Let's face it: Eva Mendes is totally together and gorgeous in any light, setting, and situation--but I started to forget her superstar status as she really began to inhabit Grace, the bedraggled young Latina mom she plays in the new film Girl in Progress. The film, from director Patricia Riggen (Under the Same Moon) opens Friday, May 11. Grace was a mom at 17 and totally missed out on her chance to have fun as a teen. She's trying to make up for it in her 30s, despite the fact that she is now the mother of Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez), her teenage daughter who is desperate for some real parenting. Grace is convinced that she has a real future with her married boyfriend (Matthew Modine), whose house she cleans, and is either absent or oblivious whenever Ansiedad makes it clear she needs attention. Badly.

Ansiedad is so determined to get away from her chaotic home life that she comes up with a plan to skip adolescence and just be an adult already. Without her mom's presence and supervision, Ansiedad gets away with everything. Which is not lost on her. It's easy to root for Grace to get some fun and romance, even though she does it at the expense of her daughter, failing her, little by little, every day. Ansiedad hasn't had the luxury of being a kid either and tries to erase her last trace of vulnerability. Still, one night she bursts into her mom's room, crying for her in the middle of the night, only to find it empty. Again.

There were moments in the film that made me want to go wake up my daughter just to tell her that I'd never ditch her to stay out all night, especially when she needed me most. But she's only 7, and she needs her sleep. There's a lot to talk about, and it's a lot easier to talk about what Grace or Ansiedad did, or didn't do, than it is to talk about ourselves and our daughters--and what we need and what we'd do differently. I think this movie will start some interesting conversations between mothers and daughters that might not otherwise have happened. At least I hope so. Watch the trailer (below), check out a message from Cierra Ramirez to parents, and tell us what you think.

Geek confession time: Besides taking in a Nationals game, enjoying Woodford Reserve, hanging out at Jake's Boiler Room, or spending time with my perfect son Harrison, one of my favorite activities every year is pouring over pages and pages and pages of public opinion survey data and trying to make sense of it. How do teen guys age 15-19 from families with limited means living in southwestern states feel about the first time they had sex anyway? I gots to know, right?

Having now spent some quality time with the results of The National Campaign's latest survey of teens and adults I have come to the simple conclusion that making sense of it all is actually, well, simple. It's really not complicated at all. A moment to explain...

There are times when you want words and phrases like "plunge"  and "steep drop" and "historic lows" associated with the things you wake up caring about every day. This would be one of those times.

Seems the U.S. teen birth rate is now at a historic low level, this according to the good public servants at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The truth is we knew that already--what we didn't know was that rates for all racial/ethnic groups are also at historic lows. What we also didn't know is that the absolute number of teen births--not the rate, friends, but the actual number--is the lowest it has been since the Truman Administration. How is that even possible?

The report from NCHS also contains new data on state teen birth rates. In particular, it is more than passing interesting to note that 16 states had declines in teen births of 20% or better between 2007 and 2010. The list of states defies regional categorization (states range from Washington to Florida), size categorization (states range from California to Delaware), population demographic categorization (states include North Carolina and Wyoming), poverty categorization (states range from Mississippi with high poverty levels to Massachusetts with one of the 10 lowest poverty levels).

Interesting right?

Read the report or some of the media coverage and let us know what you think.

MTV has announced that the upcoming fourth season of the original Teen Mom series will be the last one. Those final episodes won't air til later this year--giving everyone ample opportunity to reflect on what it all means--but I'd like to get the party started with my own Top Ten Lessons Learned from Teen Mom (so far):

1. Once there's a pregnancy, every road ahead is hard.
If Teen Mom has shown us anything, it's that pregnancy and parenting at a young age isn't easy and it isn't glamorous. We've seen these girls struggle in every way possible--within their families, in their relationships, financially, at school, socially, and more. That's not to say their lives would have been easy-peasy had they not gotten pregnant, but there is not a single episode of this show that has made it look like the life of a teen mother is anything but challenging.

2. Being a birthmother IS being a good mother.
Too often people assume that making an adoption plan is a cop-out, or an admission of failure, or proof that you don't love your baby. Catelynn's experience taught us otherwise and continues to be one of the most hopeful, heartfelt stories on all of television.

