Eliminating “Teen Mom” may not be the best way to describe the necessity of removing it from the airwaves. Scrubbing it from the existence of television is perhaps more apropos. There are apparently enough people who have enough time to waste watching what amounts to be a very bad soap opera with a group of men and women who are that unique toxic combination of immature and irresponsible. What makes this show cringe is that there is a child or children involved.
For starters, the show started in 2009. Those “teen moms” are now in their 30’s, hardly teen-worthy. One would expect that they would have grown up at some point in their lives and stopped with the soap opera reality show, but keep in mind it does air on MTV. But in contradiction to the show aging with its once teen moms the stars of the show have become considerably wealthy in those 9 years.
Can any teen mom, especially growing up in poverty, realistically expect their lives to turn out like this? They may never grow out of the scandalous level of immaturity these people do, but their chances of realizing there is money to be had becoming pregnant at an early age are virtually nil. In fact, the real world tells us a much different story. Most teen moms end up either being single parents or they struggle to make ends meet years later. Or both. Projecting this image of successful teen moms to an MTV age audience is shameful, to say the least.
No teen mom story would be complete without drugs (at least on MTV) and there seem to be no shortage of episodes where they are used. As if the culture has not had enough problems with prescription and illegal drugs over the last 5 decades, we don’t need “Teen Mom” to project a reality that it is just a normal thing that people have to deal with — especially teen moms. In projecting its stories of somehow every problem can be worked through, the reality is much different. It can be presumed that the writers and producers of this show may have found a way to sink to new lows of reality TV.
Since this is the culture of social media, many of the cast members have taken their stories away from the TV screen and on to mobile devices through their Twitter accounts. The reality seems to be that the best stories are found on social media, but “best” is more accurately defined as creepy. One recent story has one of the cast admitting to killing cats — a storyline that caught the attention of the real Humane Society. An investigation was launched. Naturally. No one knows what is really going on with the lives of these now wealthy teen moms and their partners, but it doesn’t sound good.
Remember that 9 years later we have arrived at this point because of the idiotic idea that being a teen mom was cool and almost natural. Adults, and real world teen moms, knew back then that there was little chance anything good could come from actually becoming a teen mom. Between the dysfunctional; relationships, accepted use of drugs, and the weird off-the-set social media antics of the cast members, scrubbing it from the history of television will send an important message to future teens: being a teen mom will neither make you rich or happy.
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