiment where she pretended to be pregnant with a fake belly and everything. She managed to trick the students and even the teachers. And the first thing she mentioned was how AWFUL she was treated. She lost her friends, people started to trash talk and slut shame her. Though she managed to find decent true friends though and revealed the experiment later on. I mainly rmemeber how shocked everybody was, especially the ones who were mean to her.
Precious, please don't skip that part. Many of us black girls go through the same thing, or variation of such. Many of our mothers are mean, or weren't given the tools to be nice, or hate their lives and take it out on their kids. So many of us end up in foster care, or at family house, and end up getting raped and molested as we are children. Please don't skip this part
It’s a trigger warning. That message is there not for people who are “uninterested,” but for people who may have lived that out so they don’t have to relive their trauma(therefore unfortunately know all too well what happens in these scenarios)
It’s definitely an aspects of black culture that Needs more awareness 😢
Intergenerational racial trauma is all too real. It heavily affects indigenous communities as well
THAT PART, my mom was a poor black single mom and she took the stress of providing for both of us out on me alot. for a lot of black girls, our first bully are own mothers.
It can happen to anyone. Not just black people. Sexual assault in family is not specific within race
“He’s kind of obsessed with having sex with her knowing fully well that she doesn’t want to until she’s married” the objective is he wants to conquer the unobtainable I’ve been straight up told this by guys when I was in HS and was strict catholic 🥴🥴 they want to be with a girl no one else has a chance with
I watched teen mom content in all forms from as early as I can remember. Then I got pregnant at 17 and I decided to keep my baby solely off the fact that these movies and tv shows and teen mom UA-cam made me feel it would be like a movie. Now I’m 24 and I have a 6 year old and while I’m so so glad I kept my child I do feel that it was irresponsible to make that decision because i wanted to emulate media. I am LUCKY I have a family who did not kick me out, were supportive in my decision and still to this day help me physically and financially. It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to admit that I only made that decision because of the media I was consuming as well and was not thinking about how many other lives were being affected by that decision, particularly my child’s life. I take being a mother extremely seriously and it’s a complete focus in my life, but I was lucky that I was able to finish high school and get some higher education and not have to worry about having a place to live or having food to eat. I was lucky my family didn’t disown me. I am lucky I also have a good group of other teen mom friends now, that also were affected by media and we all help each other cope but this is a real trauma a lot of people experienced. I believe that the teen pregnancy rates went down or stayed on the same downward slope, but there were absolutely girls who got pregnant on purpose, or only decided to keep their accidental pregnancies because of these shows/movies/reality TV. I was one of them
This shit is community?
@@fixsationon7244 look up teen mom family vloggers on UA-cam, Instagram and tiktok too. It’s community for sure. In 2016/2017, when I got pregnant, there was a boost of them. I regretfully made videos as well (mine are all deleted), Most of us don’t vlog anymore, most don’t post about their kids anymore either. I personally deleted every video I made and went completely private. Some of them still post videos and are influencers by profession now but don’t center their kids anymore. Some of them do center their kids in their content though. There’s a huge community on UA-cam, tiktok, and Instagram.
We’re you able to find a teen mom group in your area?! Or is it online? I’ve been able to find one online but no idea how to find one that could be in person.
@@maddy53 it is online, but be careful of internet mom friends. The teen mom online community can be extremely toxic. I’ve had many friends over the years but my true friends that I’ve stuck with are actually the ones I met on UA-cam
Where I live at the teen pregnancy is high in my city always have been
I want you guys to know that OctoMom currently has eight 13yr olds rn.
A true horror story. Yikes.
As someone with just one 13 year old, I can't even
By choice too. Nutty!
Omg I couldn't lol
@@eepers.srepee hey um I don't think it's a choice to have multiple births..
i was FASCINATED by teenage pregnancy (and pregnancy in general) as a preteen for some reason and would read teen pregnancy fanfics n such and then i ended up not even having a boyfriend til i was 22 😂 so i would say there is absolutely no correlation between teen pregnancy and the media that depicts it, at least not for me
Same, and I turned out a lesbian lmao.
Maybe u went about it the wrong way?
No, there is defiantly a correlation. Although it can be exaggerated, the media is depicting reality which is teens can get pregnant. It’s like how Euphoria exaggerates how mucha ex, drug use, and aesthetic living high schoolers do. It doesn’t happen to the degree shown, but it still happens.
