On my first day of the eleventh grade I received a rude awakening.

Not in the form of a positive pregnancy test, or a scare, but a societal wake up call. The day before my parents along with myself and my younger siblings had just completed a move to a small village in Upstate New York named Brushton. Brushton is practically in New York’s own Siberia. It’s halfway between Plattsburgh and Odgensburg, in the part of the state known as the North Country. Well before manufacturing left much of the Rust Belt in the 1970s and 80s, much of this part of New York had already seen that happen. The primary hotel in Malone (the nearby big town) was built next to a train station, and because of its obsolete (in some ways) design, was by the 1980s a defacto halfway house. Before moving to Northern New York, I was under the misconception that all of New York was prosperous.

Far from it, in fact. Parts of the Empire State have poverty levels comparable to Appalachia. One of the poorest counties in the United States is the Bronx.

As I walked in to class, I noticed a really snobbish girl in my Chemistry class. As we were introducing each other, she openly said that she was married, had a baby AND had another baby on the way. I was stunned. Never before had I encountered teen pregnancy up front. (After graduation I ran into this girl at the community college I attended). In my several years in Northern New York, I would run into it again and again.

I don’t think anyone in my family has had a child young. Even both sets of grandparents were in their late 20s before they had children. My aunt was 22 when my cousin was born, and even then she was a stay-at-home wife and mother, as her then husband was in the armed services. But as we settled in more upstate, a trend began to appear. A classmate in my freshman writing class found out she was pregnant some of the way into my first semester, and I don’t think she was much older than I am. My mom’s boss when she worked at a nursing home was a teen mom herself, who managed to go back to school to get a bachelor’s degree in nursing and still raise a family. Even my own birth circumstances were a little atypical: my parents weren’t married when I was born (not even formally engaged) and didn’t tie the knot until the following summer, and even then it wasn’t much of a ceremony.

Several of my brother’s classmates have become teen moms, whether while in high school or after graduation. Or just achieving motherhood younger than the national norm, which was in 2014 26.3 years. By the time you’re 26, you’re usually invested in a career path, paying back student loans, have your education (or the bulk of it) completed, usually in a stable relationship that looks as if will be life-long or married. Then you usually have your first child.

There’s a lot of factors I find with this: extended families living either under one roof or nearby isn’t the norm like it was years ago, more women now attend college than men, raising children is damn expensive and even parents who would like to help don’t necessarily have the means to do so.

But this begs the title question of my essay, which is off of a news story on PBS: why is the teen birth rate so much higher in rural areas? My answer is a little simpler. I don’t think it’s in part a stigma towards birth control. I believe it has a little to do with lifestyle. To quote a close acquaintance, "Because there's nothing else to do." There was a running joke that the reason why teens in Northern New York kept having children and it was in part the lack of a nearby movie theater (the nearest one being almost an hour away), the lack of a nearby mall (the nearest one also being almost an hour away and even that one is a ghost mall) and outside of hockey, snowmobiling and off-roading (ATV off-roading), not much else worth doing outside. It's farm country, and woods are few and far between, also an hour away., In suburban parts of the country, parents go out of their way to keep their kids active and involved, sometimes at the cost of burnt out teens. My younger brother, who is a senior in high school, is involved with sports, the music program, preparing to audition for music programs, being active in local youth groups (Rotary Club and a local youth cooperative), so he doesn’t have much idle time. I feel, from my own observations, that boredom can lead to negative behaviors (drug use and possession, etc). A study on teenagers living in our nation’s capital in November of 2013 by PerryUndem Research cited boredom:

Since the focus groups were conducted in the summer, boredom is a problem for many teens. They say there is not enough for them to do in their neighborhoods. Some have jobs, others volunteer at community centers, and some are involved in leadership programs. Many say they just hang out with friends. As one teen girl said “There’s nothing much to do, I mean, except for going home. But there’s nothing to do after school or anything like that.” When they are bored, teens say their minds go to sex.

There’s the old saying that “idle hands are the Devil's workshop” and while as somewhat of a pacifist I’d rather see more sex in the world than sensless murder, there’s something about two adolescents having sex that does worry me. That being said, I had already graduated college by the first time I “crossed that bridge” (and I’m a little ashamed to admit that, but it is what it is). So is the argument that boredom that causes children to have children a sketchy one?

Nor does it correlate with intelligence: the valedictorian of my graduating class from high school managed to accomplish two major life hurdles in 2014: first, she got her master’s degree in education. And mere weeks later, her and her now husband welcomed their daughter into the world. And I have to say, from photos on Facebook, she’s embraced this role and I dare say she’s good at it! I’d like to believe that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle, and there’s definitely truth to that. The mother of the soon to be former President was barely 18 when he was born. For being the product of a single teen mother, Barack Obama is definitely an American success story. Ann Dunham would later go on to earn a PhD in anthropology, right before her tragic death at the age of 52. The President’s (at times faultered) attempt to improve American healthcare is a testament to her son and the difficulties he saw as she was fighting both cancer and health insurance companies.

While I hope to be a parent before I turn 30, it will happen when it does. Just because you’re 24 or 44 when you have a child doesn’t make you a bad parent. Some people are ready to have children at a younger age, some want to experience the world first. And I wouldn’t be quick to give all the credit to MTV for lowering teen birth rates. Contraceptive use has become far more acceptable, even in a world where the push for “abstinence-only” education is still trendy. My plea to the Republicans who will be taking over unified control of the government in January is to realize one thing: sexual education works, and I’d be very happy to see every state expand sex ed access.