THE other day I was chatting at the counter of the local paint shop, and as the owner filled me in on the progress of his wife’s recent mental health problems and how most of their friends now avoided the couple, I noticed a friend of mine pass by outside. She smiled an embarrassed smile, waved an embarrassed wave and then crossed the road and scuttled off to the nearest coffee bar before I could approach her.

I say she was a friend, but to be more accurate she was the mother of a classmate of my son’s whom I have known since he was little. You know, one of those women with whom you share school-gates gossip and compare glowing reports at parents’ evenings. But I suppose the gruesome fate that has befallen my 17-year-old son represents something to her that is so unthinkably disastrous that she would rather hide behind her Guardian and choke on her croissant and café au lait than try to summon suitable words of comfort.

Except that, funnily enough, I don’t want or need any words of comfort. What I want is to bend everyone’s ear about how completely wonderful the whole thing actually is . . .

Teenage pregnancy. This is something that doesn’t happen to comfortable, educated middle-class people like us. It is something spat out in the same breath as drug addiction, alcohol abuse and graffiti by nervous Radio 4 presenters as they debate what can be done about the ever-increasing problem of today’s youth.

But a message to the people who are overcome with disapproval, or even worse, pity for me, my son, his girlfriend or, most of all, for their baby . . . let’s try not to be too judgmental about this. Let’s consider for a moment the broader picture. Nature obviously thinks young adulthood is the perfect time to have babies and there are plenty of functional models worldwide that put the rather arrogant “ideal” of modern Western nuclear family to shame.

What with loving and energetic grandmothers of 38 and 43, grand-dads, aunts, great-aunts, uncles, great uncles and cousins galore, these two teenagers have a support network to die for. They certainly won’t need to give up their education or sacrifice their dreams to languish on any council flat waiting list if we have anything to do with it. Fair enough, their lives may no longer be “normal” — whatever that may be — but maybe “normal” ideas about what is so important at their age will dissolve into insignificance alongside something so much more valuable.

So, before we all start falling over ourselves with sweeping generalisations and prejudice, it is useful to re-acquaint ourselves with that familiar question “Is there ever a right time to have a child?” Is it so great having to fall off the career ladder in your twenties or thirties to find a convenient time to squeeze out a few children and then kill yourself to pay childminders a small fortune to bring them up? Or is it better to wait till our late thirties or early forties, when, despite being in possession of emotional maturity and financial security, we are constantly knackered, unsupported and struggling to adjust to late-onset lifestyle change?

How inclined will we feel to play football or go skating as we hit the menopause? How well will we relate to teenagers when in our late fifties? And what kind of help can we be as grandparents in our eighties? Our offspring will be knackered with their own young children while changing our incontinence pads and struggling to pay for our nursing homes.

OK, OK, I won’t try to pretend that becoming parents at 16 and 17 is all peaches and cream. And I won’t lie about the fact that we all went around in shock for a week, crying over photos of our baby boy and mourning his loss of a normal youth (albeit an overextended period now quite normally stretching well into the twenties with endless studying and gap years, world travel and hedonistic partying, if his older sister is anything to go by).

Neither will I pretend that it was easy to digest and emotionally deal with what seems to be an extraordinary case of medical negligence which had these two intelligent, ambitious and responsible A-level students duped by a harassed and, no doubt, overworked GP into believing that she wasn’t pregnant any more after a supposed miscarriage, until it was way too late to do anything about it.

And most of all, I won’t try to convince anyone that it wasn’t heartbreaking to witness a teenager who was, one minute, carefree enough to sleep all day, kick a ball idly round the park and program a variety of hip-hop ringtones into his mobile phone, and the very next jumping into the car with me as we made our way hastily to the labour ward, ringing his mates as we went to let them know for the first time that his girlfriend was about to have a baby. Innit.

But neither will I become hysterical. Because this situation calls for a little perspective. Given the precarious nature of the behaviour of young men in society today, let’s consider some of the things that life may have dished him out instead. He could have joined the British Army and been sent out to Iraq to get traumatised for life, at best.

He could be conscripted into the Israeli Army at 17 to learn how to humiliate Palestinian families on the West Bank, at very best.

Times recommends

• 12 party beauty tips
• Nutrition: is being big a genetic destiny?
• What it feels like: to pry into other people's lives