@@Spidertheidiot It's so weird revisiting a topic I was required to learn about at the age of 11, thinking that it's gonna happen sometime in the future.
P.S.: I'm asexual, but kind of leaning towards the sapphic side (so probably 1/4 lesbian???)
@@robinwangai3303 How TF do you become 1/4 lesbian ?? Girls on 1 of 4 encounters and masturbation the other 3 ?? Was 1 of the 4 sexual encounters with a woman, 3 with "other" BUT then you decided to stop (cold turkey) never having sex again, making you asexual. I really try to understand Asexuality but when I meet an asexual they're too embarrassed to talk about it or pretend like I'm an ignorant person with prejudices about LGBTQ. They just know I'm hetero and assume the worst. I'm just asking questions (not trying to judge), That's how you get information. AND it's more genuine that has a human perspective to the answer. Google can only do so much.
The slow-dancing scene in Juno creeps me out even more now than it did back then.
I got pregnant As a teen, 14-15 actually… Ik. and Juno came out so closely after I birthed my son, it was so similar to my story … besides the fact that I kept my baby… craziest decision of my life, I was too young to understand. Way to young. Im now 29 & he’s 14!… & obviously I love my child. I lost out on so many opportunities in life, due to being a young mom….. things I didn’t see as opportunities at the time, but now it’s so obvious.. you can’t reply on anyone else to take care of your child, your parents can only do so much. The young father can only do so much…. Don’t rely on them… it’s not easy but once you’ve made the choice you can’t turn back. Like I said I love my child, but I would’ve cherished being a “regular teen” much more… then have my baby later. Idk I get mixed replies when I cmnt this stuff , but it’s my reality & my interpretations on such.
No one knows better than you about your life. Don’t ever feel ashamed for how you feel. It’s weird how sometimes when mothers become mothers, people think that’s all they are. Everyone is an individual with complex emotions. How we address these emotions is what makes us who we are. You’re an individual who is ALSO a mother.
True baby can change life path for the girl... Boys usually walk free but baby is for life 🙏🙏
thank you for sharing your experience
And it's totally valid for how you feel. Women often get shamed for wishing that they didn't have children or had children later, even though they love their children very much - it's just the expectation put on women to be the sole caregivers and only that. I empathise with your experience and I hope you're able to seize more opportunities now that you're older
Its not surprising to me you feel that way. I do think it’s very difficult to have a baby so young and you do miss out on a lot of things. Life is long though and I hope you have a lot of wonderful opportunities come to you in your years now as you’re more free as your baby becomes an adult and you have more freedom
I remember this panic. I had just turned 15 and was in my freshman year. My abusive stepmom at the time suddenly had it in her twisted head that I was going to be a teen mom. Mind you- I had never had a boyfriend, gone on a date, or even expressed interest in guys. This led to traumatizing lectures about purity and the horrors of sex and pregnancy over weeks. I was also forced to watch Juno, and other teen movies of the time, with her added commentary.
Turns out, I’m asexual, and my minimal interest in dating and revulsion from our sex “talks” wasn’t just because of the context. My dad divorced her before I figured it out, but I can only imagine that she would have found that to be as much an abomination as teen pregnancy. It would only right if I resisted the desire, not if I didn’t have it lol
Ah yes, the moral imperative of religion: you must suffer or it's not good enough
Wtf
when the world needed her most she returned!! missed you mila :)
As a 23 year old, I am absolutely SPEECHLESS when I think about how crazy it would be to have a baby so young. My mom had me when she was only 15!! when I picture my mom having a 5 year old child at only 20 years old, I can’t even imagine what that was like!
My mom went and saw Juno right after it came out, about 6 months after i was born. she was twenty and just about to go into college. She saw the movie and sobbed bc she didnt know if she shouldve just given me away instead, wondering if id grow up to be happy with her as a mom. Im glad she kept me, she's amazing.
I think we should look deeper into the "fresh out of high school" 19-23yo pregnancies cus almost everyone I graduated with that I know has a baby now
No for real because it's not much better tbh
ok but there also needs to be a point at which we realise that people are legal and adults and we need to mind our own business
Are you in the Midwest? In California I got married at 25 and everyone would comment how I was getting married so young. My husband and I moved to the Midwest and were shocked by how many people we met who were either married or co-raising a child at 18/19/20!
