Mom Lets Daughter, 12, Sleep With Boyfriend and, Surprise! She’s Pregnant

On June 12th, I posted a piece on a study that found that fathers exert a profound influence on their daughters’ teen sexual behavior. Here’s a link to that post. That study said that mothers do the same, but that dads’ influence was twice that of moms. Fathers’ involvement and influence reduce daughters’ risky sexual behavior.

Before that study, we knew that father presence promotes later first menarche and first pregnancy. The shocking rate of teenaged pregnancy and childbearing among African-American girls comes as no surprise given the high rates of single-mother families among African-Americans.

Now, as if on cue, comes this story out of Australia (NSW News, 6/15/09). A 12-year-old girl is pregnant with her 15-year-old boyfriend’s child. Her mother and father are divorced and the mother had custody of the girl. Beginning when the girl was 11, the mother allowed the boyfriend to live in their house and sleep with the girl.

The father complained several times to New South Wales Department of Community Services which declined to intervene. The father later gained custody of the girl, only to find out that she was pregnant.

Now this article tells us she’s back with the mother (Yahoo News, 6/16/09). It also says the mother is “mentally ill,” but apparently that’s no obstacle to her having custody of the girl and her older siblings. There’s much hand-wringing by Community Services officials, but, as before, no apparent effort to intervene in the mother’s custody.