<p>Best birth control EVER, but very disturbing. My 16 year old DD and I have been watching “16 and Pregnant” and the Teen Mom series on MTV for the past couple of years. In the first series, there were a couple of girls who are really good moms/people to balance out the crazies. But this new batch are all train wrecks. Morgan Freeman is the Executive Producer which really made me wonder while watching most recent episode with DD: at what point do the grownups producing/filming this show have an obligation (moral if not legal) to take away the car keys from the kid who is always shown driving obviously under the influence (pot), or do something on behalf of the toddlers constantly in the presence of parents/grandparents yelling abuse at each other? Our family wanted to adopt one of the moms from Season 1 (Caitlin?) … this year we just want to call the cops! (And, yes, I know we should find something better to do than watch this stuff, but it honestly is a great life lesson for teens to see that having a baby in high school is so not a good plan.)</p>
<p>I watch it all the time. That grandmother who took custody of the baby really makes me mad. She wants her daughter to do everything except be a parent. Then the daughter does stupid stuff and feels worthless. I wouldn’t be surprised if the grandchild has a lot of problems growing up between those two.</p>
<p>MJSMOM, the producer is Morgan J. Freeman, a 42-year old tv and movie producer from California, not the actor we all know and love. :)</p>
<p>I do watch this show, as I find human behavior fascinating. This season has been interesting, and I’m glad Chelsea has (hopefully) finally realized what a jerk Adam is.</p>
<p>I began watching it this season, getting hooked on Leah’s baby’s medical problems. My son says watching it is it my dirty little secret! I am fascinated by human behavior, and this show definitely gives me a side I have not personally experienced.</p>
<p>Poor baby Jace. That’s about all I can say about that one. My husband and I have often said that child protective services needs to watch the show and pay that family a visit.</p>
<p>After I watch, I always count my blessings. But I have found that I often feel sad at the end of the show, knowing that there are many others out there in similar situations.</p>
<p>I am actually saddened that we have these shows on that revolve around teen mothers/parents and also that they are so popular. To me it speaks to the laid back attitude that our society has seemingly adopted about this troubling issue. But I enjoy other types of reality television so I guess to each his own.</p>
<p>I don’t know many teen mothers. In fact, I can’t think of one that I know from my current life as a parent of young adult children. I think this show helps me to better understand where at least some of these kids are coming from and how they end up in a “predicament”. None of the situations on the show have been glorified. One of the mothers this week admitted that she got everything backward.</p>
<p>Education is everything. And if I don’t really understand why someone does what they do, there’s no way I could ever be in a situation to help someone else.</p>
<p>I always smile when they do their “teenage pregnancy is 100% preventable” public service announcement.</p>
<p>I don’t think these kinds of shows have a high degree of credibility. My daughter has just moved back to Nashville and while out with friends one night, one of the guys mentioned he had done some temp work in a warehouse with Ryan, father of Maci’s little Bentley. He told this guy that the show makes it look like they have been broken up, etc., but they’ve really been together all along and are stable. Several years ago we were in NYC and one of D’s friends was telling stories about how all the “reality” on some show about NYC preppy kids (kind of a real world Gossip Girl) was all staged.</p>
<p>Seems to me the teen mom show is really, really staged too. Have you noticed how made up the girls are in each scene, with the exception of Janelle? And speaking of Janelle, talk about a staged scene: so Janelle’s mom told Janelle to never come back, she bags her clothes and puts them out on the porch, then Janelle comes home from her road trip, waltzes into the home “unexpectedly” – but the cameras just happen to be there waiting for her? I don’t know how much reality is in this reality series.</p>
<p>D1 got me hooked on it last fall. Yes, some of the draw is the drama, but I also look forward to each little success story that happens (Leah and Corey getting married).</p>
<p>If you get the chance, watch some of the shows Dr. Drew does with these moms/dads at the end of the season. At some point he tends to ask the girls if their high schools provided any kind of information on birth control, and from what I can remember, all of them have said that the only thing ever presented at school was abstinence. If you watch some of these ‘specials’, he asks some hard questions.</p>
<p>If you think Janelle and her mother are bad, then you need to go back and watch shows with Amber. That was bad. </p>