@@d.leighannbatemon3192 Indiana, most definitely
i mean, to be fair, 18 girls in ONE high school at one time is a lot.
Nah, not really depending on how big the school is. I think my high school back in the day had like 2000 people. And the rates are like 16-18 per 1000 females ages 15-19.
You should’ve seen my highschool then💀💀
@@SS-xr7jf that is so sad 🤦🏾♀️
@@chidiogoikeh4550 is it tho? I’m pretty sure the majority of those people are living normal lives now?
@@marquisehebbler9471 it’s sad that a child should be giving birth to a child. And that it’s so common
Teen mom here (19) had my kid when I was 16 and I think it can be one of the hardest things I went through because I grew up watching teen mom because my own mother didn't want me to "end up like them" so when I got pregnant I hid it for 6 months because I didn't want to be kicked out. Once I let my family know it became one of the hardest things I had to go through because I was essentially raising my siblings at the same time.
youtube wasn’t the same without you queen mila, i’m so happy that you’re finally back 💗💗💗
I was a freshman in high school in ‘08, 14 years old. The week of homecoming, my parents sat me down & lectured me about abstinence and how important it is to wait until married for sex. I was given a purity ring that they called a promise ring- a promise to god 🤢 🤮 I was shamed for clothes, not allowed to wear makeup, or go to parties. You can imagine the shit show when I realized I was pregnant right before I graduated in 2011 at 16- I was forced to abort. It was so traumatizing & affected me so deeply that I ended up throwing away a full ride to law school because of the mental health issues that had arised. I’m now 28, married, with 2 kids- I have always been open about bodies & not shaming them for curiosity because I want to be able to provide support and sex Ed at home without my kids feeling ashamed or uncomfortable for being totally normal. So far so good ❤ ps I am no contact with my parents since 2011 :)
I’m shocked that your parents forced you into purity culture while also forcing you to have an abortion, I am so sorry you had no choice at the time and had to do that. Women should ALWAYS have the choice to decide what to do with their own body, I’m glad that now you have your own loving family. I bet your children are grateful to have a mom like you
I was a pregnant senior in 08 and had a baby 6 days after I walked in graduation. The baby's dad killed himself in 2010. So. Had your baby, not had your baby. Life's been rough either way hun.
Your parents tried to protect you the best way they could and knew .... Beside why are you not angry at the boy who got u pregnant and put you in thus situation in the first place.. .
@@catcoffee7958 because I married him.
@@catcoffee7958 how is shaming and sheltering „protecting” in your opinion?
Degrassi is actually such a groundbreaking show when it comes to issues like teen pregnancy because they also actually talked about and showed several characters who chose to get an abortion and at least one couple who decided to put their child up for adoption after they tried to raise the baby but had too many problems keeping themselves afloat. I also really liked that when everyone looked to Spike to tell people that abortion was right or wrong she basically told them that just because she had a baby at 14 it doesn’t mean everyone should and that people should be allowed to chose what’s right for them without judgement
I was born to a 15/16 year old birthmom and a 15 year old birthdad. I've never met either but knowing for forever that I was a result of two teenagers and knowing how much my birthmom went through just through her high school experience, giving birth, and finally choosing to put my up for adoption has really placed a new perspective on teen moms/teen pregnancies.
Jhené Aiko & Big Sean dressed up as Juno and her baby dad for Halloween. It’s actually pretty adorable 😭❤️
came for this comment. ❤
and mila ofc. ❤😮💨
and mila ofc. ❤😮💨
it's a cute Halloween costume!
Omg I wanted to do this too but I was too pregnant to put effort into dressing up for Halloween lol
I just gave birth to my son a week ago and I’m 25. I cannot imagine being pregnant as a teenager, those poor girls. After going through my pregnancy and now a new baby, my husband and I want to foster pregnant teens once we raise our first set of kids just so we can give our full support and attention to the girl and her baby. A lot of people think it’s weird that that’s the demographic my husband and I could agree on to foster, but I have so much support with my baby and want to pay it forward to anyone else who will need that
my mom MADE me watch teen mom with her when i was younger to try to scare me out of getting pregnant. we both ended up getting attached to the show and the people and still watch it together to this day. i cant say whether or not it was effective but im 23 with no baby yet soooooo 😂
27 childfree
If you’re 23 with no baby then sounds like it was effective 👍
ME TOO
30 and childfree. I was forced to be my older sisters free childcare as a teenager and feel like I already raised two kids. Never doing that again. I was treated like a teen mom by random strangers a lot and they did not care to hear that I'm just their aunt because to them that just meant my sister must have been a teen mom then, she is 13 years older than me and had her kids at 22 and 25. So she was young but not a teenager. I'm only 10 years older than my nephew and he was a big child and they still thought that must be my son instead of I don't know my younger brother or something. Now people usually think that's the case because we look similar and the age gap makes sense for siblings.
