Teen Motherhood

In the United States of American, there are far too many pregnant girls between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. After looking through statistics and experiencing first-hand what it is like to be a teen mom, I am more than confident I can explain the hardship that we [teen moms] go through in order to even just try to finish school and not always being successful. I am one of the very rare cases of teen moms graduating high school and going to college right away. I grew up in a house with two parents that also were teen parents but never continued their education after high school. Knowing how rough it was for them to grow up that way, I made a promise to myself I would never put myself in that position. However, I failed to keep that promise and became another statistic. I quickly learned what responsibility really meant. Being a teen mom makes one person embrace many hardships such as decision making, financing, time managing.

One reason a teen mom is overwhelmed with making decisions is because somebody who is supposed to be living to only care for them or be taken care of by their parents now must care for an additional human being. Many parents of girls that become pregnant don't want this for their child so they encourage alternative options. According to a September 2006 report by the Guttmacher Institute, three-quarter of a million teens become pregnant over the course of one year. Out of all those pregnancies, nearly one third are terminated through abortion. The younger a girl is, the harder these decisions are for her, the more the parents step in. Another decision that has to be made includes education. How is the mother going to continue or is she going to continue at all. These days there are online high schools that make it much easier for girls to graduate. However, this isn't always the case. For example, my friend Alyssa was a sophomore in high school when she got pregnant. She had her daughter half way through junior year. She stayed in school all the way until the day she gave birth, but after that she had so many complications she wasn't able to complete her junior year. She went back to school for her senior year and one month before graduation she found out she was 6 credits behind. She had missed too much school. Now Alyssa is making another tough decision. Does she go to a charter (online) school or just get her GED?

Online school, as well as taking the GED, is rather pricey. Not only do you have to pay at least once, but if you don't pass the class or test, you have to keep paying over and over again until you achieve your goal. To go along with paying for school, the teen mom must also worry about she is going to provide for her child. Nothing a baby needs these days is cheap. Between diapers, formula, clothes, and daycare, on average in the first year of a baby's life, the parents will spend $12,000. Now another decision comes in to play. Where are you going to feel safe