Teen Parenting: A Hard Look At Real Numbers

Despite widespread availability of sex education in our middle and high schools, the incidence of teen parenting is still far too common today. As raw and unbiased statistics will show, unwed teen parents and their children will face huge hurdles in life and will most likely experience lowered expectations in their health, finances and education.

Health Problems Due To Lack Of Prenatal Care

Due mainly to the lack of proper prenatal care, teenage mothers face higher pregnancy health risks than women who deliver children at a later age, including anemia, pregnancy-related high blood pressure, underweight birth, premature delivery, and even death.

Teen parenting statistics reveal that up to 40% of teen mothers do not receive adequate, high-quality medical care during pregnancy. There is some debate as to whether this prenatal medical care is simply unavailable to these teen mothers-to-be, or the care is simply not actively sought during pregnancy. Without proper prenatal care, many children born to teen mothers come into the world in poor health.

Education Suffers

Alarming statistics show that teen parenting leaves many victims in education as only 50% of teen parents will graduate from high school before age 30. And, the real tragedy is that being a teen parent without even a high school diploma almost guarantees that the teen and her baby will live a life of poverty, dependent upon marginal government handouts as peers progress into adulthood and on to successful families and careers.

Teen mothers are encouraged to stay in school, by way of numerous state and federal programs, and 80% of them do - for a while. Unfortunately, the realities of caring for another life so early in the teen parent's lives definitely takes a toll, as most will not earn their high school diploma.

Good Jobs Hard To Find

The lack of a quality education due to teen parenting translates directly into difficulties locating and keeping well-paying, steady employment. Without even a high school diploma, the teen parent is doomed to fill mostly low-wage service or light manufacturing positions - jobs that traditionally pay low wages and have high turnover. Even if the teen parent is able to find and keep one of these low-paying jobs, the low wages and lack of promotion to higher-paying positions (due to lack of education) makes it tough to make ends meet.

Due to the consequences of teen parenting, the teen and his or her small family with a job is in a catch-22 position - making too much money to qualify for government help, not making enough to rise out of poverty.

To make economic matters worse, only 10% of teen mothers receive any financial assistance from the father. 40% of teen mothers receive benefits from various government programs, thus beginning (or perpetuating) a vicious welfare lifestyle, that has claimed generations of teen parents, and doomed them to a marginal life of low expectations and government dependency.

One statistic to consider - women who deliver their first child between 20 and 24 years of age statistically have a much better chance of earning a college degree than teen parents, thus almost guaranteeing their lives (and the lives of their children) will not be spent in hopeless poverty.

The Child Of The Teen Suffers

The real victims of teen parenting are the children themselves. These children usually exhibit lower cognitive development (the development of thought processes) than those children of non-teen parents. Due to the poorer socioeconomic conditions these children grow up in, they tend to be underachievers in school and are more likely to not earn a high school diploma than their peers.

Children of teen parents also tend to have sexual relations earlier than their peers, and chances are much greater that these "children of children" will go on to be teen parents themselves.

Some Advice

The best advice? Don't become a teen parent! There are so many strikes against teen parenting that the teens who do get pregnant in high school never realize just how bad things will get for them - until it actually happens to them.

These teen parents (and their parents) almost never take the unborn life they are creating into consideration - that no matter how much love and attention the child is given, teen parenting's high costs will be born largely by the child created. And, that child has no choice in the matter - but the teen parent does. Consider adoption as there are many well-qualified two-parent families who will be able to give the child a real chance in life, and break the cycle of teen parenting.