Same story, girl
the real Juno effect is me finishing this video and then immediately watching Juno
hellz yeah
best comment here
My favorite movies were definitely Juno and Precious. I feel like they covered teen pregnancy and sexual abuse really well. I remember watching 16 and pregnant as a kid and I always hoped that they would continue school or shape up as most of them eventually ended up doing.
Oh God I remember having to watch Precious for a Social Work class in college. It's such a hard movie to sit through, but in my opinion it's super well done and the lead actress 100% deserves to win that Oscar.
I was pregnant in 2010 at age 20, and there were a couple of times where my mom literally introduced me by saying "and this is my daughter, she's not 16 and pregnant" lmao. The impact (and stigma) was very real
It's wild in hindsight that there was this common narrative of stupid little girls getting pregnant and not enough about how in about 40% of cases, the father is aged between 20-29 and should know better!
There were two camps of sexually active teens: “I have no clue how getting pregnant works and I don’t care to learn” and the second camp which was “I’m so scared of getting pregnant I’m taking plan b, wearing condoms, on birth control, and having my boyfriend pull out”. That was me. All that plan b i didn’t need to be taking.
Plan B is not cheap. Cheaper than a baby but still...
I was the same, I mean a good rule of them is to use two forms of birth control. i.e. condoms and birth control.
You forgot the 3rd camp of girls that wanted to have babies like all their friends. Majority in my school were on purpose, i dont think there were any oopsies. Even this one girl tried to trap my brother with a fake test so then he would get her pregnant for real, but I saw through it! We told her mom and she took us all to the clinic and test came back negative, then bro said ✌️ and that girl got pregnant by this other guy the next month 😬
That girl was pissed we told her mom but aint no one messing with my baby bro 😤🖕
I just made my partner wear condoms and I took the pill and we sitll don't have kids 13 years later because we don't want any.
Yikes. Aren't you supposed to avoid plan b unless you absolutely have to use it? I've heard frequent use can cause internal scarring and can lead to difficulty getting pregnant later on
Or did you ever think that maybe you need to lay off the sex when you were that young because too much plan B can lead to permanent effects.
Those pregnancy scares really did a number on me, I'm still terrified of getting pregnant and I'm a fucking lesbian
Lol this was me. What soothed me was knowing women can’t get me pregnant. I wasn’t sexually active at all anyway 😂
same as a asexual lesbian im terrified for no reason
did not expect you to talk about the sims? when i played as a teenager myself i would make a family with a teenager and a parent and then have the parent adopt a baby and then move out immediately so the teenager would take care of the child as a single mom ajdhfkslajs why did i do that to them 😭
I didn't know you could do this HAHA I'm doing this immediately 🤣🤣
i did the same for the mess and the chaos
Oh sims implanted in my mind that you’d have to have a baby at a early age
There was an entire sex panic for a while there. The "omg I had sex for the first time and something bad happened!" trope was getting really tired by the time it got to April Kepner which just pushed it over the top (to the point that even though the Grace episode aired nearly three years earlier, Grace is referred to as a "Kepner character"). Every time a character had sex on Secret Life it was like something bad happened and it reminded me so much of the fundamentalist purity culture I was in at the time and how "BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN TO YOUR AND YOUR LOVED ONES IF VAGINAL INTERCOURSE HAPPENS CONSENSUALLY OR NONCON OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE". The sex panic of the late '00s and early '10s was wild, especially if you grew up fundamentalist. I am no longer that and have had therapy to deal with the deprogramming but the sex panic is one thing that sticks in the back of my mind every now and then.
If it helps take away from the trauma, watch the coach teaching kids in "Mean Girls" where he's like "...or else you'll have sex and die". It made me chuckle cause it made fun of the sex panic and I, myself, am Asexual and not interested in sex but I'm sex positive, so it was fairly entertaining.
