Posted by Prymface on Tuesday, July 10, 2012,
A woman who became pregnant at just 16 with someone she had known for only 6 months says she has no regrets at being a teenage mum.
In fact, the woman encourages other teen mums to be proud of being a teen mum too and boasts that there are benefits of having a child as a teenager!
After giving birth she spent a whole year living in a council house and claiming benefits, paid for by the tax payer, with her unemployed partner, who was 14 and half years older than her.
She walked out on the devot...
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Posted by Prymface on Wednesday, May 30, 2012,
This story represents everything that Prymface stands for.
Last week
Shanene was contacted
through her employer
and asked if she would be interviewed on Newsnight about being a hard
working single young mum struggling with housing costs in an area where
you cannot get much for under £1,000 a month. Naturally she agreed.
Except Shanene had been deceived. It turned out that this was not the
BBC's story at all. The BBC's story was about scroungers, unemployed
thinking they had rights to bene...
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Posted by Prymface on Friday, September 2, 2011,
1. Make sure you are 100% comfortable with your life being exposed for everyone to see.
2. Read the contract before you sign anything.
3. Remember that you can change your mind/pull out at any time if you're unhappy.
4. Remember that whatever you do, some people just DO NOT LIKE teen mums - it's ignorant and unfair but it's life - be prepared for negative comments and don't let them get to you.
5. Being on TV does not stop when the cameras stop or the show finishes - be prepared to be recognised ...
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Posted by Prymface on Wednesday, August 17, 2011,
Everyone seems to have an opinion about why it happened. Every time I turn on the TV or radio there is someone spouting their theory about those who are not considered to be 'one of us' normal people. Occasionally they will get hold of an 'interview' with 'one of them', or their mothers, who may mutter something seemingly inarticulate, which provides little explaination, but is great for voyeuristic followers who want to feel better about themselves and their own vocabulary. "My child would ...
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Posted by Prymface on Friday, September 24, 2010,
I've been meaning to write this post for a while but time passed and it slipped to the back of my mind.
Then something came on the radio that made me so angry I came out in the ugliest heat rash all over my neck and I knew then that the only way to get it out of my system was to do a blog post.
The
radio show was about how pregnant girls often feel judged at
clinics and therefore aren't getting the support in pregnancy that they should. The answer? Well, naturally the answer, according to calle...
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Posted by Prymface on Saturday, June 5, 2010,
Prymface has been getting around a bit and appearing on other websites. Don't worry - my loyalties still lie here but sometimes you just gotta share the love.
Out of PrintThe Push BackThese websites are fab by the way- Huge respect to them for letting me spill my incoherent grammatically-incorrect rants onto their pages...
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Posted by Prymface on Monday, May 24, 2010,
May 5th was National Teenage Pregnancy Prevention day, or was it a whole month? The UK seem to have ignored it anyway. Maybe that's a good thing, I'm not sure how much difference it makes. I guess we'll have to wait 18 months (or however long it takes for figures to come out) to see. And even then we wont really know. It seems that a lot of money is put into projects without much evidence that it makes any difference. In USA
Bristol Palin is being paid £30000000* to talk about pausing or som...
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Posted by prymface on Saturday, May 8, 2010,
I know it's all been said before
here and
here and I've
blogged about it recently but it seems some people still believe that in order to prevent pregnancies they need to reinforce the message that all teenage pregnancies are 'bad' and 'shameful' and will basically ruin your life, rather than allow young people to talk about why they may want a baby, or why they feel like they don't have the same choices as other girls, or why they don't care enough about themselves to think about the next da...
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Posted by Prymface on Thursday, April 15, 2010,
I read an article this week about the
Juno effect, or rather the death of it. Turns out, amid all this moral panic, the film Juno did NOT actually cause teenage birth rates to increase! The thing is people really don’t know how to portray young parents responsibly. As the article states:
‘Juno was too smart, funny and likable; Katherine Heigl in "Knocked Up" was too pretty and too happy; the Gloucester girls were too poor and too dumb; Jamie Lynn Spears was too rich and too dumb; Bristol P...
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Posted by prymface on Wednesday, March 3, 2010,
First we had articles about the new book 'Teenage Parenthood: what's the problem?' by the brilliant Simon Duncan (et al).
Guardian covered it on 12th Feb but ended in a terrible quote summing up the ignorance perfectly! Then on 16th Feb we had the
case of the decimal place when Tories accidently moved it and everyone went mad (seriously though...over half of girls getting preggers??!). Oh and on the same day we had
some woman harping on about how she admired teen parents for having no ambitio...
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Posted by prymface on Thursday, February 18, 2010,
Responding to articles about teenage parents has become a bit an obsessive compulsion lately! My comments usually get ignored among all the Daily Mail type attacking of young parents. Occasionally I will get a response like 'this is the dumbest thing I have ever heard" (gee, thanks!). However, after commenting on today's article in the Guardian I actually got some positive responses. I don't know if I am getting better at arguing or people are getting more tolerant (doubt it!) but here is th...
Posted by Prymface on Saturday, February 13, 2010,
This
article in the Guardian today finally picks up on the research that suggests the disadvantage associated with young mothers tends to 'predate' the pregnancy, rather than being the result of it. It identifies the 'gulf' between policy assumptions and the experiences of teenage parents arguing that governments should focus on 'tackling the original disadvantage
often experienced by teenage parents, rather than on attacking their
decision to become parents'. It also acknowledges that for m...
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Posted by prymface on Monday, January 25, 2010,
A brave article in the Independent yesterday:
Promiscuous scroungers or loving parents? Teenage mums fight back
Britain's young mothers feel they don't deserve constant negative coverage and will this week tell the Prime Minister so.
Of course most of the comments are your typical 'I don't want to pay my taxes to encourage scum of the earth to multiply' but thats to be expected! If you have time add your positive comments to this article.
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Responding to articles about teenage parents has become a bit an obsessive compulsion lately! My comments usually get ignored among all the Daily Mail type attacking of young parents. Occasionally I will get a response like 'this is the dumbest thing I have ever heard" (gee, thanks!). However, after commenting on today's article in the Guardian I actually got some positive responses. I don't know if I am getting better at arguing or people are getting more tolerant (doubt it!) but here is th...