Even with the widespread availability of sex education in our middle and high schools, the fact that teen parenting still happens is still far too common  today.  As the raw and unbiased statistics show, unwed teen parents and their children will face gigantic hurdles in life and will most likely experience lowered realities in their health, finances and education.

Health Issues Due To Lack Of Prenatal Care

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

Teen parenting numbers reveal that up to 40% of teen mothers don’t get adequate, high-quality medical care during pregnancy. There’s some debate whether prenatal medical care is simply unavailable to thee teen mothers-to-be, or the care is simply not actively sought during pregnancy. Without proper prenatal care, many children born to teen mothers are delivered in poor health.

Education Suffers Greatly

Alarming statistics show that 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 their 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. But, the realities of caring for a child so early in the teen parent’s lives definitely takes a toll, as most will not earn their high school diploma. And, this fact almost guaranteed a life of poverty.

Good Jobs Are Hard To Find With Little Education

The lack of quality education due to teen parenting translates directly into problems finding and keeping well-paying, steady employment. Without a high school diploma, the teen parent is doomed to work mostly low-wage service or light manufacturing positions - jobs that usually 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 income and lack of promotion to higher-paying positions (due to insufficient education) makes life tough and difficult to make ends meet.

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

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

One statistic to consider - women who have their first child between the ages of 20 and 24 years statistically have a much better chance of earning a college degree than teen parents,  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 show lower cognitive development (the development of thought processes) than 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 not to 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 To Those Thinking Of Becoming Teen Parents

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.

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 to a mature, two parent home, as there are many well-qualified families who will be able to give the child a real chance in life, and break the cycle of teen parenting.

Blocking websites is one of the most effective ways to protect your child from “adult” websites and online predators. Internet safety is huge these days - It’s no secret that “adult” websites are the fastest growing “online industry,” with literally millions of sites with images that children should never see. It’s all too easy to accidentally click into to one of these adult sites. We’ve all done this, I’m sure, at least once, and the images we see can be shocking and horrifying. But there are other reasons for blocking websites, including the potential for exploitation by online predators.

Online Predators - A Huge Threat
We’ve heard stories about the children who were lured into abusive situations by an online predators, pedophiles who lurki in chatrooms posing as another teen, and who were able to meet with and assault children - or even worse. Police are getting smarter prosecuting these online crimes - officers now pose as teens online who get “lured” into meeting with a potential preditore, and then discover too late that the “victim” was an undercover policeman. But why would you, as a parent, want to even take the chance that your child could possibly be harmed by talking in “chatrooms?”  Blocking these websites is the only sure way to prevent this kind of crime.

Some Help For Parents

There are now some very good third-party commercial software packages available to help parents control their children’s internet access - without necessarily preventing the positives that internet usage can bring our kids.

PC Tattletale

PC Tattletale is an internet monitoring/safety package that , among other things, can monitor everything your child does online. Pc tattletale also can;

• Monitor email usage
• Capture passwords
• Record chatroom details
• Record website history
• Block URL- specific websites

And operates completely in a stealth mode - your child won’t even know that you’re pro-actively securing his or her online safety!

PC Tattletale offers a free 14-day try-it period, then it’s only $49.95 for the complete package.

100% Money-back guarantee!

There’s no risk - PC Tattletale offers a 100% money-back guarantee if you’re not completely satisfied  - there’s absolutely no risk to you!

Anxious children are unpredictable children. Children are unable to suppress their emotions, and often their emotions are responsible for their actions - for good and for bad behavior. Children are capable of anger, happiness, depression and the full range of human emotions - just like adults. And, anxiety is no exception, as an anxious child will display those anxious feelings in a variety of ways. And, it’s up to the parents to learn to read the child’s behavior, so that any bad behavior can be corrected.

Learn To Manage Behavior With Role Playing
Children should learn to manage their behavior in a positive, healthy way. Role playing with a parent can go a long way towards helping an anxious child learn to deal with his or her emotions.

A great example to consider would be to invent a situation that, in real life, would cause the child to become anxious. Go through each step of this process with the child, and discuss the child’s reactions, then gently mention (and reinforce) appropriate responses to the situation. Use this same process to cover similar situations - even using examples from other children, or situations. Repeat the process, as this repetition will reinforce your good examples for the child and, eventually, the child will realize (and exhibit) the learned responses to anxiety-inducing real-life situations. A parent can make this learning fun - think of ways these examples and scenarios can be made into a game. Give appropriate rewards for the right answers and behaviors.

Give The Child A Mechanism To Deal With Emotions
An anxious child needs to realize that when he or she experiences anxiety, the emotion is easily identified to the child, and that negative behaviors can be dealt with in a positive way. The anxious child can work with the anxious feelings by positive self-talk, with the ultimate realization that he or she can work with any situation without the automatic bad behavior that used to accompany such anxious feelings.

Reward The Good Behavior - Always
Always reward any positive behavior that you see the anxious child portray - even the smallest of signs that he or she is genuinely trying to act properly. Follow through with a reward and an explanation of why even though the child lapsed into bad behavior - so long as you see even a sliver of hope that the child is trying, though not fully successful. Positive reinforcement of small steps can have big payoffs.

Of course, parents must realize that the anxious child will not magically change behaviors in a day, a week - or even a month. The learned, appropriate behaviors will most likely be learned in steps, and if the parent is rewarding accordingly, then these small steps will lead to even bigger leaps as time goes by.