Encourage Your Child To Use Contraception

When faced with the question of what to tell your daughter about birth control many parents hope to not have to face this choice. Yet the fact is that it is much smarter to educate your teenagers than to look away and hope that they will figure out what to do, or maybe that if they cannot they will abstain from a sexual relationship. Time and logic tells us that human emotions take over way too often and the chance of a couple of young lovers abstaining simply because they have not thought about contraception is very unlikely. Perhaps looking logically at the potential outcomes might help.

In the United States the chance of a woman having a baby because of being involved in a relationship where the couple is having unprotected sex is thirteen percent before reaching the age of twenty. Further, though there have been some signs of improvement an American girl who is fifteen to seventeen years old is twice as likely to get pregnant as a girl to that age living in Canada or in The United Kingdom. The chance is ten times higher than if she lived in France or in Sweden. What are American teenagers doing differently than these other girls?

Of these young American girls, faced with the prospect of being a teenage mother thirty five percent of them will decide to abort the pregnancy, fourteen of them suffer a miscarriage from natural circumstances and fifty one percent have the baby. Statistics are not available for how many of them give their babies up for adoption, but the fact is a high percentage of them wind up as teenage mothers who are unable to finish high school, have low self esteem because of their living circumstances which are often difficult and not what they had hoped for in their lives. Too many of these babies wind up neglected or abused by young women who are still children themselves.

The most common method of birth control for teenagers is the condom. This has certain advantages as it not only protects them from an unwanted pregnancy but it can also prevent transmission of sexuality transmitted diseases. Not all teenager couple become monogamous couples. The next most common used method is the Pill.

Looking at the statistics, and understanding what this means to our young people, it is essential that teenagers have places to go to get contraception but as well that they are encouraged to talk to their parents and health care providers who can advise them on what to do to protect themselves from becoming pregnant. Parents who look at their teenagers and think they are too young should check the statistics again. Denying that your child is sexually active does not help them at all. Being there as someone they can talk to, even if you are first to broach the subject, will be rewarding for you both. Most importantly it could stop your daughter form dropping out of school to be a teenage mother or your son from having to pay child support when he is only eighteen.

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