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Philip Greenspun has a thought-provoking post, Maybe teenage pregnancy is a good thing:

Now that I'm 40 years old most of my friends are in their riper years. The women who are trying to have children in their late 30s and early 40s are going through torture. Hormones, needles, in-vitro fertilization, miscarriages, etc. Maybe teenage pregnancy isn't such a bad idea after all. I wonder if in pre-industrial societies it wasn't the case that the grandparents did most of the child-rearing that required judgement and experience. The teenage girl did the child-bearing but was still living surrounded by extended family so that her 30-35-year-old mom and mother-in-law could provide adult guidance for the baby. Perhaps we believe that teenage pregnancy is bad only because our family structures have been broken up.

This follows up on another insightful post on the problems with high school, one speculating that home-schooled kids have better manners, and a few others. I tried to find a unifying thread for this recurring source of rant. Here's the comment I left:

Actually, you're onto something here. Teenage pregnancy is risky in modern Western society because it reduces the opportunity for a girl to become a productive participant in the economy. But with child-rearing, you can easily spread out the work if you have a geographically clustered, trustworthy group. This is traditionally the extended family, a structure which is now rare but can perhaps be replaced by a more geographically convenient "adopted" family (as Christopher Alexander suggests in A Pattern Language).

Similarly, the abomination that is the factory high school is also mandated by the combination of nuclear families and economic convention. Proper consumer living requires both parents to work, which is only feasible when the kids can be supervised during the workday. It's no wonder that teenagers, restrained in the artificial world of the suburban high school, often fail to learn that their actions have consequences and act out with violent music or crime. They don't need to get the best tutors in India; just doing real work in any real town could teach them important practical and social skills far better than the years of health and speech classes.

Oh, you can also blame the disintegration of the extended family for suburban sprawl, the SUV, exploding health care costs, and epidemic overdependence on psychiatrists. Funny that the "family values" types are so worried now, as if there's much more to lose.

Shimon Rura - 7/18/04; 11:39:58 PM