When you hear the phrase “teen mom,” is the first thing that pops into your head the MTV franchise?

“[…] they don’t ever say [anything] about the teenage girl that’s going to school, or just graduated high school, or just graduated college that was a teenage mom. They never say anything like that. They always put the bad news on television”
(Proweller, 2000, p. 111)

I couldn’t help but look at MTV’s hit series Teen Mom through the lens of this article. Our society has a perverse obsession with teen moms – we chastise them in public but in the privacy of our homes, we ogle and obsess over their lives on TV. To make it worse, based on the light research I did on MTV’s casting practice, the producers pick the girls who “the most compelling (read: horrifying but completely unique) back stories.” So from the start, these girls are picked because they reinforce the negative stereotypes we’ve created, to serve as entertainment for the masses and a “warning” for young women.

Is it surprising, then, no one reports that most of these girls successfully graduated high school (and some, college) after their pregnancies, are now holding down jobs and taking care of their kids? It is possible, as Proweller and others show, that with support and determination, teen moms can have successful and enriching lives after an unexpected pregnancy. Obviously these positive factors are not available to every adolescent mother, so the best thing we can do for our students who find themselves in this situation is to be supportive and help them find resources that will help them thrive during and after their pregnancy.