I was a Teen Mother - Abandoning Stereotypes About Young Parents

"I was a teen mother."

That phrase usually conjures up the image of a pretty sixteen year-old girl and her jock boyfriend getting jiggy in the backseat of the car. "Oh, no," her boyfriend says. "I don't have a condom. Can we still do it.?" Consumed by lust and lost in love, she consents. A few weeks later, she begins to worry. She buys a home pregnancy test. When she reads the result, her hand flies to her mouth. "Oh, no," she sighs with tears in her eyes. "What am I going to do?"

Now her world is suddenly very complicated. How will she finish high school? What will her parents say? How will she get a degree and build a career? How will she handle the pain of labor? How will she relate to her friends after becoming a mother? Will her boyfriend still want her? Maybe they can get married and rent a little apartment, work together to make everything okay. What will the kids at school say?

The stereotype usually plays out in our minds this way: the young woman tells her parents, who freak out and nearly disown her. Her immature boyfriend, way too young to be a dad or take responsibility for his actions, stops returning her calls. She keeps going to school and endures the teasing when her stomach pops. She screams her way through labor and delivery. She smiles when she first sees her baby and is filled with overwhelming love, but soon she begins to resent her child.

He has taken way her freedom, her childhood, her life. It is too hard to take care of him and go to school, so she drops out for her GED. She ends up a single mother on welfare, working her way through college. Maybe she graduates, and maybe she doesn't. People tend to hope for the best but expect the worst. We believe her children will grow up impoverished and undisciplined because their mother was way too young to parent well and their father was never around. Ultimately they will make the same mistakes, if not worse ones.

Oh, please. Are you yawning yet? Stereotypes are overrated.