Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

THE KIDS DON'T STAND A CHANCE

Over the holidays I found myself spending a lot of time with a new series on MTV called "Teen Mom", averaging one good cry per episode. The show follows girls from series "16 and Pregnant" which aired this summer presumably as part of an attempt by MTV to make their programming more meaningful in post-"Juno" (and post-housing bust) America, where teen pregnancy is on the rise. The babies have been had, and the mother's experiences make up the new show.

Gina Bellafante of the New York Times panned the original show as "working-class voyeurism". She complained that MTV had simply traded in the rich princesses of "My Super Sweet 16" for their fast-food-eating, southern-accented, pauper equivalents. It's certainly not a perfect slice of life: of "Teen Mom"'s four subjects (culled from the six girls on "16 and Pregnant"), three are white and one seems to be biracial, even though Latinas have the highest incidence of teen pregnancy. And there is no mention of abortion (though an especially heartbreaking storyline involves giving up a baby for adoption).

Yet the show has been praised for portraying teenage mothers in a realistic and empathetic way. Amy Benfer, herself a former teen mom, wrote in Salon that she is grateful that MTV hasn't merely reduced these girls to public-service announcements ("as if by depicting their lives as unrelentingly bleak and unsalvageable, we will somehow scare every other teen into never having a broken condom, or even having sex in the first place"). Instead, it lets each of them narrate their own episode, often with footage from their own flip-camera "video diaries". She writes: "isn't it fair to give them some space to talk about their own lives, rather than be talked about by others who see them as statistical symbols of social decay?"

"Teen Mom" succeeds because these girls are more than caricatures. Mercifully absent is the fatuous self-consciousness so common on MTV reality shows, in which wanna-be actors stiffly quiz each other on their latest crushes. Still, it is MTV, which means the show uses an annoying scrapbook format and toggles between the girls way too quickly. Such heavy-handed editing does a disservice to the girls by wrapping their lives into neat packages. Yet something honest and rare still shines through.

The subjects of "Teen Mom" experience a distortion of teenage life. Maci parties with her friends at college, but when the weekend ends she returns home to her baby while her friends stay at school. Amber walks out after a dramatic fight with her boyfriend, but her parents won't let her come home so she takes her baby to the cheapest motel she can find. The way these girls navigate premature adulthood is both impressive and sad. They cling to their babies as security blankets; the need is mutual.

But these sympathetic subjects pose a potential problem: does "Teen Mom" make teen pregnancy seem too normal? Given statistics that show that having a baby at a young age is both on the rise and bad news, is it responsible make a popular television show about girls who make this lifestyle work?

MTV deserves credit for creating a show that is humane enough to be watchable, but upsetting enough to be on message. "Teen Mom" is more depressing than "16 & Pregnant", and more real than films like "Juno" or the tabloid fodder of Bristol Palin and Jamie Lynn Spears. The girls of "Teen Mom" are struggling, and we end up caring enough about them to watch their struggle.  As with other reality shows, these girls are becoming celebrities of a sort. (An adoption service for teenagers now uses the URL 16andpreganant.com, presumably in a bit of co-branding by default.) But these young stars are giving more than they're getting. I recommend tuning in, tissues in hand.

 ~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

Picture Credit: mahalie (via Flickr)