From the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Once and for All The world is a terrible place not to have a best friend. Scarlett was always the strong one. Halley was always content to follow in her wake. Then Scarlett’s boyfriend died, and Scarlett learned that she was pregnant. Now Halley has to find the strength to take the lead and help Scarlett get through it. Because true friendship is a promise you keep forever. * “Dessen has written a powerful, polished story.”—School Library Journal, starred review Sarah Dessen is the winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for her contributions to YA literature, as well as the Romantic Times Career Achievement Award. Books by Sarah Dessen: That Summer Someone Like You Keeping the Moon Dreamland This Lullaby The Truth About Forever Just Listen Lock and Key Along for the Ride What Happened to Goodbye The Moon and More Saint Anything Once and for All

Teen childbearing has risen to frighteningly high levels over the last four decades, jeopardizing the life chances of young parents and their offspring alike, particularly among minority communities. Or at least, that's what politicians on the right and left often tell us, and what the American public largely believes. But sociologist Frank Furstenberg argues that the conventional wisdom distorts reality. In Destinies of the Disadvantaged, Furstenberg traces the history of public concern over teen pregnancy, exploring why this topic has become so politically powerful, and so misunderstood. Based on over forty years of Furstenberg's research on teen childbearing, Destinies of the Disadvantaged relates how the issue emerged from obscurity to become one of the most heated social controversies in America. Both slipshod research by social scientists and opportunistic grandstanding by politicians have contributed to public misunderstanding of the issue. Although out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy rose notably between 1960 and 1990—a cause for concern given the burdens of single motherhood at a young age—this trend did not reflect a rise in the rate of overall teen pregnancies. In fact, teen pregnancy actually declined dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s. The number of unmarried teenage mothers rose after 1960, not because more young women became pregnant, but because those who did increasingly chose not to rush into marriage. Furstenberg shows how early social science research on this topic exaggerated the adverse consequences of early parenthood both for young parents and for their children. Researchers also inaccurately portrayed single teenage motherhood as a phenomenon concentrated among minorities. Both of these misapprehensions skewed subsequent political debates. The issue became a public obsession and remained so during the 1990s, even as rates of out-of-wedlock teen childbearing plummeted. Addressing teen pregnancy was originally a liberal cause, led by advocates of family planning services, legalized abortion, and social welfare programs for single mothers. The issue was later adopted by conservatives, who argued that those liberal remedies were encouraging teen parenthood. According to Furstenberg, the flexible political usefulness of the issue explains its hold on political discourse. The politics of teen parenthood is a fascinating case study in the abuse of social science for political ends. In Destinies of the Disadvantaged, Furstenberg brings that tale to life with the perspective of a historian and the insight of an insider, and provides the straight facts needed to craft effective policies to address teen pregnancy.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former Washington Post reporter Leon Dash spent a year living in one of the poorest ghettos in Washington, D.C., and a total of seventeen months conducting interviews examining the causes and effects of the ever-lowering age of teenage parents among poor black youths. Dash had expected to find inadequate sex education and lack of birth control to be the root cause of the growing trend toward early motherhood, but his conversations with the mothers themselves revealed the truth to be more complex. A riveting account of the human stories behind the statistics, When Children Want Children allows readers to hear the voices of young adults struggling with poverty and parenthood and gets to the heart of teenage parents' cultural values and motivations.

More than 1 million teenage girls in the United States become pregnant each year; nearly half give birth. Why do these young people, who are hardly more than children themselves, become parents? This volume reviews in detail the trends in and consequences of teenage sexual behavior and offers thoughtful insights on the issues of sexual initiation, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, adoption, and the well-being of adolescent families. It provides a systematic assessment of the impact of various programmatic approaches, both preventive and ameliorative, in light of the growing scientific understanding of the topic.

This book examines who is likely to have a baby as a teenager, the consequences of early motherhood and how teenage pregnancy is dealt with in the media. The author argues that society's negative attitude to young mothers marginalises an already excluded group and that efforts should be focused on support.

Traces the way popular attitudes came to demonize young mothers and examines the profound social and economic changes that have influenced debate on the issue, especially since the 1970s. --From publisher description.

Unwed teenage pregnancy is a national problem - and a puzzle for clinicians and social psychologists. For how are we to understand a pattern of behavior that is strongly motivated and yet likely to end in unfortunate outcomes? Moreover, why does the pattern of unwed teenage pregnancy repeat in successivegenerations in some families, despite education and previous experience, whereas in other families the pattern is broken? Reporting on intensive social and psychological research in a rural African American community in Louisiana, Anne Dean offers a compelling view of this phenomenon that integrates historical and economic analysis with a sensitive psychological inquiry into the minds of mothers and daughters and the patterns of communication between them. Teenage Pregnancy: The Interaction of Psyche and Culture transcends earlier investigations by going beyond conventional research strategies to test psychodynamic theories about the formation of internal worlds. Drawing on the work of Erik Erikson and Hans Loewald, Dean not only finds empirical justification for psychodynamic theories of psychic structure, but also extends the scope and methodology of attachment research in an exciting new direction. Specifically, her analysis reveals how different kinds of attachment relationships between mothers and daughters manifest themselves in adolescence as internal working models that become the templates for interpreting, and acting upon, contradictory economic, social, and familial expectations. In demonstrating how social factors and cultural schemas interact with psychodynamic motives and structures, Teenage Pregnancy has widespread applicability to social science research in general. And it offers psychodynamically oriented clinicians working with adolescents the opportunity to become better acquainted with the ways in which mother-daughter relationships gain expression in the identity choices of teenage girls.