Final Blog

When I was revising my final paper, I had a hard time figuring out exactly what I wanted to write about. When one of my friends told me a story about how ten and eleven year olds are beginning to get pregnant and have babies, I found this outrageous and began to research it. When I discovered that this was true, I decided to write my paper about it. I had a hard time steering my paper in the right direction because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to mediate the issue of giving birth control in middle schools, or just mediate the topic of early sexual behavior in general. I decided to do the latter, and it turned out well because I found strong reasons for both sides. I also explained why this was happening, some reasons being early puberty, the neighborhoods kids are raised in, and sex in the media. When I turned in my brief I had not decided on the specific topic that I wanted to write about, only the general idea of early sex in kids. I had supplied a lot of information, so when I went to right my rough draft, I had a lot of work to do. I decided to break my paper into different parts. I began by explaining what the issue was; very young girls are being pregnant because kids are having sex early. Then I explained some reasons as to why this could be happening. This part was really interesting to me because one website said that puberty was occurring earlier, and one of the reasons for it was pesticides and pollutions. It made me think that if pollution is causing earlier puberty, then what kind of other things could it be causing? I also learned that early puberty could be caused by genetics. I then began giving reasons as to why this trend is bad; girls are getting pregnant earlier, more diseases are being spread earlier which could lead to a huge epidemic. Then I researched actions that people are taking to prevent early sex. Many parents joined a group called the Parents Television Council, which is an organization that is running all sorts of programs to make TV better for their children. After that, I talked about why some studies show that sex early in life can actually be beneficial to kids. Studies showed that in some cases it psychologically helps kids become less violent, and it helps in their abilities to develop relationships later in life. I then concluded my paper with a statement saying before taking a side on this issue it is necessary to look at all of the scenarios. Because there was so much information on this topic, I had to make several rough drafts due to the different research that I kept finding. After turning in my rough draft, I wasn’t given much feedback on how to change it, so I decided to make it a little bit longer by elaborating on sex in the media. Overall, I definitely learned a lot from writing this paper, and I realized that there are many problems in the world that we do not really think about on a daily basis.