Discussion: Teen pregnancy prevention

For this assignment, you will be creating a teen pregnancy prevention (or teen parenting) plan. The teen pregnancy prevention plan can focus on how to reduce unplanned teen pregnancy, or can focus on how to improve teen parenting efforts. How you go about this is up to you, but it is important to use the research when formulating your plan. Any variables you select should be backed up by research. In this paper you will:

Describe several facets of your plan: what variables (e.g., parental monitoring) will you choose to focus on and why (e.g., higher parental monitoring has been shown by the research to lower teens’ risk of adolescent pregnancy).

You will also discuss how you would attempt to affect those variables (e.g., educating parents on how to effectively monitor without being overprotective, since that seems to increase teens’ risk).

Finally, you will discuss how you would implement such a program logistically (e.g., who specifically would you target for your program and why? Where would this program be based?).

You must use scholarly sources, such as class notes, outside journal articles and/or text to formulate your response. Use a minimum of four scholarly resources, two of these being peer-reviewed journal articles.

Your plan should be written in paragraph form (not in bullet points). Your plan should have a minimum of 1,000 words, but you will not be penalized for going over the word limit.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.