activists use to try and prevent teenage pregnancy is poignant.

Mother's Day evokes images of a caring and giving mother who has the time and dedication to overcome challenges and to raise her children to be responsible and successful adults.

The images inspired by the words teenage pregnancy are quite different. A harassed woman barely out of childhood herself, deprived of educational opportunities and struggling to make ends meet. A mother who has to farm her child -- or children -- out to relatives or virtual strangers in order to go to school or to work. Almost always a single mother, because the father is gone. Occasionally one hears an inspiring story of a mother who has children in her teens, but goes on to have a successful life herself and makes one for her children too.

These cases, as has been stated here before, are too often the exceptions that prove the rule. Most teen mothers struggle, and often fail, to bring up their children successfully. And too often, the cycle is then repeated.

Two years ago, activist Sheelagh Cooper said of the high level of child support arrears: "If we could stop our children having children we would be going a long way to solving this problem.'' A subsequent editorial said: "Mrs. Cooper may have gone to the heart of that problem -- and many other social issues with that statement. Yet this has been a problem for many years which few leaders in the community have truly tried to address.

"This may be because no-one wants to lower the self-esteem of those children already born to teenage mothers or to appear overly judgmental.'' Two years later little has changed. The number of teen pregnancies which are reported remains about the same, and while teenage mothers can avail themselves of support from social services, they still face an uphill struggle.

Part of the problem lies in that image of motherhood which is so prevalent on the cards and in the media.

Few teen mothers, if asked, would say that they regret having a child at such an early age, because to do so would be to reject the child they have raised.

But if you were to ask them if they would advise another teenager -- or their own daughter -- to do the same thing, they would often say no.

There is of course another factor in this -- the father. Education efforts tend to be targeted at the mothers, But if men could be shown the consequences of their actions and be made to see what their responsibilities, they might not be so quick to hop into bed.

In the end, education is the only solution to this issue. But if we can reduce the level of teen pregnancies in the community, we can solve a lot of other problems as well.