How To Tell Your Parents You're Pregnant

Hi, my name's Niki, and I'm a counsellor and psychotherapist and I work a lot with teenagers. I'm here to talk with you about some of the issues that you might find that you're dealing with as a teenager and to hopefully give you some tips that might be useful. So, I'm going to talk to you about how to tell your parents that you're pregnant.

The first thing that's most important is how you feel about being pregnant. Not only how you feel about being pregnant, but if you've made a decision about what you're going to do about your pregnancy. Are you going to continue with your pregnancy and hope to have a child, or are you going to terminate your pregnancy and have an abortion? If you've made a decision about what you want to do about your pregnancy, how do you feel about your decision? Are you comfortable with your decision, is it something that has felt a difficult decision to make, or have you got mixed feelings about your decision? A lot of people might find themselves pregnant, and still not have made a decision yet about whether they want to stay pregnant or whether they want to stop the pregnancy and this can be a really difficult time.

Obviously, as a female, the only person that can make that decision is you. Your pregnancy is in your body, so it can only be your decision, no matter what other people want around you. So, in telling your parents that you're pregnant, it's very important that you kind of feel as prepared as you can for what you imagine their reactions are going to be to you being pregnant.

So, you know your parents well enough by now to kind of predict that they're either going to be very unhappy with the situation and disappointed in you, or if they're going to be quite happy about the situation and supportive, or a mixture of both. But don't forget, you might also get it wrong. It might be that you'll be hopefully happily surprised by the way they react when you tell them.

Whatever it is, though, feel prepared to talk it out yourself, think it through how you might say it. If you want to get some support beforehand, there are places like Brook's Advisory Service, where young people can go and talk to a counsellor informally and get some healthcare as well as emotional support in dealing with being pregnant. You might want to call ChildLine, you might want to talk to a friend first.

But then, once you've prepared to tell your parents, find a time when you're calm, when they're calm, when there's no distractions around, because obviously this is a really important thing to tell them, and decide how much you're going to tell them. You can tell them about the circumstances of you getting pregnant, who the father might be if you decide to have a child, or at least who's responsible with you in you being pregnant, and what will happen to them at that time. Do they know who he is? Would you want them to know? Is he involved in this, in terms of wanting you to continue the pregnancy or not? And then when you tell them as much as you can, just be honest.

Be honest about what you're feeling, be honest about what you would like from them. Expect them to react because it's going to be shocking news maybe for them. So, expect that they're going to have a reaction and give them time to adjust to the idea, just as you've needed time to adjust to the idea as well.

If you're wanting them to help you think through what decision to make about your pregnancy, tell them that. Tell them that you need their help in that. But if they want you to make a decision which is opposite to the one that you've made, then let them know that that isn't what you want.

And maybe you need to argue your reasons for why you've made the decision you have. But in making the decision, think through what are the consequences. Don't just think about it as now, but also five years time, ten years time, is this going to be the right decision for you? And you might want to really think about answering the questions the