15-Year-Olds Have Learned Through Experience Pregnancy Changes Teens’ Lives Forever

Two 15-year-olds, Jason Richardson and Jamie Scott, began an intense learning experience this year that turned their families upside down.

They had a baby. They were eighth-graders at Mountain View Middle School when Jamie became pregnant.

Their decision to have sex was not planned. “It just kinda happened,” Jamie says. Their son, 10-month-old Jordan, lives with Jamie, her parents and younger brother.

Jason sees Jordan almost every day. And, yes, he changes diapers.

“I love him more than anything,” Jason says. “I go over all the time. I play with him, I give him baths.”

Sometimes on weekends, Jason takes the baby home overnight, under his mother’s supervision.

“I would tell Jason when he’s over there after school, ‘You take care of the baby - that gives Jamie a chance to get her homework done,” says Linda Richardson, Jason’s mother. “Then when you get home, you can get your homework done.”

Jordan will reach his first birthday this fall, about a week after his parents begin their sophomore year at East Valley High School.

After staying home to raise her two children, Chris Scott, Jamie’s mother, put off her own plans to find a job. Resentment popped up, surprising her.

“But now, it’s like we wouldn’t know how to live without him,” Chris Scott says of her grandson.

Both grandmothers say they talked to their teenagers about sex, about waiting and about protection. Both were surprised and hurt when Jason and Jamie, five months pregnant, finally told them.

Chris Scott took the teens to an open adoption agency. They wavered. First one was for the idea, then the other. Never both at the same time.

“I’d like to see kids like Jamie and Jason even speak to junior high kids, let them know that protection and decisions about sex mean a lot,” Chris Scott says.

Both students had sex education as eighth-graders. Jason, at least, found the class dull and impersonal.

If his teacher had said just the right thing, would he have thought differently about sex?

“No, when a teacher talks to you, they don’t talk to you like a real person,” he says.

Jamie says she wishes sex education had included more discussion “about how hard it really is to raise a baby.” She would urge students “not to be scared of their parents, to talk to them. Or somebody.”

Jamie and Jason broke up this spring and aren’t officially going together, they say.

“It’s hard enough to have to commit to him,” Jason says about his son.

Marriage is a possibility.

“We get along pretty well. We both like the same kinds of things. Like basketball. And writing. We like each other’s friends,” Jamie says.

Should kids this young have sex?

No, Jason says. Wait until you’re older. “Wait until it’s someone you really love. It shouldn’t be about other things,” he says.