16 and Preg.na.nt

“You should watch 16 and Preg.na.nt with me,” said my 15-year old daughter as we finished up dinner last night. Since she very rarely wants to do anything with me, I agreed.

Have you seen this show? My first instinct was to hate it. Because it shows just how stupid our girls still are. Looking for love in all the wrong places. Having unprotected sex with boys who aren’t even worthy to speak to them let alone see them naked. It was infuriating. This particular little girl, Valerie, was Black and was adopted by white parents into a family of eleven kids. Valerie felt invisible and became visible in the arms of Matt. Matt is an idiot. A straight –up Ke.vin Fed.erli.ne wanna-be with less talent (is that even possible?). Matt doesn’t want anything to do with Valerie anymore and told her that the only time she should be calling him is if it had to do with the baby. Meanwhile, he’s telling his homeboy that he has to get a paternity test. His homeboy said, “I know right, definitely get that fraternity test.”

**dead**


My face was frowned up during the entire show and I tried not to make too many comments. There was one moment when Valerie and her mother were having a disagreement and Valerie stormed out of the room and said, “You aren’t listening!” I leaned over to my daughter and said, “That would never happen in this house, dear. Because I would snatch you by the back of your head and make you sit down and finish the conversation.”

“I know,” she said.

After showing the delivery and how Matt "really came through" by showing up (gag me), they went on to depict how difficult life is for Valerie. She can’t go out with her friends, she has to be homeschooled because she can’t afford daycare. The “love of her life” doesn’t want anything to do with her. In a nutshell, having a baby at 15 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Did my daughter get that message? Or is she sitting there thinking: “It would be different for me because I’m not that stupid.” She tells me she gets it, but I know that her modus operandi is to tell me exactly what (she thinks) I want to hear.

I did the same thing as a teenager. Actually, I never told my mother anything at all. I was no angel by any stretch of the imagination but I knew that bringing babies into my mother's house was not a smart move. I don't know ... it just seems to me that today's teenagers have this ridiculous sense of entitlement and no sense of consequences. I mean, how you gonna lay down with somebody, with no birth control and you don't have a job? And I don't want to hear about the heat of the moment and hormones and blah blah blah.

Easy for me to say at 45, I guess. But even at 15 I was afraid of the consequences associated with being a teenaged mother.