Make Chat, Not Babies

Can DSL Connections Reduce Teen Pregnancies?

By Debra McCorkle

American teenagers just aren’t making babies like they used to. The Center for Disease Control recently gave out 2002 birth statistics for U.S. and the birth rate is down 38% since 1991 for teenage girls aged 15-17. I have a theory regarding why this is so, and it has nothing to do with morality or birth control. In my opinion, low sex and pregnancy rates among teens has everything to do with instant messaging on home computers.

I am the ungorilla-ed Diana Fossey of teenage girls, studying my two teenaged daughters and a gaggle of their girlfriends as they wander in and out of our environment. My youngest at age 13 is the primary source of my research these days, although my 18 year old daughter’s behavior has also been included in my findings. Here’s a description of a daily occurrence:

The phone rings. She doesn’t budge from her seat, continuing to peck away at the keyboard undisturbed. Irritated, I run over and grab the receiver on the fourth ring.

‘It’s for you, it’s Joe.’

She doesn’t even look up. ‘Tell him to get on instant messenger. I’ll talk to him there.’

She holds court with a half dozen of her friends online, carrying on conversations ranging from school gossip to news of their favorite bands. Sometimes I ask her if she just wants me to drive her over to her best
friend’s house. ‘No’ she frequently responds. ‘(Friend A) will just be sitting at the computer, we won’t be doing anything else’.

Does this bother me? Sometimes. When I was thirteen I was walking to the mall, bicycling, talking on the phone. My friends were coming over, making out with their boyfriends on my couch (I was the token latchkey kid), smoking pot by the back door, trying to figure out how much they could water down their parent’s Stolichnaya before mom and dad noticed. On second thought, maybe all of this computer time isn’t so bad. It’s not like teens can reach through the screen and cop a feel or pass a joint.

According to AOL's research, 93 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds use the Internet instant messaging system. When given a choice between TV, phone, instant messaging and radio, and told they could only have access to one form of communication for a month, 41 percent of teens chose television, 33 percent chose instant messaging and just 17 percent chose the phone.

Against my daughter’s preferences, I sometimes do the annoying mom thing and look over her shoulder to monitor her correspondence. She types faster than I do, fingers flying across the keys. Her humor and quickness is remarkable as she trades quips and jokes with her buddies. She can effortlessly network
between numerous conversations without missing a beat. She dispenses advice, amuses and comforts simultaneously, adept as an air traffic controller with her multiple tasks. She has suitors, but usually prefers to type messages to them rather than seeing them more than once a week or so. When not chatting,
she’s shopping online, selecting music from our extensive files (stay away, RIAA! I don’t know how those hundreds of songs got on my computer!), and making entries into her journal.

Kids are still getting together, and their sexual candor is unnerving to parents like me. Teenagers make blow job jokes and bisexual remarks as casually as discussing homework or soccer. Still, when I sit down for those occasional heart-to-heart talks with either of my girls, they confide that few of their girlfriends are sexually active. Just as they converse on-line with multiple buddies simultaneously, they tend to run around in groups at the movies and at the mall. Whereas back when I was a teenager we coupled off in alarming rates, dropping most plans with girlfriends whenever the guy showed up, most of these kids bring along a posse, the same folks on their instant messaging buddy list, wherever they go. I haven’t had a
vacation in years in which we didn’t add one or two or five friends, depending on distance and car space. Boys are sometimes present but usually as part of the pack.

When my eighteen-year-old got busier with school and volunteer activities, I missed the constant presence (by phone/computer and in person) of all her girlfriends and the continuous pajama party that was held in her bedroom for years. My younger daughter has friends sleeping over now and again, but her slumber parties are frequently held instead on my Dell computer until 2:00 in the morning, when either the last friend falls asleep or someone’s mom yells at them to turn that thing off. Sometimes, that mom is me.

It’s a brave new world and no one will know whether this latest childrearing experiment is successful until these kids are all grown and on their own. I know that I survived too much television and three nights a week of church and lived to obtain therapists and credit cards like most Americans. It’s good to read the childbirth statistics and remain hopeful that most of my daughters’ friends will not be teenaged moms. I prefer to imagine my daughter typing out advice for her numerous online friends for the next few years until she has had plenty of time to grow up. Girls have their whole lives to make babies and to change mountains of diapers and to worry about bad influences on their own kids. If DSL connections are helping to reduce the teen pregnancy rate, the school nurse should be giving out modems.

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Copyright 2004 Debra McCorkle

Debra McCorkle is the single mother of two teenaged daughters. She owns a store in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She writes in her spare time and publishes a regular column in The 11th Hour, a bi-weekly which appears in Macon and Statesboro, Georgia.

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