I think this moral panic was simply “projection” by boomers and Gen-X parents. Even though they would never tell y’all they were EXTREMELY debauched and careless from the late 1960s through the 1980s. Once HIV came on the scene, things have been simmering down for nearly 40 years but folks who want to be hysterical are still hysterical. It’s really just a way of punching down to already vulnerable people.
For those interested, Mama Doctor Jones has a video on the timeline of "Octomom's" ivf cycles and the whole thing is INSANE
16 and pregnant came about as I was maybe 15 turning 16.. So somehow it ended up being a big thing. My aunt would constantly tell me if I got pregnant at 16, she’d kick me out. Most often I’d chuckle and secretly hope it didn’t happen. Wasn’t until I got older and realized how toxic and hurtful that was.
Unpopular opinion, but I do not think it’s a guardians responsibility to raise their child’s children. Assuming it wasn’t a case of rape, if a teenager chooses to engage and sexual activity and become pregnant, it is up to that teenager to raise their kid if they choose they want to have the child and not put the baby up for adoption.
@Diana what? only in the case of her being forced into sex would you consider helping her with the baby? how in the world is that fair? when you have a child you consider these things. a wise person once said "know thyself" and people like you maybe shouldn't have your own kids if you'd all of a sudden stop helping them and kick them out in their most vulnerable time of need. to be hoisted out into the streets young and pregnant, do you know how badly that would impact the life of your grandchild? just wow... i feel bad for your offspring even if they don't exist yet
@@carohigh505 nowhere did they say they would kick the kid out though. I think they're saying if the person was warned that if they get pregnant then they would be on their own. On their own could still mean living with family but having to get a job and figure out things like childcare and transportation on their own. What they're saying is that the grandparents in the situation shouldn't have to take on the responsibility of raising 2 sets of children at once, especially if they're warned about the consequences of having a baby. They're kids still yeah but they have to grow up quick if they want their kid to grow up well adjusted and happy. Some people refuse to grow up despite their kid being in their life too. It's a complicated situation
@@bubba94290 I legit agree with u cl
Diana, not wanting to parent the baby is one thing, although carving out a rape exception for that feels like sl*t shaming, but kicking a pregnant teen out onto the streets to only be able to support herself by selling her body is both illegal and highly immoral.
It's finally making sense my crippling fear of pregnancy even though I'm not in high school anymore and never had any direct traumatic experience of it. I never realized how prominent teen pregnancy in media was when I was a kid. I remember those Sims videos were like crack cocaine for little me.
i didn't realize other people had the same super intense but also kinda irrational fear of pregnancy until this comment section, like i used to watch some of those shows with my mom or hear family members comment on teen pregnancy in general as a very small child so like i barely remember it happen but like it affected my feelings about pregnancy as whole even if i didnt remember where it came from
@@elsapayo4864 Yup, it's called tokophobia actually. A lot of us have it
@@NightNekomata yep same, and it doesnt help that at the time i was having a hard time with reproductive isses that it worse. having horrible pains from endometriosis as a scared 13 year old AND having stuff like that on the TV was not helping. seriously even now i'm low key even scared of pregnant people.
tokophobia is no joke
I'm just scared of sex in general. Im 22 I've never had a boyfriend and have social anxiety (steming from I'm guessing a combo of being told puberty is amazing and you'll be fine then proceeding to actually have my period and freak out cuz I hate messes. AND hyperhyrdosis which btw means excessive sweating leading to rumors in school I didn't shower leading to me not wanting to be physically close to people when I sweat which is always.) So I don't think I'll ever have the problem of being pregnant.
WTF THE SIMS VIDEOS? You just unlocked a hidden memory
It's so refreshing to see that you did a clear timeline on this media. I grew up in the early 2000s to a teen mom (gave birth to me at 17 in 2004) along with her friends who were teen moms and their kids, and my mom was obsessed with every show and movie you discussed. I really was imersed in the teen parent panic and this whole era both in media and in real life. This is such a niche thing and its so refreshing and relatable to see how other people get this era. Also its so true that kids of teen parents and people who see these depictions are less likely to be teen parents. My friends who also grew up to teen parents in the early 2000s have such a realistic view on teen pregnancy.
