Pay to Prevent Teen Pregnancy?
The Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood in Colorado has tried a novel program that pays teen moms for every day they do not get pregant again. The underlying premise is that these teens do not want to get pregnant again and this helps them stay focused. The debate considers whether this isn’t coercion of these young women given that there is a monetary reward for not getting pregnant again. If you remove this debate from public and consider your own teen, I wonder If you could offer the carrot of a dollar a day to keep your teen from getting pregnant, contracting a sexually transmitted disease or dating the person you do not like?
It could work depending on the teen. This is a variation on the $5.00 for every “A” on the report card. This may work initially, but the question is whether there is any long term benefit once you remove the monetary carrot. You want to jump start the teen to make what we believe to be a good decision for their future, but you also want them to continue to make other good decisions that benefit their future. It does no good to have them remain childless all the while they are unable to make good choices about using drugs and alcohol, or they flunk out of high school and miss an opportunity to advance to any type of college learning. So, although there may be short term gain, it does little without the effort to change the problem-solving skills of these teens so they ultimately become self-sufficient and can make the decision for themselves.
Although we should continue to create ways to solve society’s problems, we can’t just do it with short cuts. We also can’t use short cuts when it comes to raising our teens by selling their learning process short by convincing them to behave a certain way without teaching them the value of behaving that way. If they are going to become sexually active then they need to learn how to make good choices because their lives will be dramatically different if they do not make good choices. Without this skill, with so many choices to make down the road, we jeopardize our teen’s success and risk them blaming us not for keeping them child free, but for controlling their behavior.
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