Teen Mom

Leah, Kailyn, Janelle, and Chelsea, the four young women struggling to figure out their lives with their babies, all the time being filmed. These ladies aren’t much older than the audience that is viewing Teen Mom, if they are any older at all. The show follows the lives of four young girls that were previously on the MTV reality show, 16 and pregnant. Now they have had their babies, and are working on their relationships while trying to care for their children. There is a wide variety of people that watch this show, but young adults are definitely the target audience, likely girls in particular. With these middle school aged kids watching shows such as Teen Mom, it makes you wonder if this show was created purely for entertainment, as a warning to young adults to practice safe sex, or if there is some other purpose altogether.

This show has a few things about it that the average viewer might find a bit odd. The first one is the lack of airtime the babies get, I mean isn’t this show supposed to be about girls’ struggles to raise their children? The second is the huge amount of airtime the boyfriends/ex-boyfriends/“baby daddies” get. Teen Mom has a bad habit of focusing on relationships, instead of on the kids. It seems that a middle school student viewing this show will likely pick up on this, and may come to accept the idea that a mother’s relationships with others, men in particular, is more important than their duties to raise their child. In reality, the child obviously needs its parents more than the mother needs a boyfriend, and the child should be the first priority of both parents, but Teen Mom seems to endorse a different concept altogether. Some of the parents in the show do make their children a priority, which is good to see, but it is generally only the mothers that are in a stable relationship that are putting their children first. The concept that a woman needs to first find a man to take care of her and her children before she can properly care for her children is without a doubt encouraged on this show. Should young adults, girls in particular, pick up on this concept at a young age, it will definitely hinder their ability to be independent as they get older, and come to have children as well.

One of the most concerning things in Teen Mom is how easy they make having children seem. If a young boy or girl is watching a show like this, they are only seeing one side of things, because the TV show seems to edit out parts that make parenting seem difficult. I cannot remember seeing a baby having a fit even once, the parents at their wits end because they don’t know what to do. This message that is being sent to young adults with this kind of editing is completely skewed, and dangerous even, because it gives them the idea that parenting really isn’t that difficult, and that if “those girls” can do it, then I can too. The mothers on Teen Mom do have great support systems, and rely on them very heavily, but it is edited in a way that makes that seem completely natural and normal. It is my understanding that although new moms definitely do rely on their families and support systems, they generally don’t, or can’t, rely on them in the way that the young girls on this TV show do. It all just makes parenting seem too easy to a young audience, which has the opposite effect on them that most people would hope it would. If this show is intended as “birth control” for a young audience, then it definitely needs to make a few changes.