Family Nusing

In our society today childbearing can be viewed from two different spectrums. On one hand, there are women with higher education who postponed childbearing in order to secure their careers, on the other hand, there are girls who accidentally become pregnant in their adolescent years and subsequently decrease their chances at schooling or a future career. While older and educated women are financially stable and have resources to help them with pregnancy, adolescent girls are usually from the poor socioeconomic background and require social support in order to proceed with successful pregnancy and provide for their newborns. In this discussion, I will address the issue of adolescent pregnancy and family nursing interventions that can be used to help support the pregnant mother and her family. While for some families pregnancy is a blessing that has been expected and planned, for others it can be a surprise or maybe even a shock. The latter category is typically adolescents who are in school, unmarried and have no financial support. As a nurse, I have not had an opportunity to work with childbearing family, but I was a witness to a turbulent family situation of a coworker whose teenage daughter became pregnant and had a baby before finishing high school. My coworker was a unit secretary and her husband worked at a steel factory, and their financial needs were met on paycheck to paycheck bases. Their plans definitely did not include a 16-year-old getting pregnant; they were discussing future part-time work and application to state college when they discovered that their daughter was pregnant. The family had a good relationship and open communication, but pregnancy has affected family dynamics. My coworker was supportive and discussing future planning and prenatal care with her daughter, but her husband could not accept the unexpected pregnancy and refused to talk to his daughter for the first three months, which made the situation even more stressful. As a family nurse, the first appropriate intervention would be to offer family counseling to this