Its also so important to note that most teen moms baby daddies are ADULT men. My dad wasn't a teen father and none of my friends dads were teen parents either. So much focus is on shaming young girls sexuality when the root issue in teen pregnancy is groomers. Support teen moms and have real open conversations around sex education and abuse.
Precious made me sick.
I’ll never forget when the mom tells the lady everything that happened to precious as a BABY and how she just let it happen :(( and how precious believed all the horrible things her mom would say about her
The more times you watch the more you learn. The mother also SA'd her. She never told the social worker that though.
@@chaosspy6723 BRO WHATTTT nahhh you need to elaborate on that more
@@aphrodite8463 Rewatch the scene where she says, "you need to take care of mommy".
@@chaosspy6723 yikesssss I hate hate hate the movie and that just made me hate it more
@@aphrodite8463 the book is really worth reading if you can stomach it. There's some lovely visual storytelling with the words being misspelled before Precious starts learning to read, and some things that were not clear/left out/changed
i feel like the most recent phase of this phenomenon was kylie jenner getting pregnant at 20 and i think it her and many young mom influencers kinda started crossing the line of glamourizing becoming a teen mom/young mom.
Agreed
totally! SO many influencers/instagrammers are getting pregnant before 25 right now
Definitely. And it’s okay to not be ashamed but it is definitely unsettling to see it flaunted, like using babies as some materialistic desire and trend
@@boccarerg I see so many women acting as if ovaries shrivel up the day they turn 30. There's so much medical misinformation out there. Currently, there is a campaign against the birth control pill. People are literally PAYING influencers to say that birth control is unhealthy.
What’s wrong with young adult moms? Teen pregnancy is the issue. A 20 year old can have their own place and may even be married. I got my own place at 19, married at 22 no kids but I definitely could if I wanted to.
I'm the result of a teen pregnancy. My mother is an older millennial, and I'm a younger gen Z, born 2007. Growing up, my life was very different compared to most kids. I love my mother, but seeing how much she struggled to raise me has just completely changed my perspective on life. Teen pregnancy is hard. My mother had to give those years up to raise me. Teen parents deserve all the support they can get. You never know someone's situation. I don't know everything about my mother's, but she did her best, even if in the end my childhood wasn't the best. I am nearly an adult now. And my mother isn't even in her 40s. It's crazy to think about to most people, but for me, it's just how it is.
I remember writing an entire essay on why 16 & pregnant and Teen Mom were encouraging teens to get pregnant just so they could be famous 😭 when in reality I watched those shows religiously and clearly did not have a desire to be a teen mom. It’s funny how “logic” works lol
I’ve only seen Precious once, but man, it was just heartbreaking! It was raw and so authentic. Many people are experiencing the life that was depicted in the movie Precious. This is happening in millions of people, all across the world. It’s real, and people need to recognize that, and confront it. SA is so prevalent because it’s rooted in secrecy.
Last semester I had parenting, which of course we discussed pregnancy, teen pregnancy, and even sexual diseases etc… during the end of the teen pregnancy section, we watched Juno and we had to take notes on what we would do and how we would feel. Majority of the class definitely learned that teen pregnancy ain’t no fun game even if we didn’t think of it in that way. Don’t understand why people think the movie is bad 😤
I was a freshman in 2009 and we had a daycare and a preschool at our high school. We could earn elective credit for helping take care of these kids. I took it twice and loved it. Seemed totally normal and in retrospect I think it’d be so helpful for more schools to have this sort of program
Not just for students, but for teachers as well
We have a course at our school called Understanding Children where parents from the community can bring their children to our High School and the students learn how to care for them and pay attention to emotions, communications, different stages of toddlers, etc
I appreciated so much that you included precious. It's a movie that shows teenage motherhood from a different side. The pregnancy pact showed rebellion whereas precious I found to be resilience. She went against all odds and put her children first, such a an impactful movie.
I was pregnant in 2020-2021 and I was 21, but I look much younger for my age (I'm 4ft 10 and kinda have a baby face) I got judged constantly in public for being a "teen mom" despite me not being one. I do think media at this time did have an effect on how teen moms are treated today.
