"Reality" TV (or the Jury's Still Out)

I have no idea how it happened, but I got caught on this show last week:

When I "Googled" this image, I found a lot of blog hoopla ("bloghoo"? "bloopla"?) I never knew existed.

People are saying all kinds of things about this show: "the dumbest show ever" and "what responsible parent would ever let their teen live with their significant other before marriage"?

I really see it as more of a social experiment. And poor M had to hear a bit of a discourse and dissection of the falseness of the construct that the bloopla had also criticized: life does NOT come at you allatonce like it does for the teens on this show. Real people have the benefit of growing up and learning from experience, and so on and so forth.

BUT.

As the oldest child of a teenage mother, a cousin and sister of several teenage parents, and a proponent of "the waiting game", I firmly believe something has to be done. Do I think a social experiment such as this is the answer? Will this show help show teenagers everywhere how not to be? Perhaps not. But, it makes for good TV and at least the teenagers on that show will not likely become insta-parents.

It's a huge decision. Where maybe some people don't think much about it, maybe I think too much about it.

And I think that whatever can be done to dissuade young people from making big decisions before they realize what those decisions entail, I think it should be done. I still think it should be the parents who do that. . .

Parents, you can use my mom's "Black Bart" speech of "if you get pregnant, you'll be o-u-t of this house before you know it" if you want. It worked. It scared the crap out of me, and I didn't know she didn't really mean it until like a month ago.