Young Adults Housing Policy Does the Welfare Essay

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Young Adults Housing Policy Does the Welfare System Encourage or Discourage Young Adults to Become Pregnant in UK

The specific purpose of this research is to scrutinize the impacts of the UK Benefits System on the growing demographic of teenage mothers. But in order to track down the list of genuine impacts, one must first understand how the system works. Generally speaking, each credible or qualified group is broadly categorized into whether they are taxable or non-taxable. That is to say, those groups of deserving people such as the sick or the low income groups are entitled to the various bonuses they receive, provided that they fulfill a certain taxation criteria. {Inland Revenue, 2001}

Literature Review

Ingham (2005) in this article gives a detailed background and development of the Teenage Pregnancy Policy in England over the last few years which has become part of the National Policy. It gives the summary of the targets it aims to achieve. The policy was derived after the publication of the report Teenage Pregnancy in 1999 by SEU. The report gave statistics that placed England to have the worst record regarding teenage pregnancies compared to the whole of Europe. The report (1999) outlined the four key components of the Action Plan that the Prime Minister had initiated that would help achieve the target.

The components were to help improve understanding and change of behavior; better coordination between the local and national authorities; better prevention measures of causes of teenage pregnancy which includes better sex education in and out of school, better accessibility of contraceptives, targeting high risk groups with a focus on young men; and provide better health and care facilities for the young mothers and their children. Though the strategy faced major criticism, there were a lot more people who supported it. The strategy may not have achieved a lot in these few years but it has given a positive approach to the entire issue.

The policy has mobilized resources both at the national and local levels. It has been able to successfully reduce the conception in 80% of the areas though 20% areas still showed high conception rates. There is still a need to achieve more openness about sexuality, be more educated on the subject, and have more accessibility and availability of services with trained staff. As more and more parents are communicating with their children regarding sex, more teachers and staff at health centers are being trained properly; the strategy to reduce teenage pregnancy can be achieved and become more ingrained in the English culture which will eventually result in a progressive future.

Kidger (2004) reviews the limitations of the strategy designed by the New Labor party, for supporting teenage parents and prevent the occurrence of conception. The issue of teenage parents had been considered a serious problem since the 1980s but it was the New Labor party who was the first one to decide to form a strategy to tackle the problem. The strategy form had two main aims; one was to reduce the occurrence of conception by half by 2010; and the other was to increase the level of participation of the teenage parents in education, training and/or paid work to 60% by 2010.

The paper aims to explore the strategy initiated by the party and its appropriateness to the needs of the teenage parents.

The party defines social inclusion to be something gained through contributing as paid workers rather than something that is the right of every citizen. This special treatment of paid work which should be a citizenship right creates a distinction between the deserving and undeserving; and results in forming the moral character of the welfare recipients being questioned and disciplinary and coercive practices being commonplace within initiatives targeting the unemployed such as the New Deals (Levitas, 1998). This way the government's strategy plays a role in social exclusion of the teenage parents especial for the mothers. Social inclusion is not the only necessary requirement of the young parents. It is necessary for the government to broaden its strategy to include social connectedness to meet the different need to the parents.

The papers takes in to account the empirical evidence from the young parents who volunteer at schools as peer educators regarding the schools sex education; it explores the alternative options to help these parents in social inclusion. It later considers the implications of these findings and emphasized the need for the government to broaden its perspective for the strategy to help the young parents.

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Such policy developments can help young parents, in particular the mothers, and children to enjoy more social inclusion in the present as well as in the future.

J Child Health Care (2001) did a review on teenage pregnancies based on the experience of 16 years old girl's entire experience during her pregnancy. This analysis brought out many themes that the teenage parents face during their course of becoming parents. The themes that were highlighted were on role modeling, punishments, self validation, demographics and locus of control. The paper takes this analysis further and considers the perspective of the society, the influence of constructions on both the child and the mother, then will consider the mother's health and its implications.

The approach used is thematic content analysis (Burnard, 1991) which comes from Glaser and Strauss' (1967) ground theory approach and the various works on Berg (1989) on content analysis. The analysis aims to bring out a systematic record of different themes and issues from the interview of the teenage mother. As mentioned earlier the 5 main themes that were highlighted, role modeling, punishments, self validation, demographics and locus of control; with role modeling being the most important of them all. Role modeling plays an important part in this.

Talking to the teenage mother and analyzing the existing literature it came out that there was a strong correlation between mothers bearing their first born child in their teens and their daughters' probability of doing the same (Coleman and Dennison, 1998; Towers, 2000).concept of childhood regarding the beliefs and values differs from individual to individual as it depends on cultural background and personal experience. Childhood is a time of protection and vulnerability. A young girl conceiving so early reflects her poor experience of childhood. The analysis brought out the fact that health is not the only factor contributing in the contributing the increase in teenage pregnancy rates. It is also influenced by the poverty and social elevation. The three factors seem to be correlated.

The Family Planning Associations do try to reduce the level of teenage pregnancies but they shouldn't overlook the choice and needs of the girls who decide to conceive in their youthful years. Allowing approached such as ethnography which allows children to have more voice and opinion, can help in giving information regarding the values and life experience which affect the young girls sexual decision making.

Arai (2003) in the paper draws a comparison on the reasons behind teenage pregnancies between British and other European countries. She begins her paper by laying out why the issue of teenage pregnancies is not as critical as it looks.

The government has set an ambitious goal of reducing the conception rates by half. Though this policy is seldom questioned by the public as there is a belief that the number of young mothers is increasing and action needs to be taken to stem its growth. A closer look at the numbers reveal that the overall adolescent pregnancy rates are falling everywhere in the developed nations including UK. Though the conception rates has not changed between the period of 1970s and present day, the teenage sexual activity has increased, and the relative stability of the conception rate suggests that the sexually active are better at preventing pregnancy now than they were a generation ago (Wellings and Kane, 1999).

The policy makers in Britain justify their concern by drawing comparison with other European countries. But the appropriateness of these comparisons is not questioned. The comparisons ignore the variation in the conception rates and the rates of abortion in other European countries. The high conception rates are attributed to the increase in sex education and sexual openness though the evidence gives mix results. Also they assume that the experience of the other European countries can be applied on Britain. The pregnancy rates and birth rates vary across Europe.

Child bearing is closely associated with individual and communities which are socially excluded. The problems faced by such communities cannot be dealt with just the promotion of sex education. The tendency to see teenage pregnancies should not be seen as some sort of a demographic residuum in need of education intervention. Early childbearing makes sense for reasons of health, economic and cultural in some communities. The policy makers who do not recognize these reason stand to further risk the marginalizing such communities......

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