are you ready for marrage....i dated me husband for almost 3 years before we got married and weve been married for 2 years plus and still to this day some of the things he says and does amazes me....many close friends and relative believed we were too young to get married but we didnt care we loved each other,we still do so my honest opinion is...if you feel like your ready,and believe you can take care of your new family when you do get married then go ahead and go for it...its not gonna be easy but if you set your mind to it anything can happen

good luck and feel free to pm me anytime

If this were just a relatively short time ago in history, you would HAVE TO marry her.

In my opinion, once the two of you decided to have a baby, you in effect committed to at least an 18 year partnership. Also, if you want to automatically be legally your child's father, you need to be married. Otherwise, you'd have to go through the court system to legally prove your paternity.

If you love each other enough to purposefully have a child, you are in love enough to be married.

When I see people saying to a couple in your situation that they should wait to make sure, blah, blah, blah, it seems like it is disrespecting the future baby. It's as if they are saying that it's ok to plan a baby on a whim, but to be married takes more thought and is a bigger decision.

BALONEY!

It is selfish to purposefully have a baby and not be married, in my opinion. Why have that poor kid born illegitimate, ON PURPOSE? It's like throwing an obstacle in front of him or her before they even get started.

Also, imarriage shows respect to your girlfriend and her family. Otherwise she would have to bear the stigma of being an unwed mother, and that stigma also effects her family. Whether or not that stigma is fair is irrelevant. The point is it exists, and it's better to not have that burden in the first place.

you're 16 and she's 15... i had to go with "are you retarded"?!



what year are you living in?

No. It is my belief you should not get married. It is also my belief that teenagers should not be having children. I can have that opinion because I was a teenage mother. So it is not being derogatory in nature to say teenagers are children and have no business having children. It is coming from a position of knowing.

That said, I also got married at 16 years old and I will tell you this very honestly, I had no idea what marriage meant. Honestly. You don't either.

Finish HIGH SCHOOL. Go to college. Both of you. Then consider marriage.

Getting married isn't the right thing to do in this situation.

I voted the same. Way too young for marriage imo.

futureshock how is being born out of wedlock an obstacle for a child? As long as it grows up loved and well looked after, thats what counts.

It is selfish to purposefully have a baby and not be married, in my opinion. Why have that poor kid born illegitimate, ON PURPOSE? It's like throwing an obstacle in front of him or her before they even get started.


thank god it's only your opinion and nothing more.

Marriage does not make this child more or less. Every child and human being just needs love . Your thinking is a little old fashion

But not too young to be parents? How does that possibly make sense?


Here is what is wrong with that question:

The main obstacle to growing up loved and well looked after IS being born illegitimate.


research shows that nearly half the children of single mothers live in poverty (four times the rate for children with married parents), and their rates of substance abuse, male incarceration, and teen pregnancy are two to three times greater.

Unmarried, cohabiting mothers do not fare much better. They are twice as likely to break up within five years compared with married mothers, and their children have more than twice the poverty rate, poorer school and behavioral outcomes, and dramatically higher exposure to abuse than children with married parents.




The growth in single-parent families remains the single most important reason for increased poverty among children over the last twenty years, as documented in the 1998 Economic Report of the President. Out-of-wedlock childbearing (as opposed to divorce) is currently the driving force behind the growth in the number of single parents, and half of first out-of-wedlock births are to teens.7 Therefore, reducing teen pregnancy and child-bearing is an obvious place to anchor serious efforts to reduce poverty in future generations.

Teen pregnancy costs society billions of dollars a year. There are nearly half a million children born to teen mothers each year. Most of these mothers are unmarried, and many will end up poor and on welfare. Each year the federal government alone spends about $9 billion to help families that began with a teenage birth.

FACTS
FACT: The environment that allows children to thrive the most is provided by the natural family
Other than the widowed family, all other forms of the family unit--aside from the natural family--involve some form of personal rejection, whether between the mother and father (in divorce and some out-of-wedlock births) or in the form of an ambivalence of affection and commitment (in most out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation). An analysis of available data shows that nearly one-third of all children conceived today will be aborted; one-third of those that are not will be born out-of-wedlock; and 40 percent of those born to married parents will experience the divorce of their parents before age 18.

FACT: The safest place for children is living in an intact married family; the most dangerous is a home where the mother lives with a boyfriend.

Children raised outside of the always-intact married family are at greater risk of serious child abuse--six times more likely in a step family; 13 times more likely in the single-mother-living-alone family; 20 times more likely in the cohabiting-natural-parent family; and 33 times more likely when the mother lives with a boyfriend. Abuse resulting in death is 73 times more likely when a mother lives with a boyfriend.

FACT: The safest relationship for women is marriage; the most dangerous is cohabitation.

Federal survey data found domestic violence against women to be almost three times higher among cohabiting couples than among couples who have ever been married (that is, married, separated, and/or divorced), and almost five times higher than among currently married couples.

FACT: The intact married family is the best mental health, school preparation, and drug prevention "program" there is.

