Where are the dads in the teenage-pregnancy equation? In most cases, long gone, shoved aside or such hard cases that even those who counsel teen mothers routinely advise: Forget them. They’ll only drag you down further.
The popular perception is that if only the girls would marry the fathers, things would improve. Children, after all, do better in two-parent families, as study after study has shown.
The reality, say those on the front lines of teen pregnancy, is that shotgun weddings often would only add to the problem: There might be more abused babies, more abused women, further financial chaos if these frequently immature, volatile, unemployed men are put in homes with women who are just like them but at least have the intense mother-child biological link.
Is the best the girls and children can hope for a chance to grow up and meet a more stable guy down the road?
Maybe not. There are, at last, programs that are helping to transform the impregnate-and-run men into real fathers-and also helping the men who want to be fathers but are kept at bay by women demanding love or money in exchange for the right to see their kids.
But so far the programs are more notable for their existence and philosophy than for any large-scale results.
Only a handful exist, and their approaches vary. One says you first teach a young man the right way to live and everything will follow; another figures that Job One is to teach him how to make a living. But they boil down to showing one poorly socialized man at a time that somebody cares whether he sees his kid or not.
The programs do not aim to create a nuclear family, though sometimes that happens. Instead, they focus on such practicalities as employment and financial support; establishing legal paternity of the child, which gives him rights a child of an unrecognized father lacks; and ensuring that there will be father-child contact.
All of this is as backward as teen pregnancy, an attempt to patch a torn social fabric rather than weave it properly from the start. But because society fails to teach-and young men are unwilling to learn-that the first responsibility of the sexually active male is don’t get girls pregnant, it has to concentrate on teaching the emotional and financial responsibilities implicit in the title “father.”
Talk to young dads, and it’s clear how formidable the challenge is.
Many have a tendency to act as though reproduction is a mystery on a par with the pyramids, something they couldn’t possibly control. Others follow thought processes that are puzzling at best.
During a discussion in his Chicago high school classroom, 16-year-old Vinson Townsend holds up a condom and announces: “The best thing to do is carry one of these around.”
He is the father of one child and has another on the way. Asked to explain the disparity between theory and action, he explains: “If I’m gonna have a baby, I don’t want my kids to be by different mothers.”
On further questioning, the thinking boils down to: If you’ve already got one child, there’s no reason to try to avoid a second.
Forty years ago, teen birthrates were higher than they are now. But then, there was intense societal pressure to make amends for the “mistake” of having the baby out of wedlock. The couple generally got married and got by on a plentiful supply of jobs that didn’t require a high school degree.
Now, the baby may represent no more than a notch on the young man’s belt of masculinity and not even a blip in the moral universe of the surrounding culture. Indeed, one recent study of young unwed parents found that the newborn’s grandparents-on both the mother’s and father’s side-tended to oppose marriage.
Every approach being tried is arduous and frustrating. The most effective formula so far calls for intense-and expensive-one-on-one attention. It works best, obviously, with the most motivated of men; there are so few programs that no one knows if you can accomplish anything when you begin to reach into the lower rungs of unwed fathers.
For decades, as the problem of absent fathers grew to its present proportions, society seemed willing to ignore it.
Close to one of every four white babies is born to an unmarried woman, up from one in 40 three edecades ago. And two-thirds of African-American children are born to unwed mothers, up from about one in five.
This last statistic explains why most of the fatherhood programs focus on poor, predominantly African-American communities, and it also helps to explain why for so long there was a reluctance to look hard at the problem of absentee fathers. It reflected badly on a population that had enough problems, and it opened the researcher to charges of racism.
Gradually, though, the mounting magnitude of the problem has made people willing to step on sensibilities. Since about the mid-1980s, a rush of academic study has been under way, a series of public campaigns has attempted to stigmatize do-nothing fathers, more and more hospitals are getting dads to sign paternity papers at birth, and recent federal laws have mandated that states make more fathers stand up and be counted.
Some programs try to reach young men before they become fathers. A school in West Frankfort, Ill., puts 8th-grade boys in charge for a week of 10-pound flour sacks that must be burped, have their diapers changed and be cared for 24 hours a day. At the end of that lesson, awe-struck by the consequences of it, the boys learn about the mechanics of sex.
A Philadelphia think tank, Public/Private Ventures, last year funded six programs, including one in Racine, Wis., aimed at helping young fathers in cities to be responsible. In Chicago, a program called the Paternal Involvement Demonstration Project has worked for two years with similar aims.
One of the longest-running efforts, the loftily, if inaccurately, titled National Institute for Responsible Fatherhood and Family Development, was founded in 1982 and is headquartered in a few rooms of a rough Cleveland neighborhood’s community center.
“Fourteen years ago, they were almost chiding me for talking about the issue of fatherhood,” says Charles Ballard, the institute’s founder.
After speaking engagements, Ballard says, “a lot of times I’d be back in my hotel room and I’d cry because so many blacks did not get it-that we don’t need more of this; we don’t need more of that. We need fathers that are responsible. We need to build stronger families. Stronger families build a stronger community.”
Ballard says he would respond to his critics by saying, “`When you guys finally get to the top of the mountain, I’ll be sitting there.”‘
Watching institute workers on the job is a little like watching a Southern housewife make morning biscuits. There is no set recipe, just a lot of concentrated attention, with pats of Christian morality, Alabama courtliness and men’s movement lingo.
Workers will mediate between the mother and the father. They will visit the homes of their charges. They will refer them to parenting, substance-abuse or General Educational Development classes.
They call frequently, making sure that goals are met. And the whole time, they are behaving toward the men with the gentility of Emily Post.
A 14-year-old charge is, in every reference by the adult outreach worker talking to him, “Mr. Hunt.” At a nighttime visit to a troubled couple staying with a relative at a Cleveland housing development, Ballard and a co-worker elaborately thank every member of the household, even the children, for opening the home to them.
When you behave with respect toward someone, the theory goes, he will behave in a manner worthy of respect.
As hard as the method may be to pin down, the results are impressive. In a recent survey of men who have been through the institute’s program, three in four said they had not fathered a second out-of-wedlock child, almost 85 percent had legally established paternity for their children, and more than 60 percent were working at full-time jobs-all dramatic turnarounds from when the men entered the program.
The one stat that didn’t show profound improvement: marriage. At the time of the survey, only about one in five men had gotten married.
It is a Wednesday, and Barnie Ingram is coming in for his first visit. Eighteen years old, lanky and sheepish, Ingram is about to become a father for the first time. His father brings him-a good sign.
Outreach worker Maurice Odom shepherds Ingram into his office, a 6-by-9-foot windowless room, and starts asking questions.
The baby, from the sound of things, wasn’t planned, but wasn’t unplanned either. “I’m happy about it and everything,” Ingram says. “I ain’t been disappointed about it. The only thing I been disappointed about is I can’t find a job.”
