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Public Assistance for Young Parents: Friend or Enemy?

By the time I got to college, I didn’t have child support or help from my parents. I realized I needed additional support so I applied for public assistance for young parents. I needed support like food stamps now called Supplemental Nutrition…
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Support For Pregnant Teens and Young Parents

I understand that support for pregnant teens and young parents can be hard to come by. In my own life, I had the support of my mother who picked me up from school and took me for my doctor’s appointments. She took time off work to make sure…
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How to cope with a teen pregnancy

At this point in my story, I was pregnant at 15 years by a boy I didn’t know and whom I hadn’t consented to have sex with. My secret was out, and the guilt and shame were real. Coping with a teen pregnancy had never featured on my list…
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Surviving Teen Pregnancy Without Losing Your Mind

Surviving teen pregnancy had never featured in any of my plans for my life. In fact, I looked down on other girls who got pregnant. I thought they deserved what happened to them because of their promiscuous and fast ways. Yet here I was in…
Summer shares a lesson learned from her memoir on not knowing as much as she thought about life, sex and pregnancy.
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How to Avoid Teen Pregnancy

Because I was not sexually active, neither I or my parents probably thought they needed to talk to me about how to avoid teen pregnancy. If you had told me I would join the teen pregnancy statistics at age 15. I would have called you a liar.…
Summer Owens and Miriam DeCosta Sugarman
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Becoming a Part of History- The Miriam DeCosta Sugarman Marker Dedication Ceremony

There are not many moments when you're invited to be a part of history. Last Monday, I had the honor of speaking on the program for a major moment in University of Memphis history. As part of the University of Memphis' initiatives to Eradicate…
Summer shares a lesson learned from her memoir on developing an attitude for success.
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How Teens Can Develop an Attitude for Success

When I was younger, I didn’t have the best of attitudes. I was stubborn, often disrespectful, and focused on having my way. In other words, I didn’t have an attitude for success. But that all changed when I started to understand that my…
Summer shares a lesson learned from her memoir on self-love.
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Practice self-love to grow in self-realization

Without a doubt, the teenage years are tough from an angle of self-love and self-realization. For some, it’s even more challenging because not only are they struggling with discovering who they are, they are also trying to learn how to love…
Summer shares a lesson learned from her memoir on positive people power.
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Why you need positive people around you

If you aren’t spending time with positive people who uplift you and motivate you towards achieving your goals, you are doing yourself a big disservice. As a 15-year old, I was careful to make friends who have similar priorities to mine. That…