This Monday, Paul Fain, a reporter from Inside Higher Ed, posted an article about Make It Personal: College Completion (MIPCC), the work the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) is doing, in partnership with The National Campaign, to incorporate information about unplanned pregnancy into college curricula as a way to improve retention. It was exciting to see USA Today include the article on its website, which provided great visibility and also attracted many comments. There have been some very supportive comments and also many derogatory (and, often, flat-out inaccurate) statements. I would like to give this latter group the benefit of the doubt and assume that they simply were not fully-informed (perhaps a result of USA Today removing the hyperlinks to helpful information in the article as it was originally published?).

Therefore, I would like to take a moment to dispel some of the most egregious myths I've read on these message boards.

Myth #1: By the time they arrive at college, students already know everything about how to prevent pregnancy.
This is not the first time we've heard people say, "These are grown-ups, surely they already know this stuff." But as we've seen again and again and again, there is in fact quite a lot that young adults don't know. Some of them may not have had any formal sex education in school at all, or they did but it wasn't very good, or when they received it they weren't having sex yet and didn't think it was relevant. For others, this was a taboo topic at home and their parents didn't give them helpful information.

I was also disturbed to read some very ugly comments about how, if students don't already know everything about sex, body parts, and birth control when they arrive at college, they're a lost cause and don't deserve to be there, so we shouldn't even worry about them. I'd argue there's a lot that students don't know when they arrive at college and a lot of remediation is done on topics that students should have learned before they got there (including math and writing). How is this subject different from any other--and how many other subjects are as life-changing? The point of college is to learn. Instead of criticizing the students who arrive at college without this knowledge, why don't we give it to them so they can be successful? There are many ways to do this, often at little to no cost to the college.

Myth #2: This topic does not belong in the classroom.
While some may view this topic as a personal matter, and we understand that view, students do need and want to talk about this. Plus, this personal matter has serious consequences for educational success, which is the business of colleges. When we talk about incorporating information about preventing unplanned pregnancy into a course, we're not talking about taking a time-out from class to pass around the condom fishbowl. We're talking about a thoughtful dialogue that can occur when students are able to discuss this issue in a classroom setting. It's an opportunity to think about personal beliefs and learn course material in a new and interesting way. It can also help instructors meet their course objectives.

Take, for example, this anecdote from one statistics instructor whose course outline is now free and available thanks to the MIPCC project:

I found that having a topic to work toward enhanced my class and was well worth any extra time on my part. My goals for this project were for students to learn the pitfalls and benefits of survey research, to work with a large data set instead of the usual 10-20 subjects, to learn the course content, including t-tests and correlation, and to participate in a project that serves to help people. This was very meaningful and interesting for my students.

Call me crazy, but this actually doesn't sound like a distraction from class at all. To me, it sounds like an instructor providing classwork that students will actually find interesting.

And, for those instructors who teach a student success course--which can cover everything from available resources on campus to creating a study schedule--and can't fit one more thing into class time, starting in the fall semester they can assign online lessons that students can do for homework.

Myth #3: Older students or those who are already parents are either left out of or will be offended by this conversation.
I'd like to introduce you to an amazing woman named Heather Thomas. Heather was president of the Phi Theta Kappa (PTK) Honor Society chapter at Mesa Community College and, after she gives this year's commencement address at graduation, she plans to attend Northern Arizona University on a scholarship. Heather got pregnant when she was 15 and went back to college only after her daughter graduated from high school. She was a leader in her college's MIPCC program, Project H.O.P.E., and made the connection between unplanned pregnancy and college completion the key focus of her PTK chapter's award-winning project.

The truth is that students who are already parents know better than anyone just how hard it is to go to school and be a parent at the same time. There are many Heathers out there and no story is more compelling to their fellow classmates than the one they share. Last May the Chronicle on Higher Education even published an article about the impact Heather has made on others.

Many also commented that this conversation should be happening at home, and we couldn't agree more. By talking about this in the classroom, students can become more comfortable with this topic and can then have meaningful conversations with their own children.

Myths #4-8: I need to wrap this thing up, so I'll quickly set the record straight that contraception is not cheap; you cannot just walk into a drug store and get any method; more use of it does not lead to more abortion; we agree that not having sex is the most effective way to avoid pregnancy for those who choose this option; and Natural Family Planning is an option too, but definitely NOT the most effective method. But I could go on, trust me.

This project is about finding innovative ways to educate and encourage students to consciously plan and prevent unplanned pregnancies, which can interfere with college completion. That includes educating them on all their options--including not having sex--and letting them decide what works best for them. To me, that sounds like the exact opposite of Myth #9: taking responsibility away from students.