In the opening scene of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, a suburban mom reheats dinner for her teenage daughter, Amy. She puts pot roast in the microwave, while Amy, who’s slipped away to the bathroom, carefully unwraps the pregnancy test she’d hidden in her tuba case. All the while, Amy’s mom is going on about her intense band practices: “By the time you get home, you barely even have time to eat and do your homework, let alone have any fun! You’re only young once; you should be having a little fun.” We watch the microwave counting down to “0” while Amy takes the test. As the microwave flashes “END” across its display and blares its flatline-like alarm, Amy stares, horrified, at her positive test. She is about to pay the price for having the fun her mom chided her for missing out on. Life as she knows it is coming to an abrupt “END.”
The Secret Life of the American Teenager both normalizes and questions behaviour like Amy’s. On the one hand, it suggests all teenagers are getting themselves into these sorts of situations. They all have “secret lives” their parents don’t know about. But on the other, the show constantly points out just how inappropriate Amy’s pregnancy is. Right after that intro scene, for example, the show’s theme song comes on: a bubble-gum pop melody that plays while colourful cartoon flowers and bumble bees scroll across the screen.
And though her friends offer to go with her to see her doctor, they quickly realize they’re already committed to yearbook meetings or ballet lessons — activities we’re supposed to view as age appropriate for these young-looking girls. We’re meant to see Amy as a child who is way too young to be having the type of “fun” that got her into this predicament.
Then there are her parents’ reactions: Amy’s mother is totally flabbergasted, and her dad’s furious with the baby’s father. Both are also exasperated that Amy’s entire school — and, more importantly, all their neighbours — have heard the news. We watch Amy try to deal with lots of practicalities — whether she should keep the baby, have an abortion, or arrange for adoption. But we also see Amy and her family try to manage the full-blown scandal her pregnancy causes.
Even the series’ title is full of shock value. By using the singular “The American Teen,” the title implies that all American children are the same. They all lead “secret lives” that include taboo activities their parents would dread, including sex and pregnancies. The Secret Life of the American Teenager makes it seem like teens everywhere are living through these “adult” problems — even if adults don’t know it.
Plenty of other shows take a similar, scare tactics approach to depicting teen pregnancy. Some shows think they can stop teen girls from getting pregnant — or even stop them from having sex — if they tell those girls they’ll be desperately poor, hungry, and miserable if they have a baby. Look at MTV’s16 and Pregnant: it’s meant to be entertaining, first and foremost. But it was also designed to show viewers just how bad teen mothering can be, both for the mom and for her child. It shows plenty of new moms who are poor; who can’t finish school because they’re exhausted; and who fight and break up with their boyfriends, even though they’d promised to stick around.
The idea is that, by showing young girls just how awful teen mothering is, fewer of them will risk pregnancy because they’ll want to avoid this awful future at all costs.
But some girls, after watching 16 and Pregnant, don’t think teen mothering looks all that bad. Some of them say they can relate to the girls on the show; they think they have a lot in common. As a result, they ignore the negative effects of their pregnancy.
So, the media’s scary construction of teen pregnancy affects viewers in many, often unexpected, ways. We certainly can’t rely on it to prevent teenagers from becoming unexpectedly pregnant.
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