This is just depressing...

"As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, 'some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were,' Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. 'We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,' the principal says, shaking his head."

Read the whole thing here. Something is clearly off in the message these girls are getting about sex and single motherhood. While the post-birth support the mothers who keep their babies receive at this school is laudable (and so often a missing element of the pro-life campaign), you've got to wonder how anyone can make these students see that not getting pregnant at all is the best idea. And, of course, that adoption is often the very best thing for these babies. That's one of the things I loved about Juno, which seemed almost old-fashioned in its embrace of the idea.

Generation X vs. Millenials

A pretty funny essay on Generation X vs. the Millenials. Here's a choice excerpt:

"That's why the time has come for Generation X to unite. We need to call bullshit on these naive, self-important crybabies trying to rob us of what is rightly our own. Remember how the Baby Boomers all turned into self-serving, narcissistic assholes who deified Michael Douglas in the '80s? The time has come for us to turn into assholes, too, minus the Michael Douglas part."

And one more...

"Still, it's never been sexy to be a Gen Xer. And that's the problem. Maybe we're responsible for the Spin Doctors, but if you cut through the bullshit, you'll see that we're not merely sexy. We're fucking hot:

We were the first bloggers. We created rap music. Silicon Valley. McSweeney's. Indie rock.

And we are the Internet generation. We founded Google. Wikipedia. DailyKos. Gawker. Meet-Up. MySpace. Ebay. YouTube.

We're not slackers. We are Tiger Woods, Snoop Dogg, Parker Posey, Tina Fey, Johnny Depp, Michael Jordan, Dr. Dre and Lance Armstrong, to name a few."

It's an entertaining read, and best taken as a tongue-in-cheek piece, although it is true that kids these days (ouch--that makes me sound old!) can drive you up the wall. (And I am thinking specifically of the 17-23 year olds I see in the classroom, admittedly a limited sample.)