1980's School Boy Father was one of the first acting roles for the sixteen year old Rob Lowe, seven years after Roe v. Wade and eight years before his, ahem, trouble. And he was dreamy in that sort of generic, sexually non-threatening, Tiger Beat sort of way that youngish girls tend to like for some reason. Whatever. He was all softish and had obnoxious hair and jeans that were too high and he is far more appealing as Sam Seaborn with grey in his temples and Aaron Sorkin's dialogue (and oh, was he ever nice as kind of a dick with really good genes and thick-rimmed glasses in The Invention of Lying and also he is even kind of nice in Brothers & Sisters as the Republican person, despite the overall kind-of-bad-but-kind-of-good-ness of that show).
But anyway! What nugget of moral wisdom was Martin Tahse trying to impart with stilted dialogue and terrible hair this time?
Sixteen-year-old Charles Elderberry (Rob Lowe) dallies at summer camp with sexy Daisy (Dana Plato) and discovers later, to his astonishment, that she has borne his child. Unlike other teenagers who might go into hiding, Charles races to the hospital to see his son and is horrified to learn that Daisy is putting the child up for adoption. Having grown up without a father, he insists on his right to keep the baby, and with the help of a social worker (Beatrice Colen) he is granted a trial adoption, much against his mother's advice. The outcome of the story is both real and poignant, as Charles reluctantly faces reality.
The outcome was neither real nor poignant. It was mostly stupid and also mostly just illustrated how stupid teenage boys are. I mean, really? YOU ARE SIXTEEN. You cannot raise a child. Also, it illustrates how fond these writers were of broad strokes and contrived plot points in order to impart their supposed wisdom.
Particularly, I have issues with the fact that the social worker granted him a trial period. IT IS A BABY. Do hamsters even come with trial periods?
But, you know, whatever. Teenagers should be aware of the consequences of their actions and actually know about contraception and babies are expensive so you can't buy the ugly car that you want if you have a baby. (Also, a suggestion to Charles Elderberry? Carnations are cheap and ugly and insulting. Do not take the girl that has just had your child a single carnation. I suppose the limited budget of this production could explain the choice of a carnation (save it where you can!), but seriously, the prop closet must have had a fake rose or daisy or something.)
And apparently most of them aren't? At least if you consider MTV's 16 and Pregnant to be a representative sample of teenagers across the country (hint: it's not). But that one amazing couple was and they were smart and I kind of loved them and mostly wanted to smack all of the others because OMG THEY ARE SIXTEEN. And stupid.
And now we get to compare this to actually decent things! Like Glee!
Most television shows of the teen variety tend to avoid the introduction of babies. Sure, they love the pregnancy because they can get all very special episode about it, but if the baby actually ever shows up then it is just an obnoxious foil to everything and standards and practices tends to frown upon killing babies. So we're most often left with a variety of scares, adoption, abortion, and miscarriage, with the last two being mostly rare because again standards and practices—especially for a teen show—don't like that much controversy.
So Glee is really the only thing that seems to actually be going down the teen pregnancy road in any sort of leisurely fashion where (OMG!) a set of twins or triplets may actually need to be cast. I think 7th Heaven probably went down that road once or twice or something, but that was even more excruciating than these After School Specials because of the incessant religiosity and indoctrination and probably whichever teen-mother was probably also teen-married, so it doesn't count.
What is interesting about the way Glee is handling this is the competition between the two potential fathers and their underlying motivations. Finn is too stupid to realize that he's not the father (which...urgh) and also too stupid to actually have independent thought, and Puck is too... Puck is also stupid, but I don't think that's the source of his motivation. The stupid reinforces what is probably a more basic instinct of possession? And Quinn, well, I don't think she's stupid; she's manipulative and too blinded by her faith to actually consider abortion.
So now we get to see the same issues Schoolboy Father explored: money, responsibility, parental rights, and the continued inability of teenage boys to understand the basic mechanics of human sexuality (which...did I just read a lot more than most people, because I knew how this stuff worked in fourth grade). And we also have songs!
Personally, I think Patsy Stone has the perfect solution for this particular trope.
