New Adventures in Bad Parenting: United Kingdom.

The United States takes a lot of flak for our cultural depravity. We’re considered to be fat, lazy, reactionary, shallow, over-sexualized, even jingoistic. Yes, some of that is sometimes true, but the fact is that most cultures are guilty of these things, and not just in the west. The United States, though, is often made the example of everything wrong with the modern world, like we’re the impudent child compared to old Europe’s class and dignity. Well, not this week.

Over in Great Britain this week, a 13-year-old boy and 15-year-old girl have just become parents. Hardly anyone would be shocked if this occured in the United States, since much fodder for jokes is made about inner-city troublemakers, rural southern rednecks, or western Mormon broods. It’s easy to forget that even a country that places “Great” in their title is full of irresponsible and foolhardy people. These kids, though, are not the biggest problem in this equation.

Nine months ago, when Alfie Patten was only 12, he had sex 1 time with the older Chantelle Steadman. I may be naive, but it boggles my mind that a 12 year old, one who’s voice hadn’t even broken yet, would be having sex but that’s not to say I can blame him because at that age you hardly ever know what you’re doing and can easily just do things without thinking. Where the problem lies is that neither of these kids realized what they were doing or that the consequences of their actions could be a human life. Then, once they found out about the pregnancy, they decided it would be good to have the baby, but also didn’t want to tell anybody.

You could chalk this up to teenagers being teenagers and concerned more about getting in trouble than doing the right thing. I, instead, see a vicious pattern repeating. Chantelle’s parents are both unemployed and have 5 other children who they support on government assistance, while Alfie’s parents are divorced and he has 8 siblings. If you’re a father who only gets to see your children some of the time, and that time is divided between 9 children, how much of that time do you think is going to be spent at soccer matches and movies and how much do you think is going to be spent building trust and talking about sex and responsiblity?

These kids should have known better, first to have sex when they weren’t prepared for it, but putting that aside, they should have known to use protection, and after that, they should have known that this was such a big deal that they should have told their parents. The fact is, they didn’t know these things in part because their parents dropped the ball. It’s hard enough being a good parent under the best of circumstances, and gets exponentially harder when you start to early, can’t financially support them, have an unstable home life, and then have too many children too boot.

It’s unfortunate that now these kids will probably also repeat the mistakes of their parents. They certainly won’t last as a couple, and neither of them works yet so already they can’t take care of the child on their own. Education will now be secondary to them, and thus limit their opportunity to improve their lives and the life of their child, and kids who are having unsafe sex at 13 are just as likely to have unsafe sex at 20, so I’m sure more kids are on the way.

So who’s to blame? Is it just the parents? Is it the teenagers? Is it the schools or the media? Like our stimulus here in the States, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Ultimately, it’s a reminder that children are children and that not talking to them about sex doesn’t stop them from having it, but it does stop them from being prepared when they do. Maybe if they’d had proper sex education, or had attentive parents who were comfortable talking to them about sex, then maybe they wouldn’t have rushed into it, or if they had, would have been wise enough to use protection.