by Phylis Cox

Created on: November 26, 2008

At Gloucester High School in Gloucester, Massachusetts, administrators noticed an extraordinary rise in pregnancy for girls sixteen and under at the school. The number rose from an average of four pregnancies a year to seventeen. Upon investigation, administrators discovered that several girls in the school had made pacts to become pregnant and raise the children together (

www.politicalgateway.com. "According to Bill Albert, deputy director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 10 percent to 15 percent of teen pregnancies are intended"(www.gloucestertimes.com.

Growing up at a time when girls who became pregnant were treated unfairly, I find it difficult to comprehend why high school students would exchange high fives when a pregnancy test came back positive. The girls I went to school with would have been ashamed and afraid to tell their parents. They would have been forced to stop attending school because their situation would have been considered a disruption to the learning environment. Although I think shaming pregnant students and removing them from school is disgraceful, I don't see a problem in treating the pregnancy as a serious, life-changing event.

There's no doubt that our society has relaxed its moral attitude. Thank goodness, pregnant teenagers are no longer shunned, but I sometimes wonder if in an effort to be fair, we as a society have overcompensated and have created the false impression that the lives of a pregnant teenage girl and her family will not change dramatically.

As a teacher, many times I've witnessed young mothers showing off their babies to their classmates. Rarely have I heard them talk about the difficulty of caring for the baby. At those times, they're happy to soak up the oohs and ahhs of their friends. I don't know if their carefree attitude is a cover up or if their parents have taken on the burden of raising the child. In any case, are we creating a false impression that nothing in their lives has changed? Are we failing to make kids understand that it's difficult and costly to raise a child?

Some people believe that low self-esteem is a major contributor to the many problems that our children face today, including teenage pregnancy. Tremendous efforts to improve self-esteem, however, have not produced the results so many of us anticipated. As a matter of fact, I maintain that society's misunderstanding of how to raise self-esteem has actually contributed to many of our problems. Helping children

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