Baby talk

After having read the, by the way brilliantly funny, book ‘Slam’ by Nick Hornby, I began to think about adolescent life. Growing up and becoming the adult that you want to become can be very difficult. Everyone is different, so not everyone experiences maturing in an equally hard way, but everyone that goes trough puberty has their own little difficulties, major problems or at least every now and then a doubtful thought. Nick Hornby really succeeded in capturing that bungling way of being that a lot of sixteen-year-old boys have, the way they can worry about matters that wouldn’t be seen as really disturbing by someone other than such an insecure adolescent, that has to deal with something for the first time. The fact that the reader reads along with Sam’s toughts, instead of that the story is being told by an all-knowing narrator, is probably why this book makes most people laugh. Eventhough the story line is actually quite sad, the style in which Sam’s thoughts are written down (rather dry), makes you see the serious events that happen in the book in a little les serious and in a funny way.

Sam is a special boy who handles with his major problems, little difficulties and even doubtful thoughts in a particular way: what he does is talk to his poster of Tony Hawk, the skate hero that he absolutely admires, and wait for a profound advice. But at a certain point just talking to TH isn’t going to suffice anymore. Sam and his pretty girlfriend made a mistake. A very, very stupid mistake. And now they have to deal with the consequences, or at least, Sam has to deal with the consequence of the fact that his girlfriend, Alicia wants to keep the child.

What would go on in your mind if you were to be in a situation like this? Would you run away and hide from your problems, from suddenly having to be a grown up, and from suddenly having more responsibilities than you had ever asked for? I don’t think that having a baby, which means having very little sleep and very little spare time, having to change diapers constantly and not having a really smashing social life, isn’t something that will make your teen relationship stand very long. The United States seems to be one of the countries where a lot of teenagers find themselves being pregnant. I suppose this is because in the United States there are still a lot of areas where most people are either highly religious, and consider it to be a sin to have sex before being married, or where people just don’t live under the best social circumstances, which could mean that they would have never had a proper sexual education. Because religion plays such an important role in some parts of the U.S, most people in these areas find that Abstinence-only sex education is the best kind of sex education there is. People who critize this opinion, like myself, say that giving sex education that is so limited, and that doesn’t give any information about how to protect yourself when you do decide to have sex, is absolutely not the right way to educate young adolescents. The popular television channel MTV has recently released a realityshow that’s called ’16 and pregnant’, in which the life of pregnant teenagers is shown, which I think is a great way to give a message to teenagers from the U.S and the rest of the world. It shows that life becomes a lot less pretty when you’ve got a baby at such a young age and that most of the teen mothers don’t finish their school. It speaks to teens and is not saying that they shouldn’t have sex, it says that they should think about it and be safe.