If Jamie Lynn Spears somehow thought that having a baby would be a good career move for her — boy has that backfired!
While Nickelodeon hasn't committed to any course of action on the Jamie Lynn front, aside from wishing her the best, her audience is speaking loud and clear.
"Fire her!" That's the message from Star magazine's readers. In a poll on Starmagazine.com, 93% of them are emphatic that she should be fired from the network or that her show, Zoey 101, should be canceled. Over 91% believe it was irresponsible of Jamie Lynn to get pregnant, and 80% say that she never should have broken her baby news by appearing on the cover of a magazine that often pays big bucks for stories. On the contrary, 80% feel that she should have kept it quiet for as long as possible.
I don't believe that Jamie Lynn and her mom, Lynne, anticipated that there would be a virulent lack of sympathy for her situation. They didn't take into account that as the star of Zoey 101, Jamie Lynn was considered a role model for the teens and tweens who watched her show. Overtaxed parents counted on Zoey to deliver wholesome entertainment and even moral lessons. Now those parents feel betrayed and so do their young daughters — Jamie Lynn really let them down!
And Jamie Lynn has no excuse that her fans can empathize with. She isn't underprivileged and she certainly had access to information about birth control. If anything, Jamie Lynn was over-privileged — she had the world at her feet. How many young girls would have loved to be a star on Nickelodeon and would have appreciated that opportunity!
Then there is the issue of appearing to be profiting from the pregnancy — Jamie Lynn and Lynn — I think this is a blaring public relations boo boo! Even if you weren't paid to divulge the scoop, people think you were. The New York Post reported that a publishing source told them that Jamie Lynn was paid $1 million for revealing her news.
All of this makes your audience even less sympathetic. "Get out of show business" — that's what 83% of the Starmagazine.com poll respondents say the Spears family needs to do.
Now of course Jamie Lynn may not really have misguidedly conceived this baby as a career move, though she may have somehow thought that her sister Britney's notoriety was a career plus. After all, Britney seems to think that having a pack of paparazzi on your tail is a better way to promote your new album than the old-fashioned method--touring and making personal appearances.
Instead, the sad truth could be that Jamie Lynn may have been desperately seeking attention by getting pregnant. "She wants a little bit of me" attention, with everything that's going on with Britney like it is," her aunt Chanda McGovern told the New York Post. Another source told the paper that Jamie Lynn is just a child with not a "lick of sense." Boy, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of sense in the clan and those Spears girls sure are "look-at-me" addicts!
The Spears women may also not exactly be telling the whole truth about how "shocked" they were to find out about Jamie Lynn's pregnancy. The official interview version is that they were both "shocked," "shocked" when they learned the news. Hmmm!
#1 How could Jamie Lynn be shocked when she must have known she wasn't using a reliable method of birth control or any birth control at all. And #2, Star magazine ran a story in our August 6th issue saying that Jamie Lynn had had a pregnancy scare and that Lynn Spears had been telling friends in Louisiana that Jamie Lynn thought she was pregnant.
Now, at the very least, if I'm Lynn Spears and I read in Star (and she had to have been made aware of our story) that my 16-year-old daughter had had a pregnancy scare, I would definitely have used this as an opportunity to have a heart-to-heart about what my daughter might be doing with her boyfriend of two years. And I might have noticed that my daughter who lived with me was having morning sickness — she revealed that in her interview. I would have been very concerned about the possibility that she was pregnant on every level — how it would affect her personally and how a pregnancy could also be a career killer. After all, no 16-year-old is properly prepared to raise a child and no 16-year-old with a career as a teen heroine on a teen network is likely to keep her day job.
The fact is that two-thirds of teen moms never even finish high school and only 1.5% get a college degree by the time they are 30. Teen pregnancy in general is far more likely to hurt a girl's career than help it, no matter how many cover stories are written about you.