Caring - To show love

The Benter Teenage Mothers’ CBO caring program aims to show love, concern, and help to teenage mothers and their children as persons who need help and assistance. Our teen mums’ children are either malnourished, unattended to, or neglected. Teenage mothers spend much of their time either at school or spend the whole day working to earn something to sustain their families. They don’t have time with their children. Even while they spend the whole day away from their children, they are mostly concerned and worried about them and what might be happening to them. Our care intervention here involves child care during school days and simple support to individual teen mums. Our support includes providing sanitary pads, nutritional porridge for children, washing soap, and renewable diapers.

When a teenage girl gets pregnant, the community immediately judges her out of some cultural/societal prejudice. When these teenagers give birth, they are called ‘teenage mums’, but we rarely hear of ‘teenage dads.’ Quite often we are not interested to understand or seek to find out how they became pregnant and why. Teen mums do not know parenting skills and what needs to be done to ensure their babies are safe and healthy. It is never easy for teen mums to be mothers at that tender age. They not only lack knowledge of ‘how to be’ but also, don’t have the facilities and resources to be mothers. Some teen mums have been rejected and expelled from their families, others live in broken families, and some play roles of parents as elder sisters after the death of both parents or separation or sickness of their parents. The children brought to life by teenage mothers are innocent and deserve to live like any other child.