Despite steadily decreasing rates of teenage pregnancy within the last decades in our country, this problem remains among the topical issues in modern American society, along with obesity, AIDS and drug abuse. In 2002 the rate of teenage births (from 15 to 19 years) totaled about 11% of all the births in the United States. Annually about 856,000 teenagers become pregnant, and approximately 425,000 become moms. At that, in our country one of three teenage girls gets pregnant before the age of 20.
Teenage pregnancy is, probably, one of the hardest experiences for a young developing individual. It brings to numerous changes in daily life of a teenager, like interruption of study, psychological pressure and stresses, emotional problems, including feelings of guilt or shame, and so on. Pregnancy means responsibility, which requires making serious decisions and being ready to overcome all the difficulties, connected with giving birth and bringing up the child.
As a rule, teenage pregnancy is unplanned, that is why it is accompanied with a number of possible economic, psychological and medical problems. First of all, it is necessary to make a choice between termination of the pregnancy, giving birth and parenting the baby or giving the baby for adoption. This question is among the hardest for a pregnant teenager, because, in addition to own viewpoints and feelings, teenagers are usually under heavy influence of their parents, friends, teachers, or just circumstances. That is why they are more likely to choose abortion.
Within the time, emotional anxiety decreases and the child starts learning to cope with the divorce. Usually, separation of parents brings a lot of different changes in the child’s daily life, and most of them are negative, like loneliness, stresses, new obligations, etc. Therefore, a child can disobey the situation by weird and unusual behaviors, failures in school, withdrawal or other behavioral patterns. Long-term outcomes of divorce on children include fears to lose the attachment for the parents, fear of being rejected by one or both of them, fear of misunderstandings and tension between the parents. All these fears considerably affect psychological condition of the child.
Just several decades ago it was usual for an American family to have father working hard outside and mother staying home and bring up the children. But escalating requirements of modern times resulted in the necessity of constant increasing of family income. Very often both father and mother are forced to work full day. In such cases they can not properly care about their kids, because the work takes a lot of efforts and time. Frequently little children have to stay alone at home, or be under the supervision of another adult: a relative, a neighbor, or a professional childcare specialist. And, in many situations it may not be good and advantageous for the development of children.
Obviously, there were a lot of positive effects of good income received by my working parents. Father had a successful career and now he became a chief manager of one of the departments of their agency. Mum is a marketing manager. Three years ago we moved into a big and very comfortable house, where I finally received my own room and some “space” to build my own daily life. Besides, me and my brother visited very good schools, and we could easily afford all the reasonable things we needed. But, in anyway, we had some lack of family care: I can see it clearly from the behavior of my brother, who learns many new things from his street friends, not form the family.