I got called a teen mom when I would baby sit my little brother a lot of people thought he was mine it was awful and I was a virgin 💀 I was so upset I had to deal with living with a baby as a teenager it sucked but at least I got to experience what it's like without it being my own
Now that you mentioned it, I'm really starting to understand why I had such an unhealthy obsession with pregnancy in my teens
I was in high school back then. My high school had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the US. 900 freshmen and 200+ graduated. All of the girls in my group were teen moms and three personal friends were teen dads.
There's a big factor that wasn't mentioned that is the growth of internet & social media during that time. Everyone was sharing everything, so naturally people saw & heard about it more than ever. Then the over saturation helped a generation of teens feed their curiosity, while showing them the downfalls so they could move on to other things.
We need a part 2 discussing Kylie. And the renewed desire to be a “young, hot mom”
Also the new pyramid scheme of young hot Mormon couples having baby after baby and vlogging their life on Instagram and UA-cam. Def falls under the desire to be a young hot mom.
So true... I'm 29 and just got married, always wanted to have one kid. But I feel like I've already missed out on some sort of chance. I know I haven't, but all that "young, hot mom" rhetoric really gets to me. 😢
When I was graduating high school, my teacher commented how amazing it was that our year managed to go through 4 years of high school without any student getting pregnant. Then I went college, where I was in the class with this girl who was a teen mom. At first she kept to herself, THEN the teen mom thing got hot. And my god did the ugly fly. I never went through the high school drama phase, but this girl manage to let me experience it in college. She was an over the top drama queen and roped a class of 90 people into her drama (some of whom are men in their mid 40s). She was glorifying teenage pregnancy like crazy, she said things like her baby would be 18 and she would still be in her mid 30s and be a "hot mom". Shopping together on the arms of her handsome son. And people would mistake her for a cougar with her hot young boyfriend (ew). She was suggesting it was trendy and genius idea and that other people should do it too. Her close friend circle was chiming in and agreeing for heavens sake. I was just stunned, it was so disgusting how she went about glorifying it and sucking everyone into her drama. I wasn't even close to the center of her drama vortex, but I got sucked in regardless. I don't give a f*** that she was teen mom, I wish she kept to her self.
what in the sam hell did i just read
I remember during this time someone in my 7th grade class got pregnant. As a class we were like sat down in our class and told about it and basically told not to talk about it. Very strange.
Strange parallel, a classmate’s mother died of an OD and our school went about it the exact same way. Weird but unsurprising that they’d treat pregnancy the same way they’d treat death
this happened in my middle school.. a 7th grader ended up pregnant and it was the lowkey drama - but the adults didn’t tolerate us talking about it
My theory (as a preteen in 2011, and a teen with my own obsession for a short bit) is that the obsession with teenage pregnancy is related to being a better parent for some. I grew up in an abusive household with a terrible relationship with my mom, and i was absolutely obsessed with teenage pregnancy media. I wanted to know the girls stories, i wanted to know what they had been through, i wanted to see how they handled those trials and worked through to where they were after. As a young teen, I was drawn to the idea of having a baby of my own (even though im STILL a virgin lmao) and although i still dont really know WHY i felt that way, my main guess is that it was because of my poor relationship with my mother. I've always loved kids, but as i grew older i was more and more determined to be a better parent than my mom was to me. I wanted a child of my own so i could prove myself, so i could show her how to be a REAL parent, etc.
It could also be because i basically parented my own mother from the ages of 8-present (i still havent left the household so i can't say things have changed)
this shows/histories made me feel the same way!! it didn't make wanna have one but it encouraged discussions on better planning, ways to help the teens once they are in that position, to think in the health repercussions, how it will influence the baby's life ... in a way it also helped me to destigmatize the issue bc the majority showed how much they struggled, in comparison to the narrative provided (and massively spread) from religious groups or naive people: always idealizing and simplifying pregnancy, without acknowledging and often avoiding talking about the hardships involved, hardships that one may face being a teen or an adult. Accidental pregnancies, poor choice making and bad parenting (at that time specially, but still to this day) are experiences that the majority associate with only teen pregnancy, they blamed it solely on the "teen" factor, they choose to forget that unplanned pregnancy, lack of economic stability, irresponsible parents are a thing in adulthood too!! Kids, unfortunately, can suffer in any environment and upbringing, it seems to me that some want to feel superior by judging them, just to ignore how shitty parents they really are or bc they are jealous that the youth are more informed and have more choices/resources available that the ones they, back then, used to have.