A high school in a nearby town offers free day care for the students, and apparently this is not unique. Urban school districts have been providing day care for nearly a decade – maybe more.
I realize that it is a problem, but it is just odd to me that it is now available at a high school in a small town. Dang it – those kids obviously have too much free time! Give them more homework! When I was in high school, if you got pregnant, you were out.
In fact, even if you were married (back in those days kids did sometimes get married their senior year) and you got pregnant, you were out. It was just one of those consequences that you had to accept.
Teen pregnancy was not a status symbol, you weren’t glorified on television, and no one made it easier for you, as far as I could tell. There was certainly no free day care, except maybe grandma.
See, I am on the fence with this thing.
One the one hand, I like that the day care centers give girls a chance to finish school despite being a mom. She can run in between classes and nurse her baby, check on him, or handle anything that may need to be handled.
Knowing her baby is being well taken care would certainly give her the ability to concentrate on her Algebra class. For those reasons, I think that the day care centers are a great idea.
But.
Does that send the message that it is o.k. to have sex, to get pregnant when you are still in school? Go ahead and have unprotected sex, when that baby comes along you can bring her to school with you, no problem.
Schools in the United States are overcrowded and financially strapped in many areas. Is it fair to spend money on child care for the students who have had babies with money that could have been used to invest in benefiting other students’ educations?
Some schools in my area have multi-million dollar football stadiums and field houses, day care, and afterschool programs, but not enough English textbooks for every student. That bothers me, a lot.
I am happy that the teen pregnancy rate is down, that the abortion rate is down, and that more kids than ever before are being responsible about their sexual activity by either abstaining or using contraception.
I am not so happy that teen pregnancy is being glorified on television and that schools with groaning budgets are being asked to spend even more of those precious dollars on day care.
If a teen is old enough to have sex, old enough to choose unprotected sex (and yes, they choose it – contraception is easy to get), and old enough to choose to keep her baby, then she is old enough to file for child support and provide her own day care without burdening the school district and taxpayers with the cost.
The United States is turning into a society that puts the needs of a few on the priority list over the needs of the many. It can’t be done successfully. It isn’t right to make the majority suffer for the minority in school or anywhere else.
What are your thoughts?
statistics source: Guttmacher
photo credit: michael_swan via photopin cc
