On parenthood

 A good friend of mine, a 39 year old woman we'll call Samantha, recently told me that her daughter is pregnant. For some context, Samantha's background is important here.


Samantha is a hard working woman who has made her share of mistakes in her life, but is certainly under no illusions about her responsibility to herself and her children.  She married early and the marriage produced 3 kids, ended soon after the third child, and she found herself alone and without support. But she took charge of her life as the kids got a bit older, got licensed and opened a daycare center, and moved to a very nice Chicago suburb so her children could have a better education and be be exposed to a different way of life than she was exposed to.  When you meet Samantha, you have no choice but to like her. She's a very nice person with a bubbly personality, very straightforward in her approach and doesn't have a pretentious bone in her body.  I say this but again, she has made some decisions that she herself has admitted were ill considered but who hasn't?

Her first daughter graduated from a nice suburban high school last year, and I asked about her. I, perhaps a bit presumptuous, asked about her daughter's college major, her plans, her current summer work experience situation.  Then again, I take that back. It would not be presumptuous of me to ask about college plans if I was talking about a Wall Street executive whose kid graduated from Andover.  Anyway, Samantha instead told me that her 19 year old daughter is  pregnant, living at home, and has no concrete plans.

My reaction perhaps betrays my feelings about teenage pregnancy and/or unplanned families.  All kinds of studies and data support my worst fears. Inability to control your reproductive life, teen pregnancy, academic failure or stunted academic progress, limited potential, low expectations, and the worst, repeating cycle. It repeats itself in the next generation.  This daughter, in my opinion had a good example in her mother's attempts to provide a relatively comfortable life for them. She went to a high school where most kids graduate and move on to college.  She had a mother who did all she could to provider for her and siblings. And still...pregnant at 19, a boyfriend who has no prospects or plans.. So my friend Samantha is about to be a grandmother--I could barely say it out loud--at 39.  I asked Samantha how this could have happened.

First, she did not want to put her daughter on birth control once the daughter confided in her mother that she was sexually active.  She felt it would be tantamount to condoning her behavior.  Samantha admits this might have been a mistake but she is not sure.  The daughter does not want to consider the alternative to having the baby, she's very conflicted. But at the same time, no job, a bad situation and all she has is her mom who is already working hard to take care of the other two teenagers, and her own mother (grandmother to the 19 year old).  The mother of the boyfriend is useless: she has 7 other children from an unknown number of fathers. Samantha all of a sudden finds herself in the middle of a messy life she had worked quite hard to avoid and protect her children from.

I am sure anyone can come up a long list of things Samantha did wrong during the years but as someone who knows her, while her life is quite different from mine, I can say that she leveraged resources she had to make something out of almost nothing. I expected dramatically different outcomes from her own children given her efforts to raise her them well.  While there are no guarantees, I do wonder if there is any control parents have in ensuring their children make the right decisions, from a position of power and self-control rather than succumbing to whatever chance might throw at you.