When people think about single parents, they think about all the negatives. They often think they are lazy and rely on their parents to provide for their kids. Since becoming a teen parent, I've learned not to listen to the negative people around me and continue to push myself every day to provide for my child. I want to continue striving and showing everyone around me that I can do what everyone else can do with a kid and be what I want to be. Being a Teen parent isn’t always about the negatives; many positives come with being a teen parent. Hello! My name is Sandra Blanco. I had my baby, Selena, at the age of 15, and I am now 17, about to graduate high school a year early at Georgia Chaffee TAPP.Moving forward, I plan on going to college at JCTC and become a Pediatrician. Wanting to become a pediatrician wasn’t my first career option, but since exploring that career field, I've been wanting to pursue and use my skills to help parents navigate through parenthood.Since becoming a teen parent, I have developed many different positive strengths. Some of those strengths are balancing work, school, and quality time with my daughter.Being able to balance my life has helped with my mental health and overall build up my maturity level. Being able to have the strength to overcome fears I never knew I had and testing my parenting to the limit showed me never to give up. When I gave birth to my daughter, I went through many challenges, like postpartum depression. When I was experiencing depression, I felt so disconnected from my daughter, and people around me started to notice.Undergoing different types of emotions challenged me, but I knew facing them was the only way out. I knew moving forward, depression was just the many obstacles that I would need to face to truly become a better version of myself. Since facing depression, I hope my experience will help those around me who suffer from postpartum depression and take the steps to reach out for help because being a teen parent makes you feel all alone and scared of asking for help, because of the stigma that is in today's society about teen/single parents. When I found out I was going to be a mom, I wanted nothing but the best life for my daughter. So I started to take charge of my education and show everyone around me that I can go above and beyond. Since I started taking it seriously, I made it my goal to graduate early so I can jump-start my career. I took all the negative voices around me and turned them into my motivation. Being a teen parent shows you how many people around you want to see you fail rather than see you succeed. I hope that when going into my career as a pediatrician, I will be able to apply my challenges, experiences, and strengths to my work and help as many parents or teens with their children and succeed to the fullest. Being a teen parent is hard and very challenging. You go through significant changes like hormonal unbalanced, changes in body figure, mental health, trying to balance your life so you don't have to drop out of school.But we still look towards the future and show everyone else that we are more than just a label shunned upon us, and that we are parents who will do anything to ensure we succeed, not just for us but for our children.