Young mums and dads: too much, too soon

You know what really gets on my nerves?

Young people having children. And I'm talking REALLY young, not twentysomethings, but teenagers.

I find it quite unbelievable that not so very long ago it was unacceptable for an unmarried woman to even contemplate having sex, and now 14 year olds are doing it and managing to get pregnant.

To be brutally honest, these young women (and men) are being extremely irresponsible. When I do have a child, I would like to be able to give it a proper home, a father who will stick around and everything it needs. I would want to have a good, stable job so that I am able to provide for it. And I wouldn't want to depend on government funding and the help of my parents to do all that.

These young people are pretty much kids themselves. Some haven't even finished their basic education, let alone ever gotten a job. I think that it is very unfair for children to be brought into a world where they will not be properly taken care of because their parents are still so immature.

I am currently 19, and I feel that I am still not ready to have a child. I have to get through university and get a good job before I think about things like that. The idea of marriage and family seems to far away to me.

So why do they even go along with having these children? I honestly have no idea. I think some of them must believe that they are more mature then in reality, that they can cope with the pressure of being a parent and having someone that depends entirely on you.

When I was in my first year at college, a girl I knew at the time got pregnant. It was the first time she'd ever had sex. She was a couple of months younger than me. When I look back on this I wonder if she ever actually thought about preventative measures, or even about getting pregnant at all. I wonder if she had ever thought about having a child before then.

Probably not.

Not long before she found out she was pregnant, she dropped out of college, so all she had to her name was her GCSE results and a job at a shop. Now, the only thing I know about her is that she goes clubbing a lot, and I wonder who looks after the baby.

I think that when teenage girls get pregnant and decide to have the baby, their lives are promptly ruined. They never get to enjoy the freedom you gain in going to university or taking a gap year. They have to give up the things they could have enjoyed, like going out clubbing.

I am so glad that I have enough sense to make the conscious decision not to have children until I know I can provide for them and give them a good life. I just hope that the trend of getting pregnant so young is going down and not up.