By SARA RIMER
CONCORD, Mass. — Talk about teachable moments.
In schools and shopping malls and around the dining room table, the subject of teenage pregnancy and sex was suddenly and uncomfortably in the air as mothers and daughters and fathers, too, talked about — or tried not to talk about — the pregnancy of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, who plays the perfect, well-liked and, it is understood, virginal teenage girl on “Zoey 101” on Nickelodeon.
High school girls here wondered aloud on Thursday why no one was talking about contraception. Parents across the country, on the other hand, commiserated over the Internet about how, thanks to Ms. Spears, they were facing a conversation with their 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds about sex.
“Nowadays, nothing’s safe, not even cartoons,” Diana Madruga, who has an 11-year-old daughter, said as she wrapped up her shift as the manager of a Dunkin’ Donuts here in the Boston suburbs.
Shopping at American Girl Place, the doll store, in Manhattan, Sharon Carruthers said she had used the news as an opportunity to talk about the dangers of teenage pregnancy with her 10-year-old daughter, Yasmine. “I want my daughter’s mind in the real world,” said Ms. Carruthers, who is from Deptford, N.J. “But this is not what my daughter is going to do in her life. She knows better. She knows right and wrong.”
Yasmine shook her head. “I never expected her, of all people, to do this,” she said, referring to the girl who in her mind is both Zoey and Jamie, the actress who plays her. “She’s supposed to be the good one in the family.”
High school girls who had already had their hearts broken by the all-too-public life of Ms. Spears’s older sister, Britney, known as a hard-partying mother of two, worried that their younger sisters would be devastated by the news — or, worse, that their sisters might think it was “cool” to be 16 and pregnant.
“She’s the idealistic little girl,” Alicia Akusis, 17, said of the television character Zoey between classes at Concord-Carlisle High School here. “She does perfect in school. Boys like her because she’s pretty, but she doesn’t deal with boys. She’s really smart, she’s really cool, she’s an empowering girl character.”
Ms. Akusis said she hoped that her younger sister and stepsister, who are both 11 and love the show, would not find out about Ms. Spears. “I don’t even want to bring it up with them,” she said. “I don’t want them to be disappointed.” It would be like their discovering that Santa Claus was not real, she said.
Ms. Akusis’s friend Mikala Viscariello, 16, was less concerned with shielding the young than with facing the realities of modern life. “There is no excuse for not using contraception,” Ms. Viscariello said.
Ms. Akusis shot back, “I don’t think she should have gotten pregnant in the first place.”
Perhaps the news of Ms. Spears’s pregnancy should not have been so surprising in what has seemed to be the year of the unwed mother in popular culture. First there was the movie “Knocked Up,” in which a 24-year-old entertainment journalist accidentally gets pregnant in a drunken evening. Now there’s “Juno,” about a 16-year-old who confronts an unplanned pregnancy and decides to have the baby.
But Nickelodeon has won wide acclaim as a sanctuary from the hypersexualized youth culture. That is what burned up Matt Younginer of Columbia, S.C., who was shopping with his 9-year-old daughter, Ansley, in Manhattan.
“She loves ‘Zoey 101,’ ” Mr. Younginer said. “It’s usually Britney Spears who would do that stuff, not Jamie Lynn. She was supposed to be one of the good, clean actresses for girls to follow after. I think it just sends an awful message for the young girls.”
Dan Martinsen, a spokesman for Nickelodeon, said Thursday that “Zoey 101” was one of its most popular shows among viewers 9 to 14.
“Nothing about the content, characters or the storytelling on our air has changed at all,” Mr. Martinsen said. He said that Nickelodeon was discussing a special on the issue with Linda Ellerbee, the television journalist who is the host of “Nick News.” “Whenever an issue becomes so prevalent that it’s inescapable,” Mr. Martinsen said, “her show is where we turn to help kids navigate and interpret and understand it.”
Ms. Akusis and her friends around the cafeteria table at Concord-Carlisle High School seemed to be doing a pretty good job of that themselves. The consensus around the table was that it was unrealistic to think that 16-year-olds would not have sex, and that someone should have talked to Ms. Spears about contraception.
The girls, who had followed the story on TV and the Internet, were also critical of Ms. Spears’s mother, who had been widely quoted as saying that one reason she was shocked by her daughter’s pregnancy was that she had always followed her curfew.
“When I heard that, I started laughing out loud,” Ms. Akusis said. “You can have sex during the middle of the day,” adding, “It’s not like there’s a time limit.”
One of her rituals, she said, was to watch “Zoey 101” with her stepsister and sister every week. “I hope they don’t cancel the show,” she said. “Zoey is still a good role model for little girls.”
Ms. Viscariello agreed. “It would be wrong to cancel her program and tell her she can’t come back because she’s pregnant.” But, she added, Ms. Spears would need to take some time off.
“You need time to figure your stuff out,” she said. “And you’re going to have to take care of a human being.”
She turned to David Prifti, who teaches photography at the high school. “Prifti, what happened when you had Amanda and Lucas? That took up a lot of you and your wife’s time, didn’t it?”
Yes it did, said Mr. Prifti, whose children are 17-year-old twins.
Later, in Mr. Prifti’s class, Greg Moseley, 18, said he was sick of hearing the name Jamie Lynn Spears. “Why do we care about Britney Spears’s little sister?” Mr. Moseley said. “Why does it make a difference? What does it mean? Nothing.”
“All this stuff is impossible to get away from,” he continued, “unless you go to Alaska and live in the woods.”
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