Teen Pregnancy, 101

I have always considered myself to be honest with my children about, well, about everything. It’s one of the reasons this whole Santa charade creeps me out. But that’s not what this post is about. When I was pregnant with my third child my older kids were five and three. I was just dying for one of them to ask how the baby got in my belly (okay, so I did say ‘in my belly,’ not ‘in my uterus’—I guess I haven’t been that honest).

At one point my son asked how it got in there and I replied ‘Daddy helped put it there,’ because I wanted to ease into it and I assumed his next question would be ‘how?’ It wasn’t. For whatever reason, but probably mostly because Joe does most of the visible work around the house (changing batteries in toys, folding laundry) “Oh,” was all he said. Damn. Did I miss a teachable moment? Or was I just answering honestly, in age-appropriate chunks, and allowing him to go as far as he wanted? My intention is to follow their curiosity, he just wasn’t as curious as I’d wanted him to be. Eventually, thanks to a peripheral mention of hermit crabs mating in the moonlight, my children learned how the basic male and female pieces fit together.

Our liberal neighborhood also provides us with lots of discussions about babies and their origins.

Curiosities like Why don’t Jimmy and Erin have a daddy and Why does Zeke have two moms? allow for talk about eggs and fertilization—the ‘daddy’ parts available to moms who aren’t in love with a man, the middlemen and women who can fit the two parts together when the biological parents, for whatever reason (and there are plenty around here), don’t do it themselves.

Between all of this honesty and alternative lifestyle stuff, I figured we had all the bases covered. And yet I’ve been rocked by the news of Zoey 101’s—whoops--I mean Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy.

A sixteen year old pregnant?  Not the craziest thing in the world. The seventeen year old prom queen in my high school was noticeably pregnant in her ballgown and tiara in 1981. It seemed scandalous to me, but at least I was a freshman. I’m sure our parents fretted about that one and the message it was sending.  Prom Queen as role model, blah blah blah.  But this? A sixteen year old who plays a character my elementary school children identify with? Zoey 101 may be in college, BUT to my 3^rd and 5^th graders, her college may as well be high school—the sanitized kind where Hannah Montana and Drake and Josh go.

Yes I let my children watch these shows. To me, they were a welcome improvement from cartoons—where anything can happen with no consequence (mashed flat by a falling anvil? No problem! Step off a cliff and plummet to the earth below?  Piece of cake!). I loved the little bits of morals these shows offered my kids. Lie to your parents? You’ll be found out. Judge someone by how he looks? Miss out on a great personality. Cheat on your test? Face humiliation and loads of extra work. Lots of sound school stuff coming their way, just as they’re asked to negotiate their own way through the minefield of academics, lunches, recesses. Frankly, I was grateful for the help.

And my kids do know, as much as any kid can, that Zoey, Drake, Josh, and Hannah are played by actors --like they ‘know’ (thanks to a well-spent $29.95) that the cotton candy machine looks great on tv but makes terrible cotton candy in real life. I have to admit though, at forty-one, I’m not always able to make this real-vs.-fantasy distinction, having been devastated--yes, devastated--by Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt this summer—(but he seemed so light-hearted and happy in Starsky and Hutch!).

Still, my seven-year old daughter caught wind of the Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy news the other morning and was alarmed. “She’s having a baby?” She asked.

“Yes, she’s having a baby.”

“But they said she’s only sixteen,” she added.

“Well, it was kind of a mistake.”

“But, didn’t she have to…do…that thing to get the baby?”

“Yes.”

“Then how could it be a mistake?” She asked.

“Well…”

“Maybe she just didn’t know that that thing is how to make a baby?” She mused. “Or maybe she just forgot.”

“I think maybe you’re right.” I said, deciding that she’d kind of hit the nail on the head. It does seem to be some form of forgetting. Forgetting that that’s how babies are made. Forgetting what they’ve been told about it being able to happen to anyone. I was thinking about all that teen-forgetting, and then I forgot to seize the opportunity to explain some more things about sex to her.

We all know that the media attention is what’s going to affect my children more than just the fact that some far-off child-star made a mistake (a much more updated version of Dana Plato shoplifting). I can protect them from television news coverage, but not from friends talking in school, and from the magazine covers that will, no doubt, be assaulting us in the airports we’ll be in in the next few days (in the next nine months?). And I can only imagine how impressionable girls only a handful of years older than my daughter will be affected by what will no doubt be sugar-coated glimpses of one girl’s early-journey to momhood, a journey that won’t reflect the real-life struggles facing most sixteen-year old moms. Jamie Lynn’s figure will snap back in minutes, education and career-opportunities will continue to surround her, and her baby’s going to be awfully cute, beaming adorably from her hip, making it hard to resist the idea that every teen girl should have such a cute companion.

The good news, I guess, is that this is serving as an eye-opener for me, this ‘honest’ mom, who, it turns out, had been cutting corners in some of my explanations with my kids. As open as I thought I was being with my kids about the mechanics of conception, I just didn’t think they were old enough to learn the sex-as-recreation (not just procreation) part. This is a teachable moment for me, and I hope other moms are paying attention too. Maybe this time I shouldn’t just answer their questions, I should initiate some discussions.