I guess I am falling prey to media hype, when I first read about the 17 teens in a small Massachusetts town that all got pregnant at the same time. I thought wow good blogging material for my troubled teen blog. But then I saw it was all over the blogosphere and decided no one wants to read another blog about what they have already read about. Well today I saw that one of my favorite blogs “The Bryant Park Project” was talking about the Juno Effect (yesterday I blogged about the Girl Effect) and had to jump in. They interviewed Jane Brown, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she claims the Juno effect is real. If you go to the The Bryant Park Project In Cluster of Teen Pregnancies, ‘Juno’ Comes to Life you can hear the interview. Which I thought was very appropriate, she spoke about the media and at an age when sexual feelings begin to dominate an adolescents thinking they begin to question what is appropriate and inappropriate. Parents may not be talking about it, schools are talking about abstinence and religion tells you to wait until marriage. What good is this when the media seems to be glorifying it. She claims the media does have some effect, even when teens tell you it does not play a role. Be honest most of us will say we are not effected by the media, but still we want to look a certain way. Now those women in the polygamy sect, I would think they are one group that is NOT affected by the media
What amazes me is all the talk around contraception, abstinence and being a “single parent” but where is the discussion around the child. I guess there are statistics that show teen pregnancy rates are falling, so something must be working. But then there is the blip, and once again the negative cycles need to be stopped. I recently read the book Slam
Skateboarding SLAMS - need I say more?
Much of the focus with the news about the teens from Massachusetts has been around the media, movies Juno and Knocked Up, magazines talking about the baby bump and of course Britney’s sister Jamie Lynn and her new baby. I guess pretty soon we will see video games? It is good that teen pregnancy is coming to the forefront and talked about but are we really addressing the issues? The discussions need to go further and on a deeper level.
When I was in high school my cousin became pregnant when she was a teenager, her story is not glamorous. She had the baby, everyone in the family accepted her and the baby. She died shortly after of a drug overdose before the baby was a year old. It was lucky for the child that he had loving grandparents that took him in and cared for him. Do you think he was resentful as a teenager or grateful? I haven’t really followed his life, I do know that he joined the military and had a family at a very young age. Her choices effected a lot of people. I remember my mother telling me about my cousin, never putting her down, but that it was not right. Then later the news about her death it was unexplainable.
Even with troubled teens parenting is rewarding, I would not change it, but it is far from glamorous.
Webster’s definition of glamorous: a romantic, exciting, and often illusory attractiveness; alluring or fascinating personal attraction.
Posts
