Why counsel the parents of pregnant teens at all?

Parents are very important in the lives of their children, as is recognized by studies and ad campaigns including the campaign against drugs, which proclaimed "Parents, the anti-drug." In 2001, 49% of teenagers said their parents influenced their decisions about sex most strongly, while 16% said their friends influenced them most strongly. The 2007 survey (summary can be found in a press release online at http://www.teenpregnancy.org/resources/data/pdf/wov_07_pr.pdf) shows that 47% of teens say parents are the most influential in their decisions about sex while 18% say that their friends are their primary influence. Interestingly, there was a dip in these numbers during the 2004 survey, where only 37% of teens said parents were the biggest influence on their sexual decisions.

For successful life solutions, parents have key roles to play in all the options to be considered: adoption, marriage, or single parenting. Parents need to help guide their children through the crises often found in a pregnancy. If there was a rape or sexual abuse, parents must be involved along with professional counselors to help their daughter cope with and learn to heal from these experiences. Parents should also help with the more "routine" crises of pregnancy like pre-term labor, partial or complete bed rest, etc.

It's also critical to counsel the parents of pregnant teens because the parents themselves are often suffering and need a safe place to discuss their hurts and the strains their daughter's pregnancy is putting on them, their other children and their marriage. It is easy to focus only on the pregnant young woman and forget that there is often an entire family involved who are all impacted by the situation. Since parents will need to be there to support their daughter as well as any other children, they need a place to come and find support for themselves.

In today's culture, pregnancy outside marriage is becoming commonplace. In 2000, one of every three babies was born outside of marriage (The Family Portrait, by Bridget E. Maher. Available from the Family Research Council), 27% of Caucasian births, 69% of African-American births, and 43% of Hispanic births were to unwed parents. There are a large number of parents who are impacted by the choices of their children and who need all the support they can find.

Why focus on the parents of the pregnant girl?

In America today the father of the baby has very little legal say in a pregnancy outcome, and the parents of that boy have even less legal voice. This is not at all to say that the father's opinion is not heard. In our decades of experience in counseling pregnant girls and women, they shockingly often say that while the father says he'll emotionally support her "whatever she chooses," he also makes it very clear that he prefers that she abort. In our experience, the parents of a boy who fathers a child discover the pregnancy much later than the parents of the pregnant woman and have much less impact on her decisions than her own parents. So while the boy's parents do suffer some of the same emotional reactions as the girl's parents, their pain is just different enough that it is hard to write material that covers "both sides of the story" at the same time.

The book How To Survive Your Teen's Pregnancy focuses on the family of the pregnant girl, and so does this group discussion guide. We do not recommend that parents of the baby's father attend a group like this in a mixed setting - they need to have their own group so they can focus on their different issues without the possibility of blame and resentment that may be expressed by the parents of a pregnant young woman.