The media has a negative effect on the rate of teenage pregnancies.
In the society we live in today the teenagers are influenced by everything they come across. They look up to celebrities and see them as role models no matter whether the person is leading a life worth looking up to or leading a life of shame. Most teenagers try to be like the people they see on TV and in the newspapers because according to their view those people live interesting life’s.The media spends most off its time selling their magazines or getting rates up by showing these celebrities behaving badly making babies like it’s going out of fashion and having random sex.
Most teenagers would then see this as ‘cool’ and think ‘OH my now that would be fun let me try it’This is how the media affects the thinking of our young girls. ‘I want to be like her.”The boys are worst of because the media keeps portraying these Hollywood hunks as players who sleeps with every second girl, gets them knocked up and then goes all on in their jolly life’s. They aspire to be like that. They enjoy playing with girls and going all the way, giving them bragging rights to their friends: ‘Oh that John Mayer has nothing on me, I had sex with five girls in just one night.’ Or ‘Boys tonight I’m going to pull a Colin Farell’I actually heard guys say these things while I was in school, so that proved to me that boys like to be more like girls.And some girls even go to say that they don’t mind having sex with different guys or have a lot of sex, I mean ‘Christina Aguilera is a dirty girl and she does not have a string of babies’
If you take the show “sixteen and pregnant” you would think that is a wake up for girls to see the reality of being a parent on sixteen and having to cope with having to take care of another person, but no they find that entertaining and some even claim that they can do it easier than those girls in the shows.
What the media does is show these girls through shows like sixteen and pregnant that it is okay to have sex and fall pregnant as long as you stand up and take care of it.
MTV sells the show as a cautionary tale to discourage teenage pregnancy, but critics have recently speculated that it actually has the opposite effect. (1) Doctor Logan Levkoff, a teen development expert, says that even though MTV illustrates the harsh consequences of teen pregnancy, there are many pregnant teens in pop culture that can really influence American teenage girls. “There are more pregnant teens in pop culture than ever before,” Levkoff said in an interview with ABC News. “They are on the cover of magazines, getting paid, getting endorsement deals, and becoming calendar models. Even if MTV shows all the hardships, they’re still being supported in so many ways. The way we bring people into fame for really not doing anything has created a culture where it is exciting to be a pregnant teen and the fact of the matter is that most teens who are pregnant do not have the same experience that the girls on those shows have.” The multitude of teen moms that appear in the media reduces the shock that used to be associated with teenage pregnancy. “There is no fear and shame in teen pregnancy anymore,”
According to researchers in the Rand Corp (1) (2008) teens exposed to the most sexual content on TV are twice as likely as teens watching less of this material to become pregnant before they reach age 20.
According to Anita Chandra, DrPHa, Steven C. Martino, PhDb, Rebecca L. Collins, PhDc, Marc N. Elliott, PhDc, Sandra H. Berry, MAc, David E. Kanouse, PhDc and Angela Miu, MSc (2) there is increasing evidence that youth exposure to sexual content on television shapes sexual attitudes and behavior in a manner that may influence reproductive health outcomes.
Sources
1. MTV’s reality shows glamorize aspects of teenage pregnancies
More schools should implement programs like Paly’s “Baby Think It Over” project
by Bailey Cassidy of Campanile
Published March 17, 2011
http://voice.paly.net/node/26681
2. Time U.S.
By Alice Park Monday, Nov. 03, 2008
3. Pediatrics: official journal of the American academy of pediaters
to Anita Chandra, DrPHa, Steven C. Martino, PhDb, Rebecca L. Collins, PhDc, Marc N. Elliott, PhDc, Sandra H. Berry, MAc, David E. Kanouse, PhDc and Angela Miu, MSc
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