“Teach the Parents”

“We are facing an unabated ‘epidemic’ of younger and younger adolescent pregnancies,” says Dr. Lucie Rudd in the book Self-Destructive Behavior in Children and Adolescents.

Drawing from her own experience in working at an adolescent clinic, Dr. Rudd says: “When the young girl has been lacking a feeling of being loved and cared for, and especially if she has been placed in foster homes or institutions, she will often develop the fantasy that a baby of her own will give her the love she has missed and will help her to live happily ever after.” Is such a fantasy likely to be realized, however? Continues Dr. Rudd: “Little does she realize the amount of time and care that her baby will require.”

Some feel that the teen pregnancy “epidemic” can be slowed by sex-education classes in school. But as Dr. Rudd observes: “Parents do not want anybody to teach their kids reproduction. They appear scared of sharing their responsibilities with some agency outside of the family. It brings out hostility. In the meantime, they do not appear to be able to discuss comfortably with their children love, reproduction or sexual drives. Perhaps . . . we should teach the parents.”