Too many baby showers, not enough weddings; too many funerals, not enough graduations

The other day I logged into my Facebook account, and I noticed that one of my Facebook friends posted a status that read “too many funerals, not enough graduations. too many baby showers, not enough weddings”.  Seeing this quote brought many thoughts and opinions to my mind. Are there too many baby showers compared to the amount of weddings? Are more people dying than the amount of people graduating from high school and college?

This quote can be deciphered in many ways depending on the person who is reading it. If you are older than 30,  you will evaluate this quote differently than a teenager; if you are a male, most likely your opinions will be different than a female’s; race also plays a part in the thought process as well because statistics are different for each race. However, I’m an African American teenage girl, so I’m going to talk about the way that I view this quote.

 As an African American teenager, I can look around and observe that there are more baby showers than marriages and more deaths than graduations. But it wouldn’t be fair to come to this conclusion without statistics and facts.

Too many baby showers, not enough weddings

This part of the quote, to state the obvious, means that people are having children out of wedlock rather than getting married. To most, this doesn’t seem peculiar at all. Having a baby out of wedlock isn’t something new, but when the people who are having these babies are indeed babies themselves, I find something wrong with it. I am not one to judge, and I think that everyone should do as they please but in my opinion, there are far too many teen pregnancies and not enough marriages!

I read on blackwomenshealth.com that 13 percent of pregnancies are to teenagers and that African American teenage girls have a higher number of pregnancies out of wedlock than their White and Hispanic peers. These statistics aren’t enough for me. I want to know “why” having a baby seems to be the trend amongst girls my age; “why” when I go to school there are girls in my classes who are pregnant,“ why” people who I went to elementary school with are giving birth, and finally, “why” girls who are younger than I am (16) are having babies. In my opinion, this just doesn’t make sense because they are going to be missing out being young and free of a major responsibility, raising a child. I can’t help but wonder… Don’t they want to go to school, maybe attend college or a technical school without the responsibility of taking care of a baby? What about pursuing a career, becoming independent, and getting married?

According to a research paper I read, the marriage patterns in the US has changed drastically because people are getting married later in life, this most likely means that the majority of the teenage girls who have babies will not get married. If so, this part of the quote is accurate.

What happened to the song we use to sing in elementary school “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage”? Now-a-days it’s “pretend love, baby carriage then maybe marriage”. I feel as if marriage doesn’t cross the mind of many people. Do these girls just not want to get married? No, I don’t think that’s the reason at all. I think that getting married is the dream of most girls. I also think that the girls who are getting pregnant as teenagers think that this is the way to make their boyfriend stay around, maybe even marry them. However, like my mom always says, “why buy the milk if you can get the cow for free?”. For those of you who haven’t heard this quote, it means why would a man marry a woman who has already had their baby or is living with them? I believe that if a couple loves one another enough to lay down and make a baby, they should love one another enough to say their “I Do’s”.

NEWS FLASH LADIES: having sex won’t make him love you and having a baby won’t make him stay. Even though I could talk about this topic forever, I don’t think I am going to be able to answer my own questions no matter how much research I do.

Too many funerals, not enough graduations.

This part of the quote makes me a little sad. This is implying that there are more funerals than graduations. I don’t think that a person can say there are literally more funerals than graduations because there are too many factors that come into play such as, the number of schools in the country and the number of people that die a year (all age groups, races, and genders) and that wouldn’t be a fair statement. However, I can narrow this down so that it means something to me and say that there are more African Americans dying than graduating from college.

Because of the number of young people who have died this year from car crashes to homicides and in some cases even suicides in the city where I live, sometimes I feel like there are more deaths than high school graduates. I know this is probably not true, but that’s really how I am feel each time I hear of one these events occurring. Although the numbers of deaths that have occurred this year in my community are ridiculous and include all races, ages and genders, I am only going to reference the statistics of African Americans in their teens and twenties that are either dying or receiving college degrees nation-wide.

7.6 percent of African Americans age 18-29 in the US had a college degree in 2005, and in 2005, the death rate for homicides of African Americans age15-24 was 84.6 percent. Once again, this quote is accurate because research has been done and indeed there is a higher percentage of deaths than college graduates among African Americans in 2005. I won’t say that this quote is still accurate for 2006-2011 because I couldn’t find any statistics for those years. But I personally do think that this quote is accurate for those years as well.

It’s a shame. There are “too many baby showers, not enough weddings; too many funerals, not enough graduations”. I hate that this quote is indeed accurate, but it is. What is the world coming to? Hopefully people will stop, think, and figure out that marriage is important and an education is more important than a violent argument that may lead to death.