Children born or raised outside of marriage are more likely to suffer mental health problems; they suffer depression and commit suicide more often. Children whose parents were not married have showed an increased likelihood of having lower verbal IQ, lower school performance, and lower school attendance, all leading to lower job attainment and lower income.

Teenagers whose parents have divorced have used cocaine almost twice as much as children in intact married families, and children in single-parent families have used cocaine almost three times as much.

FACT: One-third of all children are born out of wedlock, and much more often to adult women than to teens.

Recent survey data from the Fragile Families Survey conducted by Princeton and Columbia Universities show that the majority of the fathers and mothers of children born out of wedlock are romantically involved. Most of these couples also reported a 50-50 chance of getting married. One major obstacle: federal welfare and tax policy.


FACT: The rate of divorce among couples who have lived together before they marry is twice the rate of divorce among those who have not lived together before marriage.

Cohabitation is a fragile living arrangement. Not only are couples more likely to divorce if they live together first, but those who cohabit, split, and then marry someone else eventually divorce at four times the rate of those who do not cohabit before marriage.

FACT: Children in broken families are more likely to commit juvenile crime.

When it comes to juvenile crime rates, marriage matters a lot. For instance, in Wisconsin--the only government entity to have published family background data--teenagers of always-single-parent families are 22 times more likely to end up in jail than are those from two-parent families.

The huge differences in rates of crime among black and white teenagers virtually vanish when one controls for family background. In other words, black teenagers and white teenagers from broken families have similar rates of juvenile crime: They are high. Black teenagers and white teenagers from intact married parents also have similar rates of juvenile crime: They are low.

Finally, fairly recent findings from a U.S. longitudinal study of more than 6,400 boys conducted over 20 years show that children who grow up without their biological father in the home are roughly three times more likely to commit crimes that lead to incarceration than are children from intact families.

FACT: A child is 50 percent more likely to die during infancy if born out of wedlock.

Children born outside of marriage have 1.5 times the risk of low birthweight; and low birthweight increases their susceptibility to neonatal illnesses, which make a baby significantly more likely to die in infancy.

FACT: Marriage also provides the safest environment for a child before birth. Both national surveys conducted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research institute used by Planned Parenthood, show that being conceived outside of marriage quadruples the chances of a child being aborted.

FACT: Poverty is predominantly a phenomenon of the broken family.

Children living in always-single-parent families are six times more likely to live in poverty than are children in married families. The two-parent family puts much more into the marketplace and gets much more out of it.

In 2000, 80 percent of children in the bottom quintile of income lived in single-parent families. .

FACT: The welfare state spends virtually nothing on restoring marriage among the poor.

The welfare reform act of 1996 mandated that states use a portion of their federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families funds to promote marriage. With only a few exceptions, however, the states have not done so. In 2000, the states budgeted only 0.16 percent of the $7.3 billion surplus TANF money that had accumulated nationally.



Source from: http://www.heritage.org/research/features/ issues/Family/

Show us facts and statistics on Teenage Parenthood with Marriage. Are these statistics based on Adult marriage?

Future, were you a teen mom? Get married as a teen?

futureshock, you're also a little off on the fact that this was a planned child. He did not plan this baby. His girlfriend went and tried to get pregnant without discussing it with him, which I think is the lowest, shittiest thing to do. I also think that would completely destroy the trust in the relationship, and forcing marriage into it is just a horribly bad idea all around. It will never last, not as long as his girlfriend is acting like an irresponsible, immature child with no regards to others wishes and lives.

If you read through the first, long thread he started, you will see that they reconciled all of that and decided together to go ahead with the pregnancy.

But he didn't actually plan to get her pregnant, which is a world of difference.

That's right, however, she offered to abort the pregnancy.
They decided together, after they reconciled her behavior, etc., to go ahead and have the baby.

I'd be the first one telling him to get out of dodge if I didn't believe how much he loves his gf and will love their future child. Also, it sounds more and more like the child will be at risk without him there to help care for it, and keep an eye on the child's mother.

The child is already at risk by the girlfriend's behavior - thereby proving (to me!) that she is not of an age where she should be parenting a child.

Maybe they should be thinking about adoption at this point.

They should think of the life of the child. This isn't a baby doll. This is someone's LIFE that is being screwed up with the affects of drugs. Oh sure it was just this once. But what happens the next time? She could have seriously damaged this child for what? A fight with her father! What happens when something really bad happens? Like she can't afford formula? Or the baby cried non-stop for 4 hours?

They both need to stop and really think about what is going on. This is not fun and games, this is real and they both need to grow up in a big fat hurry!

You dont know what kind of parent each individual woman/girl will be, whether shes married or not.

I think shes too young to get married, I didnt say anything about being too young to have a baby did I? I do think its too young to have a baby aswell. The point was about marriage.

I think she is too immature to have a baby.

It's a little late now.

No it isn't. There is still adoption. The child doesn't have to be ruined.