Opinion: Teen pregnancy is being romanticized, thanks to social media

Social media companies need to do something about the increasing number of videos romanticizing teen pregnancy, and soon.

Perhaps these clickbait YouTube titles look familiar: “A Day in the Life of a Teen Mom,” “Teen Mom Struggles!” “Senior Year GRWM: TEEN MOM EDITION.”

The issue with these videos is not the content itself. It is the intent behind posting them.

Most teen mom YouTubers open their channel with a video telling their story — “Single Mom at 14: My Story,” by Maddie Lambert for example — and somewhere in the video, they explain that they created their channel to help other pregnant teens feel not-so-alone in their journey as a young parent. While these stories may be true, there are entirely too many teen parents using the internet to exploit their situation and children for profit, rather than for support from the young parent community.

Here’s the thing: teen moms should not be influencers. Why? Because the notion promotes unsafe sexual health. With so many ill-informed teenagers that use the internet daily, seeing videos that intentionally or unintentionally promote the idea of getting pregnant and having children at an age where you most likely do not have the financial means to do so, is very unsettling.

Sexual education is being taught in exceptionally more schools since 1995, but according to a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, less than 50% of adolescents received support in finding contraceptives from 2015–2019.

Statistics from America’s Health Rankings show that teen births in the United States have decreased 42% from 26.4 to 15.4 births per 1,000 females aged 15–19 between the years of 2013 and 2020. This decrease could easily be reversed if teen pregnancy continues as a social media trend.

Internationally, of those 15.4 births, the largest percentage of babies born are American Indian, Black, Hispanic, or Hawaiian.

I bring up ethnicity not to be controversial, but to introduce the idea that if teen pregnancy is going to be a trend on social media, diversity should at least be represented because the majority of teen mom ‘influencers’ on social media are white. White babies born only account for 10.3 of those 1,000 teen births, yet YouTubers such as Maddie Lambert, Camryn Clifford of Cam & Fam, and Yasmin Switzer are some of the biggest names when one thinks of a teen mom YouTuber.

Years later, with large followings and a brand of sorts, these young women still put “teen mom” in their video titles. Why? For attention and, unfortunately, a steady stream of income.

Many other pregnant teens have taken to TikTok, a platform with shorter video formats, to seemingly poke fun at their own situation or mock other teen parents.

One video, posted by the user @krusty_kristy, portrays a teen walking down her school hallway with swift camera movements to a fast-paced song. She spins around with a smile on her face and a hand on her baby bump before continuing down the hallway like she owns the place. The caption on the video reads, “Walking around my school being the only pregnant student there.”

Grace Hunter has a running joke on TikTok that her two older sisters are her “mom” and “grandma.” She is seemingly in her 20s and it is very apparent that all three women in these videos are close in age to her. The videos on her account that grab my attention, however, are the ones with a caption referencing a pregnancy at 12 years old.

A 12-year-old is not even a teenager. They are still going through puberty. If these videos are just a joke, which is what I suspect, glorifying something so serious is very insensitive.

There are hundreds of videos just like this, making fun of young pregnancy for attention. Even if the situation is real, sharing such a personal experience on the internet is very nerve- wracking. It should not be so easy for others to make fun of.

While I do not think that every single parent on the internet is posting these videos with ill intent, it cannot be denied that since 2017, teen pregnancy has become increasingly more romanticized on social media.

Teen pregnancy should not be a trend, yet the popularity of these videos and channels seemed to have started one. This is a very real problem and platforms such as YouTube and TikTok have done nothing about these videos. At the very least, comments have been disabled.

Using teen pregnancy as a means to gain attention sends the wrong message and promotes poor sexual conduct and the risk of poor sexual health. Not only is there a risk of infections and diseases such as STD’s, STI’s, Herpes, and HIV/AIDS, about 700 women die yearly from pregnancy or delivery complications in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

For all these reasons and more, it is important to understand that teen pregnancy is not a joke. It never was and it never will be. Social media companies need to moderate this content better so that it does not continue the ripple effect of teenager and child exploitation.