Teenage pregnancy: liability not the child’s alone

Teenage pregnancy is ugly all around.

It boggles the mind that when children conceive, people are up in arms but they, parents included, are silent when the courting happens on their watch.

Can we admit that this is not just a journey for the child, but also a test of parental responsibility? Are children being supported by whatever parenting structures they may have? Are parents doing the necessary supervision of the child who goes after men almost twice their age? Are parents carrying the cross for their part in ensuring their children’s innocence remains untainted?

When children do well, we congratulate the child. What happens when they fail to impress? Are their parents held accountable? And then the same teenager, who at 13 has birthed a child with a man almost 30 years old, is thrown a baby shower by her parents.

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Look, when it comes to parenting, it’s each to their own, but we have to be honest – there is nothing to celebrate in teenage pregnancy. If we are going to have a fun event in the first pregnancy, who is to say there will not be a repeat offence?

Parenting is no easy feat, I wonder how someone has to alternate between a school uniform and motherly shoes copes.

Parents really need to stop trying to befriend their children. There is nothing cool in teenage parenting. We cannot normalise that a grandmother is 38 years old, when in KwaZulu-Natal alone, 26 000 plus teenage pregnancies were reported in 2023 and 1 254 of those pregnancies happened to girls aged 14 and younger.

The alternative to a pregnancy is termination.

Parents, with the help of government, need to teach their children that unprotected sex will lead to unplanned pregnancies, never mind incurable and curable diseases.

And it is not just the women and girls who need to be educated about this, but men and boys too. A man is an active participant in the making of these children. And a child is forced to terminate because he remembered that he had a wife at home?

These children have scarred the nation. Parents cannot walk freely in the streets without fingers pointing to “his/her mother”.

While we pray for healing and redemption as a nation, may we not forget that parents need counselling regarding the acts of their children. They are the collateral damage.

The silence of parents in the face of wrongdoing defines how we see them too.

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