MTV Shows About Teen Moms Helped Drop the Teen Birth Rate

The birth rate to teenage mothers in America has declined almost continuously over the past 20 years, according to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Adolescent Health. Public health officials have attributed the drop to teens having less sex and more access to birth control, but a study from economists at the University of Maryland and Wellesley College found another contributing factor to the declining birth rate: MTV.

Their study, published in the journal for the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that MTV's reality shows “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” led to a 5.7 percent reduction in teen births—around one-third of the overall decline in teen births in the year and a half following the show's introduction in 2009. They got this figure by conducting what they called "an in-depth empirical study, analyzing several measures of exposure, including Nielsen ratings data and metrics from Google and Twitter."

Is this really all that surprising? For much of the 80s and 90s, we all heard about MTV’s unstoppable ability to influence the young, but most of the time the people talking about that influence were right-wing religious groups who said that MTV would lead children straight to hell. Even these shows about teenage mothers were accused of glamorizing and therefore encouraging adolescents to have kids.

But, as the study’s author Melissa S. Kearney pointed out in a piece at the Huffington Post, the economists found that, even though the birth rate had been dropping steady for two decades, there was “notable evidence that the introduction of MTV's 16 and Pregnant is responsible for a significant portion of the reduction in the teen birth rate in recent years.”

The researchers looked to see whether larger reductions in the teen birth rate were occurring where more people were watching the show. They focused on changes in birth rates in places after the show went on the air and also looked at MTV’s ratings once it was introduced. They also looked at Twitter and Google trends, and found that tweets and searches about birth control and abortion spiked when the show was on, specifically in locations where it is more popular. It seems teen pregnancy isn't that glamorous after all, even when it's on MTV.

“Our use of data from Google Trends and Twitter enable us to provide some gauge of what viewers are thinking about when they watch the show,” said Philip B. Levine, the study’s other co-author. “We conclude that exposure to 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom was high and that it had an influence on teens' thinking regarding birth control and abortion."

This isn’t the first time that media typically thought of as sort of trashy has been used to teach about the advantages of family planning. In Tanzania, a radio soap opera broadcast nationally from 1995-1997 was found to have “strong behavioral effects on family planning adoption; it increased listeners' self-efficacy regarding family planning adoption and influenced listeners to talk with their spouses and peers about contraception.” A similar program is being planned in Burundi, with the backing of UNICEF, the United Nations Population Fund, Population Services International, and the Dutch government, and is slated to begin airing this year.

In Brazil, the telenovela "Páginas da Vida" had a plot line that dealt with a teenage pregnancy that was “was highly entertaining, yet able to raise many important questions throughout Brazil concerning social and reproductive health issues,” according to the Population Media Center. Sixty percent of women interviewed were watching the show, and 65.4 percent of female viewers said they would be more careful to prevent unwanted pregnancy.  Brazil’s birthrate has also been dropping over the last five decades and is now below that of the United States.

The economists who looked at MTV noted that the recession was still the biggest factor, but the shows "drew in teens who actually were at risk of teen childbearing and conveyed to them information that led them to change their behavior, preventing them from giving birth at such a young age." For a network often derided as mindless at best, and responsible for such social ills as Carson Daly’s career, this latest research suggests that MTV and its influence can also have a socially positive function.

By showing the lives and hardships that teen moms face, their shows, which were after all developed with guidance from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, have proven to be at least partly educational.