Teen Mom or Teen Fame?

Remember the days when MTV used to be what its acronym stood for-music television? I used to love coming home from school everyday to watch Carson Daly host TRL and discover the number one music video for the day.  Nowadays, MTV has transformed into a reality television station, with shows such as Jersey Shore (which my younger brother admittedly loves and watches religiously). While these types of shows are what one would label as “trash TV,” the show that is absolutely unnecessary is Teen Mom.

This program follows the lives of teenagers who had unplanned pregnancies, and documents what happens from before birth to either raising the child or giving it up for adoption. I can’t help but wonder why any girl going through such a private, emotional experience would want to share it with the rest of America. Perhaps one or two of the teenage mothers on the show wanted to educate other girls on what can happen from unplanned pregnancies, yet the rest seem to search for the same thing: fame.
 
Waiting in the airport this afternoon, I decided to grab a few magazines to help pass the time spent waiting for my flight. None other than Kailyn and Leah from Teen Mom are plastered on the cover of In Touch Weekly, while last week Janelle graced the cover of Us Weekly with a multiple-paged story explaining why she is not ready to be a mother. Many of the girls featured on the show are stuck in devastating conditions, getting thrown out of their own homes with no money and no job, and fame may be the only way out of their current lives. Yet is fame the right thing for them when they must take care of a newborn child? No. Teenage mothers on this show should not be concerned with getting their face on the front of a magazine, but rather raising a child.
 
What Teen Mom has done is taken difficult hardships some teenage girls experience and turned them into a form of entertainment for the rest of America. This show is not “reality” like it claims to be, for it only shows certain aspects of what the girls go through each day. When the cameras are off, it does not show the reality of what the girls deal with. It’s not an hour episode each week; having a child as a teenager becomes a 24/7 responsibility, which the show does not effectively demonstrate. School becomes a secondary priority, plans for the future such as college disappear, and relationships change dramatically in dynamic. Drugs and alcohol have been glamorized in past television shows, but being a teenage mother should not be glamorized and shown as entertainment, for it is anything but. Teen Mom has simply been an opportunity for struggling teenagers to find a way to make themselves known.
 
By being on Teen Mom, the girls have to not only think about their newborn children, but the cameras that surround them as well. The show does not allow them to be the best parents they can be, and it is important that MTV realizes there is nothing amusing about being a teenage mother. The satisfaction of fame can only last so long, yet the satisfaction of being a successful parent will last for a lifetime.