Telling Your Parents,That u are Pregnant

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No teenage girl wants to have to tell her parents that she is pregnant and no parent of a teenage girl wants to hear that news. Still, if you are a pregnant teenager, it is important to tell your parents and allow them to help you through the experience. This article offers some ideas about how to tell your parents that you are pregnant.

Why Tell?

If you are pregnant, you have three basic choices. You can give birth to the baby and keep it. You can give birth to the baby and give it up for adoption. Or you can have an abortion. If you’ve chosen one of the first two options, your parents definitely need to know—your changing body will make it easy for them to guess anyway. If you tell them yourself, rather than waiting for them to notice it, you will have much more control over where the conversation takes place and how it goes.

If you choose the third option, abortion, you may be able to keep your parents in the dark. However, some states have parental notification or consent laws. Even if your state doesn’t, you should tell your parents that you have been through something so important and potentially life-altering.

The only reason not to tell your parents is if they have a history of abuse and you fear for your safety. If this is the case, contact a women’s clinic or hospital and make an appointment to see their social worker.

Preparation

Before you talk to your parents, double check the results of the pregnancy test. Some of the early-detection tests are not very accurate and may give false positive readings.

If you are sure you are pregnant, take a day or two to think through your options.

Plan what you are going to say to your parents. Do you want to talk to them together or would you rather tell one of them before the other?

Find a time to speak to your parent or parents in private, when they have some time to talk and are not rushing off to work or another commitment. If it is hard to catch them in a free moment, ask them to schedule some time to talk to you about something serious.

Tempting as it may be to tell your parents in a public place, like a restaurant, avoid this impulse. Tempers run high at such a moment, voices may get raised, and you don’t want a bunch of strangers witnessing a big fight between you and your parents.

Most parents of pregnant teens try to be supportive, but just in case the talk goes badly and they throw you out of the house, or you feel unsafe and want to leave, it’s a good idea to have a Plan B. Could you stay with your baby’s father or with one of your girlfriends for a couple of days? Is there another relative who might take you in?

The Talk

There is no way you can cushion your parents from the natural shock and grief they will feel when you tell them you’re pregnant. There’s no gentle lead in, no way to make a joke of it, and it’s cruel to make them guess. The mature thing to do, once you have your parents alone in a private place is to simply say, “Mom, Dad, I’m pregnant.”

Be prepared for an intense emotional reaction, such as crying or yelling. Be prepared, too, to answer questions about who the father is, how the pregnancy happened (for instance, were you not using birth control or did your birth control fail), and what you plan to do now.

Some parents may take over and start making plans for you. Although this may feel very comforting at the time, make sure your voice is also heard, especially if you and your parents have different ideas about how the pregnancy should be handled.

There is no “typical” reaction to hearing the news that one’s daughter is pregnant. Some parents are immediately reassuring, others may be angry, still others will try to ignore (deny) the news.

If your parents have an extreme reaction, give them a few days to pull it together. Then approach them again. Hopefully they will be calmer and more able to give you the support you need once the idea has sunk in.

Having to tell your parents that you are pregnant is one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do. But if you can be direct and honest with them, they may turn into a valuable source of support and comfort.

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Teen pregnancy is bad for the mother…

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• Future prospects for teenagers decline significantly if they have a baby. Teen mothers are less likely to complete school and more likely to be single parents. Less than one-third of teens who begin their families before age 18 ever earn a high school diploma. Only 1.5% earn a college degree by the age of 30.⁴

• There are serious health risks for adolescents who have babies. Common medical problems among adolescent mothers include poor weight gain, pregnancy-induced hypertension, anemia, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and cephalopelvic disproportion. Later in life, adolescent mothers tend to be at greater risk for obesity and hypertension than women who were not teenagers when they had their first child.⁵

• I absolutely hate hearing everyone talk about that great party on the weekend or how they are going out of town over spring break. It seems that I am missing out on my childhood years. Where my daughter grows up and asks me what I did when I was a teen, all I will be able to say is "I changed your diapers and prepared you formula." I really wish I could go back and do things differently. I am sick of the constant worrying about how we are ever going to live once we move out of my mother's house.         - 16 year-old mother

  Teen pregnancy is closely linked to poverty and single parenthood. A 1990 study showed that almost one-half of all teenage mothers and over three-quarters of unmarried teen mothers began receiving welfare within five years of the birth of their first child.⁶ The growth in single-parent families remains the single most important reason for increased poverty among children over the last twenty years, as documented in the 1998 Economic Report of the President. Out-of-wedlock childbearing (as opposed to divorce) is currently the driving force behind the growth in the number of single parents, and half of first out-of-wedlock births are to teens.⁷ Therefore, reducing teen pregnancy and child-bearing is an obvious place to anchor serious efforts to reduce poverty in future generations.