<p>Sadly, I knew Leah and Corey had gotten married long before they even showed them getting back together on the show… because I have actually read Leah’s Facebook fan page (yea, I know, get a life).</p>
<p>One of D2’s very good friends got pregnant two months before graduation, and it has been as drama-filled as the show portrays. She was 17 1/2 at the time and luckily was able to finish high school before the baby was born. Her parents have been very supportive; the baby’s grandparents on his dad’s side have been very manipulative and have done everything they can to deter him from a relationship with the baby (he left for college before the baby was born). The grandparents, baby’s mom and baby all live in the same neighborhood and the paternal grandparents don’t even acknowledge the baby’s existence. Then D2’s friend got into a very abusive relationship with a guy much older than her and that created lots of conflict with her parents, until finally one day she called them to come get her after he’d held a knife to her throat. They had actually gotten engaged two months into their relationship and she had moved in with him because her parents were so unsupportive of the relationship.</p>
<p>These are all active members in the community… professional people, church-goers, financially well-off, etc. Funny thing was, I know for a while in high school, D2’s friend’s parents sort of questioned D2’s ‘influence’ on their daughter because we were not as strict as they were. I could always tell they didn’t approve of some of our choices, but I pretty much knew all along that it was their daughter who was the one hooking up with guys, etc.</p>
<p>So, so disappointed to learn Leah and Corey are getting divorced… after only six months of being married.</p>
<p>Oh my gosh. I just looked it up - you are correct.</p>
<p>One of the biggest “frauds” of this show is that many of these girls act as though their choices are limited because of finances. (Example: The girl who had to live with the baby’s father and his parents even though she and the baby’s father had broken up; and Janelle, who says she can’t afford her own place so she continued to live and fight with her mother.) Yet these girls are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for being on the show. If these children are being forced to live in terrible situations for the drama it produces for the show – despite the mothers having the resources to live elsewhere – I would think these children would have grounds for lawsuits against the producers at a later point in time. (I would certainly think Janelle’s child has been scarred by all the fighting he has already witnessed and the cold “parenting” of Janelle’s mother.)</p>
<p>In a related issue, in this season’s show the teen mother from Vermillion, SD, received a phone call from her boyfriend, who was at a pharmacy picking up medicine for their daughter and wanted to know if the child had insurance. The teen mom replied: Yes, medicaid. How could someone earning that kind of money have a child receiving medicaid benefits?</p>
<p>I also wonder what kind of money the other people in the Teen Moms’ lives get for being on the show. What kind of money do the babies’ fathers get? And the girls’ parents? And wouldn’t the knowledge that this teen mom had a bunch of money coming in make her a lot more attractive to future potential partners/spouses, compared to, say, and typical teen mother with no money? It would certainly provide some additional motivation for a marriage (Cory and Leah, for example) or continued involvement by the father (Adam).</p>
<p>AFAIK, no one gets paid at least until after the filming is done.</p>
<p>I’ve never seen a figure of how much they’re being paid, but I doubt they get paid until the season is over. I’m sure there are all kinds of contract stipulations (such as not leaking information to the public that takes away a story line from the show) that prohibit them from getting paid until the season is over and the girls (and dads) have met their contract obligations. </p>
<p>One of the reasons Corey and Leah broke up is because he took some of the money she (they) made and bought a new pickup truck, without asking her about it, thus putting their finances in jeopardy. I think it was only a $19,000 pickup, and if that kind of purchase put their finances at risk, then I don’t think they’re making the huge salaries as some speculate they might be.</p>
<p>I would rather have my eyelids pulled off with pliers than watch any of these so-called “reality” shows. No redeeming value at all.</p>
<p>One of these girls graduated from my son’s high school and now goes to the local community college. She also works at two local places that I frequent. She appears not have a lot of money so I must believe that there hasn’t been a great payoff yet. Both she and the baby daddy have been in the local papers recently, she for a car accident and he for a drug charge.</p>
<p>That’s Kailyn and Jo.</p>
<p>I read somewhere that the pay is in the area of $60K per season, most of it going into a fund for the babies. How true this is I don’t know.</p>
<p>That’s more along the lines I was thinking I’d read at some point, too.</p>