Mom at Sixteen

So I just finished watching the Lifetime movie “Mom at Sixteen” online and it made me thinking of writing.  All I ever read about writing YA is that you should never force a moral or lesson down your reader’s throat.  That will make them basically get bored and lose focus on your novel.  This movie was exactly that.  It was very predictable, I’d seen it before but forgot about it so rewatched it, and the lesson was constantly pushed down the watcher’s throat: Don’t have sex or you could become pregnant.  It was kind of irritating and pulled away from the story for me.  There were constant sex education classes the focused on sexuality and why do girls give in and have sex with guys.  There was a lot of “Well we want to do it,” “The peer pressure,” “They won’t like us any more if we don’t do it,” and honestly I can remember feeling the same as a teen.  But even I was rolling my eyes by the third class meeting going over the same thing, girls should dress appropriately and not have sex.  It seemed like every teenage girl in the movie was either dressed like a slut or doing “it” on campus somewhere.  But of course the baby mama teen was dressed prim and proper and was appalled at the actions of her peers.  Although it’s been a while since I was a teen, I remember that this just wasn’t how it was.

So why am I reviewing a movie on my writing blog?   Because movies come down to the same concept of novels.  An interesting and engaging plot with characters you can relate to.  I felt I could relate to Jacey the baby mama and the sex ed teacher the most.  The sex ed teacher can’t have kids of her own even though she is trying…can you kind of figure out the ending from this?  Well she figures out the baby is Jacey’s and it’s because of her big mouth the school finds out.  Then the school carries on calling Jacey a slut and throwing stuff at her like she is the only one in school that is pregnant.  Now I ask you, when have you ever heard of only one teen being pregnant in school?  In a small town maybe, but in a regular town heck no.  This story was just so far off course from reality, and while I know it was a Lifetime movie that had to end nicely or with a twist, it still irked me.  They could have tried a little harder on the script and made the characters more relatable and made the story a little more correct.  This was done around the time when the sex bracelet games started, so it’s not that old of a movie, and it was after I had graduated, in fact it was made the year my sister graduated five years ago.  So it’s not old.  And when I was in school it was not a shock to hear a girl was pregnant every few weeks.  And then when my sister started telling me about her schoolmates being pregnant in school it didn’t shock me.  So the story was just kind of meh to me.

I think if you are going to do a story like that you need to do your homework and really try to understand your audience and the people and story you are trying to portray.  The story was a sweet story that ended happily, as most Lifetime movies do, but it just could have been better.  But that’s all for this review.  I have another one coming up.  Just want to do some research for it first.  Bye for now.

Writing away,
M.