If you’re a parent, you might look forward to becoming a grandparent as well. You probably anticipate that when you retire, you can bounce a grandchild on your knee and spoil them with presents on their birthday. However, you might become a grandparent sooner than you anticipated.

You never know if your teens are going to be sexually active or not. You can talk to them about sex and encourage them to wait, but the decision is theirs.

Because of this, it is not inconceivable that your teenage daughter might get pregnant. If that happens, you’ll need to try and deal with the situation as a family.

Does she want to keep the baby?

Before you start hunting for the best smart baby thermometer and cribs on the market, you should first ascertain whether your daughter wants to keep the baby. Terminating the pregnancy is always possible, though you might object to that for religious or ethical reasons.

It’s your daughter’s body, though, and she will be the one who ultimately chooses whether to terminate or carry the baby to term. You can discuss it with her, but hopefully, you will respect whatever decision she makes.

If she decides to keep the child

If your teen daughter decides to keep the child and carry it to term, you’ll need to make some further decisions at that point. Much will depend on whether your daughter has finished high school or not. A pregnancy at nineteen is a little different than one at fifteen.

If your daughter’s still in high school and wants to graduate, she’ll need to figure out how to make that happen. She might be able to talk to a counsellor at the school who can suggest some strategies.

She may come up with a situation where other family members can watch the child while she is at school. If that’s not possible, then perhaps you can hire a babysitter.

Maybe your daughter decides that she wants to leave high school to care for the baby, but she wants to pass her GCSEs instead. GCSEs isn’t as good as a Further Education, but it will afford her some opportunities she will not have if she abandons high school altogether.

An older teen pregnancy

If your daughter is still a teenager, but she has graduated from high school, you’ll probably be glad of that. She has GCSEs, which will serve her well as she enters the job market.

You will likely have to make some of the same decisions regarding who can watch the baby. If your daughter wants to go to college, she’ll need to line up babysitters or relatives to help her with that. If she doesn’t feel like college is the right fit for her at that point, she might get a job instead.

She’ll have to figure out whether the father can help if he is still in the picture. If he is a dedicated father, he should be able to pitch in financially. That will help a great deal since, if he’s nowhere to be found, raising the baby is more of a family matter.

Your legal obligations

You should understand that as a parent, you have to help your teen daughter if she gets pregnant if she’s under eighteen and still living under your roof. She is still your dependent, and it’s only right that you do what you can to help her, even if she made an irresponsible decision.

If your eighteen or nineteen-year-old daughter gets pregnant and decides to have the child, you can continue letting her and the baby live in your home, but you are not legally obligated to do so. You can kick them out of the house if you want to, but many parents would feel like that’s a callous thing to do.

Every parent handles these situations a little differently, and there’s no right or wrong way to proceed here. There’s one thing you ought to keep in mind, though.

How you choose to act, individually and as a family unit, will probably impact how you and your daughter get along for the rest of her life and your grandchild’s as well. If you act kindly and compassionately, you can maintain a healthy parent-child relationship. If you decide to kick your daughter out of the house for her decisions, she might remember that and shun you in the years to come.