By Abubaker Abrahams

While the frightening high percentages of teenage pregnancy are a major social challenge in Cape Town, one expert has raised concerns over the number of young mothers not completing high school. According to the 2015 annual school survey, over 15,000 pupils fell pregnant during the academic year. Many teenage moms cannot complete their schooling due to pregnancies and are forced to find employment to support the financial needs of the child. The growing concern around teenage pregnancy needs some intervention and VOC had the opportunity to speak to the University of Pretoria’s Early Childhood Intervention programme, Dr Alecia Samuels to focus on her written thesis on teenage pregnancies.

“We want to look at whether teenage mothers are getting parenting support or any other social support. We also want to look at the quality of the relationship the between the teenage mother or that person or people that’s helping her raise her child because that relationship is important in terms of the child’s development,” she said in explaining her motivation.

There has been a misconception on why the number of teenage pregnancies has risen but Samuels clarified the fallacy.

“One of the things that really started our interest was that the debate on teenage pregnancies tends to focus a lot on one of the myths that teenagers are becoming pregnant due to access to child support grant. There is not actually very good evidence supporting that conclusion. If we actually look at the amount of people that access the child support grant, only less than 6% of all those accessed to child support grant are teenager mothers.”

Samuels further explained that her research has proven that many young women don’t see any future for themselves after leaving matric.

“There’s a huge percentage of girls that become pregnant and drop out school because of the pregnancy but there’s is also a percentage that fall pregnant after school. When young mothers don’t see a future for themselves, they don’t see themselves getting anything after matric, they don’t see a reason delaying motherhood… what I found was that many young people just did not have a vision for their future.”

Teenage mothers find themselves in difficult circumstances when wanting to further their studies. Young girls from impoverished communities are being encouraged to complete school so their children can have a better future, but Samuels explained why it is so difficult for them to do so.

“One of the saddest responses that I got was that, if I was going to give my child a dream, I’m going to have to pay for their dream. It was such a stark reminder of exactly what context teenagers mothers find themselves,” she said.

However, there is also the view that teenage mothers who get too much support could result in the teenager falling pregnant again.

“Grandmothers can give too much support and that can also result in [a second] teenage pregnancy. Grandmothers should not take complete responsibility of parenting and then raise the child as a sibling of the teenage mother. The teenage mother should have decision making over her child’s life and she also have to take part in sharing that with her mother,” Samuels continued.

Samuels’s research proved teenage mothers surprisingly had support from the child’s father as well.

“Within a community in the Cape Flats [which we reached], we found that teenage mothers were getting support from their own mother but also importantly from the child’s father as well, so that was a good finding for us,” she added.

Listen to the full interview here: