Posts Tagged ‘MTV’

February 19th, 2010

MTV’s 16 & Pregnant

I thought last season of 16 & Pregnant was chock full of irresponsible children having children, which confirmed my thought when they used some of those same girls for their most recent series Teen Mom. Until this past Tuesday when they debuted the new season of 16 & Pregnant.
The advertisement of the show says “10 more girls” and I thought to myself, here we go again.

But of course MTV is going to continue to cash in on this Maury Povich type series because they are making a butt load of money off of it. Tuesday’s episode of 16 & Pregnant was #1 on cable, and #2 on TV only behind American Idol. It featured a 16 year old, rather immature girl, and her alcoholic, missing in action, loser of a boyfriend who in the end, saw the baby one time and that was it.
My heart broke for this girl’s mother. I thought Farrah from Teen Mom was bad at ditching her kid to go hang out with boys or party, but this girl took the cake.  At one point she even compared being a mother to being in prison. Clearly a child that was not ready for motherhood.

But I have to wonder, with numbers, and ratings like this, what kind of message are we sending the 13-24 age group, which this show is most popular with? Now, I myself am only 24, soon to be 25, but I did not have my first child till I was 22, living on my own, and fully responsible and supported myself. And to be honest with you I would never have been able to raise a child, and live in my parents home for a wide array of reasons.

But are we showing a glorified message to these young girls of what pregnancy and parenthood is?  Granted most of these girls clearly are not living the high life, but in typical teen mentality, how many will say “Oh well that won’t happen to me” or “Johnny is the love of my life, he won’t leave” when in reality the number of girls on this show that actually had their boyfriends involved in the raising of their children statisitcally was way higher than in reality.

I just think MTV should focus on shows helping teens to prevent pregnancy to begin with, not exploiting them through crappy choices.
Another thing that struck me as strange is…. why hasn’t MTV featured any girls who made the choice of abortion?  It seems to be sending a very one sided message to teens, and young women watching this show.

I don’t know… I guess that is just my take on things.

I hate to see something like teen pregnancy glorified.