The year 16 and Pregnant debuted on MTV was also the year I started to think about having sex. Not in an abstract way: Sex, at that point, had shrouded my daily consciousness for years, from my first sex-education class in seventh grade into high school, as classmates gossiped about who had lost their virginity and to whom. I mean it in real and practical terms.
I had a boyfriend—a cute, floppy-haired 17-year-old who played soccer and adored me. And we were, well, doing what most 17-year-olds do amid the idyllic boredom of Connecticut suburbia: getting drunk and fooling around. I knew about the pill, but I wasn’t on it. Frankly, I was too embarrassed to ask my mother.
Years earlier, she had given me the talk as I sat in the back seat of our minivan, eating a ham-and-cheese Lunchables. My face grew brighter and brighter red as I stared at my artificially colored cheddar. Afterward, when she asked me if I had any questions, I responded with a quick no. That had summed up my attitude toward sex (and Lunchables) ever since.
But one Sunday afternoon, when I flipped on the television in hopes of watching a Laguna Beach rerun, what I found instead was a docuseries about pregnant teenagers. The episode centered on Amber Portwood, a teen from Indiana. She got into intense screaming matches with her boyfriend, Gary, that often led to physical violence (though the film crew didn’t interfere), and when he bought her an engagement ring from Walmart for $21, he asked about the return policy.
After the episode, I turned off the TV and sat in silence for a few moments. Then, I took a deep breath and walked into my parents’ room.
“Hey, Mom?” I said quietly. “I think I want to go on birth control.”
I was far from the only one asking. According to a 2010 study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 82% of teens who watched 16 and Pregnant reported feeling that they better understood “the challenges of pregnancy and parenthood” as a result. And in 2014—five years after the premiere of both 16 and Pregnant and its spin-off Teen Mom—the National Bureau of Economic Statistics looked into why the United States had seen a nearly 11% drop in teen pregnancies since 2008. Two key factors? The economy and…Teen Mom.
“You can have all the sex ed you want,” Sarah S. Brown, then the chief executive of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told The New York Times in a 2014 article about the study. “But if you can say, ‘Could that happen to me?’ That brings a reality and a heightened connection that is very significant for teenagers.” The downturn would only continue: In 2019, the Pew Center found that the teenage pregnancy rate in the US had fallen to fewer than 18 births per 1,000 girls for the first time in history.
Overall, there’s been a 77% drop in teen births since 1991—and with the current nationwide fertility rate at 1.62 children per woman, well below the population replacement rate of 2.1, the US could soon face the litany of problems that come with a declining population.
I don’t mean to dismiss those issues; they’re real, and they’re troubling. But what’s not talked about enough is the legacy of Teen Mom.
Teen mothers are less likely to complete their education and, therefore, more likely to live in poverty and rely on government assistance. Early motherhood entraps them—and their children—in a bleak socioeconomic cycle that’s almost impossible to break. It’s little wonder, then, that as teen births have plunged, rates of child poverty have too.
So when we talk about addressing the falling birth rate, let’s talk about this: The average cost of child care per year for a single child is $24,243 in Washington, DC, and $20,913 in Massachusetts. Housing costs have skyrocketed while wages remain flat: The Pew Center found that the average price for a single-family home went up 51.7% between August 2019 and August 2024.
If the government wants women to have more children—in a stable family setting—they need to give them the tools to achieve long-lasting economic security. Until then, let’s celebrate Teen Mom—one of the rare examples of a show for which the phrase “so bad it’s good” actually meant something.
