Your Daughter the Teen Mother

This is a topic that is just something I end up thinking about periodically, probably because I have a 17-year-old daughter with a boyfriend. It's a subject of great debate yet is often kind of couched in a silence at the dinner table; an uncomfortable pebble in your shoe rubbing on your foot. It's simply avoided.

Fortunately my Asperger's and her mother's sometimes lacking skills of tact means this normally doesn't apply to our family as a problem.

If I'm reading this right, the US had a 84 out of 1,000 teens pregnant on average. This report shows that almost half of school-age teens have had sex at least once. Newer information just further convinces me that this isn't a topic that should be ignored.

I've worked around kids enough...with a young one and a teenager in the house, especially...to know that you can't take for granted that they know what they should or shouldn't do. You'd assume that they could figure something out. Then we get questions about things like how to make spaghetti ("The instructions are right on the box!"). For some reason apparently the biological drive to mate, despite fumbling and possibly getting slivers, is strong enough that teenagers manage to figure it out while simpler things like boiling water without disintegrating the pasta...with instructions in hand...escape them.

Lesson: don't take it for granted that they know their parents views, understand those views, and understand the consequences.

My daughter has had exposure to the hardships incurred by unwed pregnancies. She has an aunt that has two children without a father in the picture; she lives with her parents and so the children's grandparents use a considerable amount of their resources to raise the grandchildren. She herself...well, isn't my biological daughter. My wife became pregnant her last years of high school and married the biological father; the marriage crumbled and reached a breaking point nearly ten years later, after which she divorced and met me, so she's my step daughter and she was raised under economic difficulty and had to move around as jobs and money permitted while her mom worked during the day and went to college on weekends and at night to try making a better life for them. She basically grew up seeing what can happen (although I guess her mom was a bad role model for showing the bad side of being a teen mom, since her mom worked her tail off to get through school while raising a daughter with little help from the father and managed to graduate with a degree...she now has a master's degree).

She sees the hardship that her grandparents go through emotionally with having their daughter and grandchildren with them as well as experiencing her own childhood with parents barely scraping by because of balancing family, bills, and education.

But again, we couldn't take that for granted.

My wife wanted to make sure that our daughter was able to tell her...if not both of us (okay, I'm not a teddy bear to relate to when there's emotions involved. I'm cognizant that she'll first go to her mother if something like this happens to have some support before revealing it to me...) that she was sexually active so she could get birth control. Or come to us with questions.

We differ a little here.

She knows I disapprove of her having any relations with someone else before she is married. I know, it's such a conservative view! Weird! But the fact is that I disapprove of it before marriage, I have made it clear to her that she has full support to do whatever she wants to do once she is 18 and out of the house.

See, my philosophy extends from the notion that if you want to play adult, you need to be in a position to live like an adult. Having sex is a big risk; condoms break, they slip, and anything that can get one motile sperm into the uterus can get her pregnant. At that point you are then responsible for bringing a potential life into the world that didn't ask to be here. Taking risks like that means you think you're prepared to go into the world as an independent adult.

She was told that if she got pregnant, she'd be given a reasonable time to move out to her own apartment. She's not disowned or banned or anything like that...she just needs to get her life in order and understand that there are consequences; sex isn't a little hobby thing to do when you're bored or to fit in. We agreed we'd help her out with things when we could, but only as long as she's making a reasonable effort to keep her own head above water...steady job, education if she needs it, pays own bills, learns the joys of keeping her car running, things of that nature.

But we can't swoop in and save her every time. She wasn't living with us rent free if she decided she was living here; she uses electricity, she uses groceries (unless she buys her own), she uses space...she was going to pay a reasonable rent. My parents never told me much as I grew up about finances; I wanted to remedy that with her. We told her that we're paying a little under two grand a month to keep a roof over our heads. We make no secret from her what it costs with our bills and taxes.

But none of this made much of a real-world impact until she was strongarmed into getting a McJob. It was heartwarming to see her read her first paystub and realize how much money was taken out for silly things.

My primary concern, reinforced from the surgery, was that we want her to live on her own if we were to die. We have provisions in our will for her and her brother so that she'd be taken care of while my parents were still alive, and she's nearly old enough that should something happen she can care for her brother reasonably well in about five to seven years, I suppose (we're hoping to change the will should it become necessary later on), until he's old enough to live on his own. But my worry is that if we're always there to keep her protected from the real world she will never mature and lead her own life.

We need her to understand that. Desperately. I need to know that while it may not be pleasant, I want to know that if something happened to my wife and I that our daughter isn't going to be unable to sustain herself in "the real world".

I need her to understand that we will not raise her children for her because she wanted to experiment with her boyfriend because who will raise them if we die? Is it just another generation tossed aside unwanted after we pass away because we're too old to adequately care for her children?

She needs to understand that there comes a time when she needs to face the world and reality. We need to transition from careless teens to parents to grandparents...not perpetual parents. Just as my son and daughter can choose to do.

My wife and I don't want to look back on our lives after sixty or seventy years, just having the last grandchild moving to college from our home, wondering what we could have been doing had we not been raising our children's children or worrying about what is going to happen to our great-grandchildren. What if we had set firmer boundries? Or forced our daughter to take responsibility for her actions?

Of course this is all just one possible scenario. It's a worry, one of many that parents have to face. And like I said...as far as we know our daughter isn't active sexually, and she knows that abstinence is the only way to be sure she doesn't get pregnant, but that she is fully allowed to do whatever she wants when she is of age and we won't judge her negatively for it because we support her living her own life once she is taking responsibility for (possible) consequences. As long as she's happy and making her own way we can die without worrying about how she's going to manage. I told her that no matter what she chooses to do at that point it's fine with us.

Others, no doubt, have different opinions on the matter...