Ideas for what should happen when they do are harder to come by.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s proposal that all 16- and 17-year-old parents who get support from the taxpayer should be placed in a network of supervised homes has certainly been given short shrift. Mr Brown suggested these homes would teach the young parents about responsibility and raising children, but this was seen by some critics as ­a desperate proposal by a struggling leader.

The idea isn’t given a warm ­welcome in Paisley, either, where the charity Barnardo’s runs an innovative project to support young people preparing for parenthood. “The thought of being shoved in a hostel along with lots of other girls in the same situation would have made everything so much worse,” says 16-year-old Megan McLaughlin.

Megan, from ­Paisley, is fairly confident that she is a responsible parent – but ­finding out she was pregnant at 15 was a huge shock. Her daughter, Abigail, is now six months old, and she is still coming to terms with becoming a mother. “It’s all such a blur that I can’t even remember ­whether I went back to school at all,” she says. “I’d split up with my boyfriend, but I wasn’t feeling well so I went to my doctor who told me I was pregnant. I had no idea.”

Megan was five months pregnant. “I had no choice but to have the baby,” she says. “I didn’t think about adoption.”

She worried about letting down her parents: “I think it’s hard for my dad because I’m his baby and here I was at 15 having a baby myself. My mum could come to appointments with me so I don’t know if that was maybe easier for her.”

She also found herself isolated from friends. “I’m not 16 any more, like all the girls I went to school with,” she says. “In my head I’m at least 20, and everything in my life revolves round Abigail.

“What I really hated about being pregnant was strangers looking at me,” she adds. “I knew they were judging me, thinking I was some stupid teenager who’d got ­pregnant to get a house or benefits. I couldn’t go to prenatal classes at the hospital – I was in such a state of shock for so long that it was hard enough even just getting organised.”

Fortunately for Megan, her midwife referred her to the Paisley Threads project run by Barnardo’s. Although she didn’t use their prenatal support, she has found their postnatal care a real lifeline.

Threads helps young people preparing for and coping with new parenthood as part of a range of services for the under-21s. It also helps young people struggling with housing or parenthood to gain confidence and take control – exactly what Megan is dealing with.

Ashley Watt, 19, was 16 when she discovered she was pregnant. Her daughter, Kayla, is now two. Ashley displays an impressive maturity in her aims for the future, but it has not been an easy road.

“I was in fifth year at school and aiming to go to university,” she says. “I simply couldn’t believe I was pregnant and I put it out of my head, trying not to think about it. Eventually I had to tell my mum, as she was so worried about me. I was so pale and lethargic that she’d been concerned I was taking drugs, so her reaction to me having a baby was actually really positive.”

Despite that support, Ashley echoes Megan when it comes to describing how difficult it is to cope with parenthood at such a young age. “You have no idea how huge the changes are until it happens,” she says. “I left school straight away, started working full-time in a shop and lost all my friends. Everything I had in common with them no longer mattered.”

Life became even more complicated early on in her ­pregnancy when there was a fire in her ­family home and they all had to be rehoused in a one-bedroom flat. “Mum slept in the living room and my brother and I had the bedroom. We were all on top of each other and the tension just grew.”

Her pregnancy didn’t give her a lift up the housing ladder, she adds. Instead, the local homeless unit offered her a room in a B&B.

Staff at Paisley Threads suggested she took advantage of a system that allows speedier access to housing if you accept a place in a hard-to-let area. “That’s what I did,” she says. “I applied for hardship funding to get it furnished but didn’t get that, and it was hard – all the noises you hear in the close at night, and that feeling of being so alone. Then, when Kayla was born, I had all the responsibility of her, though my family helped and my brother was brilliant.

“But I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. I’d go into schools with my baby if they wanted, and say to other girls: ‘This is what happens if you don’t use contraception. This is what sex education is all about.’ I didn’t have a clue.”

Going back to school six weeks after Kayla was born made life even more complicated, but ­Ashley maintains that potential criticism makes her more determined.

Despite her problems with ­housing, she considers the prime minister’s proposal to be totally unrealistic. “I’m at college doing my HNC and next year it will be my HND and I’m aiming to get good enough marks that I can go straight into second or even third year at university,” she says. “I’m working hard to make a good life for myself and my daughter and I don’t want to be labelled.

“Paisley Threads have offered me great support and pointed me in the right direction. Putting us all into hostels isn’t right – that’s not a normal way to be part of society. And that’s what we need: support to bring our children up properly, rather than be set apart as if we’ve done a terrible thing.

“Some time I’d like to have more children and do it the right way for me, with a job and a supportive partner. But right now I’m studying, looking after my little girl and hoping to get a part-time job. I don’t think I can be categorised.”

www.barnardos.org.uk

Teen pregnancies in Scotland: the facts

The most recent figures from the Scottish government showed that 42.4 out of every 1000 girls aged 15-17 became pregnant in Scotland each year. For under-16s, the figure was 8.1 per 1000, a total of 751, although 58.9% ended in abortion.

The government points out that not all teenage pregnancies will be unplanned or unwanted, but has a target of reducing the rate in under-16s to 6.8 per thousand by 2010.

In the under-20s, the most deprived groups have approximately 10 times the rate of delivery as the least deprived (70.4 per 1000 and 8.3 per 1000) and nearly twice the rate of abortion.

A league table by Barnardo’s puts Scotland 28th out of 31 countries for teenage pregnancies. Only America, Mexico and Turkey have more teenage mothers. The ­Scottish teenage pregnancy rate is five times that of the Netherlands.