Adolescent Pregnancy: Deilis Martinez (fgcu-intro to sociology)

Adolescent pregnancy is defined as a teenage or underage girl, usually between 13 and 19 years of age becoming pregnant. Now that’s not saying that there haven’t been cases in which a girl under 13 years of age, but it is a general definition.

There are many sociological problems involved when teenagers become parents. Usually these adolesecent parents find themselves limited to education. It has been proven that the higher a woman’s level of education, the more likely she is to postpone marriage and motherhood. The teen mother will usually choose to drop out of school because it becomes a burden handling school work and nursing a child. And the teen father will choose work over schooling so that he will have the means to provide for his child. Due to the lack of education, teen mothers, more times than not, will be employed by a company in which some would call, “dead end jobs”. So, these teen parents will fall down in social class and depend off of welfare from the government. They are usually provided with medicaid for the mother and child. The medicaid that is provided to these teen mothers is paid for by us, the tax payers. We, tax payers, are in turn providing this growing population of teen mothers with their benefits, which come directly out of our paychecks.

 Along with the stress of raising a child can come the mental unstability, such as depression. There are times that even a matured woman will find it difficult and strenuous to raise a child, let alone a young teen girl with no life experience. Often times these girls will become consumed with caring for this child and eventually lose their social life. This loss of a social life will later affect their life chances and future. These teen parents will be limited to their access to resources, such as who they know, and h0w those people will help them become more successful in life.

Adolescent pregnancy is a cycle. Children born to teenage mothers are more likely to engage in sexual acts at an early age and become teenage parents themselves. These children are also at a risk of poverty, like that of their parents. Many times, these children are kept indoors because they are no caretakers to keep an eye on them while they play, so they watch more television or play video games more than usual. In turn, these children become obese and have more complications in their future due to their unhealthy lifestyle. 

This entry was posted on 30. November 2009 at 21:44 and is filed under Introduction to Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.