For the past nine-ish months, the internet has been dying to know whether or not Kylie Jenner had a secret involving an occupancy in her womb. While the internet figured for a while that she had to be pregnant, she revealed yesterday, February 4th, that she had given birth to a baby girl! After reading Kylie’s Instagram post and watching the video made chronicling her pregnancy, I couldn’t help think about how I would feel having a baby at 20. My twentieth birthday is only a year and a half out, and I simply cannot imagine being a teen, or very young, mother; but then I thought is Kylie really a “teen mom”?
Most people in our society agree that teen pregnancy is sadly a hindrance to the mother, father, baby, and surrounding family. According to dosomething.org, more than 50% of teen mothers never graduate from high school, 2/3s of families started by young mothers are poor, and a quarter of young women have a second baby within 24 months of having their first child. All of these factors are no fault of the mother, but they do affect her life and that of the baby. A young, non high school educated mom usually can’t give a baby the same life of a 30 year old, married, college graduate.
You may be thinking, “but Kylie’s not a teen, she’s 20!”, and in my opinion 19 and 20 are not very different. The point is that Kylie is a 20 year old with a net worth of 50 million dollars. Having a baby at twenty may not seem like an issue to her, because she can give her baby a life that most Americans can only dream of, and that’s true, but isn’t that somewhat a problem? If Kylie were a normal twenty year old she would probably be at a college, being young and dumb, and finding herself– I worry that Kylie’s world has made her grow up too quickly and the fact is – she’s not a normal twenty year old. While she has all the money she could ever need, she’s still five years away from full brain development and I hope that within those five years, her baby isn’t harmed by the usual neuroses of a confused, hormonal, young woman.
Photo courtesy of Kylie Jenner.