Kellie Quinton

12 Main Road Adelaide, South Australia 5171 Phone: 0431588033

E-Mail: quin0190@flinders.edu.au

Date: 25th October 2016

Hon. Zoe Bettison
Australian Labor Party
Level 12 South, 1 King William Street, Adelaide SA 5000
GPO Box, 2832, Adelaide SA 5001

Dear Zoe Bettison:

The purpose of this letter is to open your eyes to the underlying problems of teenage mothers
and substance abuse among them. A lot of young mothers or pregnant teenagers have been
struggling with substance abuse issues for a long time. By substance abuse, they are taking illicit
drugs, smoking marijuana, drinking and smoking cigarettes all whilst pregnant or after childbirth.
This is a problem not only for the mothers but also their children. Their futures are less likely to
be successful and finding careers will be difficult as they focus more on substance abuse than
going to school. If this is a continuing problem, teenagers are going to keep risking their futures
and their childs future.
There are a number of reasons why teenage mothers are resulting in substance abuse. Many of
them are unsupervised, as their parents are often out working, studying or even using
substances themselves. Teenagers in single parent families definitely lack either having a mother
or fathers support and that can allow teenagers to have more freedom than they should through
adolescence. Other causes of substance abuse in teenagers include low education. For example,
going further upstream to the problem of teenagers becoming parents at such a young age, they
are not educated well enough to use contraception or understand why they should not be
engaging in sexual activity. What about peer pressure from other teenagers that are engaging in
drugs and alcohol as well, or the hope that substance abuse will help with their depression
because there is not enough support for young mothers. They dont always have a safe and
supportive place to go and many of them cannot go back to school after having a child, because
how are they going to fit in and who is going to look after that baby while theyre in school if they
lack support from family and friends?
There needs to be a change for these teenage mothers. They need help from you. They need to
know that they have support and that they are not alone. You need to realise what they must be
going through is hard and not always their fault. You need to focus on supporting them through
school-based programs so that they can go back and have an education after childbirth. There
needs to be strict rules on parents to keep their children supervised during school nights and
over the weekends because a lot of underage sexual activity and substance use happens when
children are not supervised. Additionally, teenagers need to be education in a broader framework
of sexual education and the government should be providing programs that are real, that relate
to teenagers, not programs that shy away from what being an adolescent is really like. Overall,
there needs to be a change in the way teenagers are taught and how well they are supervised.
Sincerely,

Kellie Quinton