Teen pregnancy is bad for the child…

• Children born to teen mothers suffer from higher rates of low birth weight and related health problems. The proportion of babies with low birth weights born to teens is 21 percent higher than the proportion for mothers age 20-24.⁸ Low birth weight raises the probabilities of infant death, blindness, deafness, chronic respiratory problems, mental retardation, mental illness, and cerebral palsy. In addition, low birth weight doubles the chances that a child will later be diagnosed as having dyslexia, hyperactivity, or another disability.⁴

• I got pregnant a month before my 17th birthday. I live in an emergency shelter for teen moms. I raise my son alone. In his whole life, his father has only taken care of him by himself one time. He does not pay me child support. My son was born two months early and with a hole in his heart. He requires constant care, so I have little time for myself. I love my son more than anything in the world, but it would have been a lot better if this had happened when I was like 27 instead of 17.       - Visitor to National Campaign’s website

  Children of teens often have insufficient health care. Despite having more health problems than the children of older mothers, the children of teen mothers receive less medical care and treatment. In his or her first 14 years, the average child of a teen mother visits a physician and other medical providers an average of 3.8 times per year, compared with 4.3 times for a child of older childbearers.⁴ And when they do visit medical providers, more of the expenses they incur are paid by others in society. One recent study suggested that the medical expenses paid by society would be reduced dramatically if teenage mothers were to wait until they were older to have their first child.⁴

• Children of teen mothers often receive inadequate parenting. Children born to teen mothers are at higher risk of poor parenting because their mothers - and often their fathers as well - are typically too young to master the demanding job of being a parent. Still growing and developing themselves, teen mothers are often unable to provide the kind of environment that infants and very young children require for optimal development. Recent research, for example, has clarified the critical importance of sensitive parenting and early cognitive stimulation for adequate brain development.⁴ Given the importance of careful nuturing and stimulation in the first three years of life, the burden born by babies with parents who are too young to be in this role is especially great.
• Children with adolescent parents often fall victim to abuse and neglect. A recent analysis found that there are 110 reported incidents of abuse and neglect per 1,000 families headed by a young teen mother. By contrast, in families where the mothers delay childbearing until their early twenties, the rate is less than half this level - or 51 incidents per 1,000 families.⁴ Similarly, rates of foster care placement are significantly higher for children whose mothers are under 18. In fact, over half of foster care placements of children with these young mothers could be averted by delaying child-bearing, thereby saving taxpayers nearly $1 billion annually in foster care costs alone.4

• Children of teenagers often suffer from poor school performance. Children of teens are 50 percent more likely to repeat a grade; they perform much worse on standardized tests; and ultimately they are less likely to complete high school than if their mothers had delayed childbearing.⁶

And bad for us all…

• The U.S. still leads the fully industrialized world in teen pregnancy and birth rates - by a wide margin. In fact, the U.S. rates are nearly double Great Britain's, at least four times those of France and Germany, and more than ten times that of Japan.3

• Teen pregnancy costs society billions of dollars a year. There are nearly half a million children born to teen mothers each year. Most of these mothers are unmarried, and many will end up poor and on welfare. Each year the federal government alone spends about $9 billion to help families that began with a teenage birth.¹⁰
  
  

• Until recently sex and pregnancy were at the bottom of my list of worries. But my boyfriend and I just started having sex. Twice it was unprotected. Now I am constantly worrying and counting the days hoping I am not going to be a repeat of my own teenage Mom.       - Visitor to National Campaign’s website

  Teen pregnancy hurts the business community's "bottom line." Too many children start school unprepared to learn, and teachers are overwhelmed trying to deal with problems that start in the home. Forty-five percent of first births in the United States are to women who are either unmarried, teenagers, or lacking a high school degree, which means that too many children - tomorrow's workers - are born into families that are not prepared to help them succeed.⁶ In addition, teen mothers often do not finish high school themselves. It's not easy for a teen to learn work skills and be a dependable employee while caring for children.

• A new crop of kids becomes teenagers each year. This means that prevention efforts must be constantly renewed and reinvented. And between 1995 and 2010, the number of girls aged 15-19 is projected to increase by 2.2 million.⁶

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