They Say: Teen Parents are Rich Kids Too
There’s a popular myth out there about pregnant teens: they’re disadvantaged youth who come from poor families. Oh yeah, and more likely than not, they haven’t seen their real Dad in a long, long time.
A nice pat way to explain how teens end up pregnant. Except it isn’t true.
A new study proves that the myth of the poor girl getting knocked up because she doesn’t have a strong male role model at home and mom is off working two jobs to make ends meet is just that - a myth.
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found sixty-seven percent of Americans believe pregnant teens come from homes below the poverty line. Seventy percent, they say, believe the teen girls are from single-parent households.
But a look at more than fourteen thousand kids in grades seven through twelve revealed that four of every ten teenage parents (including the fathers) lived in a home with both biological parents. An additional nineteen percent of those kids lived with one biological parent and one step-parent, putting the number of teenage parents living in a two-parent household at more than fifty percent.
Only twenty-eight percent of the teen parents lived in a home below the federal poverty line, and more than forty percent lived in homes where the income level was at or above two hundred percent of the poverty line.
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Tags: disadvantaged youth, Jeanne Sager, low income families, pregnant teens, single parents, teen pregnancy, teen pregnancy myth, they say, two-parent household
4 Comments
[...] They Say: Teen Parents are Rich Kids Too | Strollerderby [...]
Gaming Night is a great way to bond. | Parenting help in Oregon commented on Nov 02 09 at 6:20 pm[...] They Say: Teen Parents are Rich Kids Too | Strollerderby [...]
Workout with the kids | Parenting Help in Arizona commented on Nov 02 09 at 11:36 pmEric commented on Nov 02 09 at 2:34 pmContinuing my role of ’statistics asshat,’ the conclusions drawn are a little stretched. If you read the graphs in the linked article you can see that teens of a non-two biological/adoptive parent homes are 50% more likely to have children (40% of teens having 60% of the babies), and teens living below the poverty line are nearly twice as likely to have babies (16% of teens having 28% of the babies). Another whopper of a point is that this measures births to teens not teen pregnancies.
jenny tries too hard commented on Nov 02 09 at 3:48 pmyeah, I have to agree with the statistics asshat here…to declare something a “myth” you generally have to prove that it doesn’t exist or is pretty darn rare, not “slightly less out-of-proportion than we thought”.
It’s also useful to point out that a lot of people don’t think in terms of the actual federal poverty line. People at up to 200% of the poverty line can usually qualify for programs like Medicaid, and in my brain Medicaid recipient=person in poverty, even though the fed gov would technically disagree. The stereotype of a pregnant teenager being “poor” would still fit to many people who would classify Medicaid recipients as “poor”, so it would be good to know whether the respondants knew this.
