by Katie Allison Granju
A few months ago I read an article about a high school in Florida that included a section in its yearbook featuring the students at the school who are also parents. Controversy erupted as many in the community objected vociferously to this supposed glorification of "teen pregnancy."
I, on the other hand, found it a nice way to honor the accomplishments of this high school's student-parents. As anyone who has attended school of any kind while a parent will tell you, parenting as a student is damned hard work. I know because I had my first baby while in college and my second baby while in grad school. Juggling baby, bills, and books was mind-numbingly difficult, even with significant family help. So I feel confident in suggesting that the young women who are mothers and students at that high school are pulling off something far more challenging—and certainly more important—than the girls on the cheerleading squad.
Additionally, I worked for two years in the early '90s as a counselor in a Knoxville-area residential facility for teenagers in foster care and their babies. It was and is a unique program that allows these young mothers to remain with their own children rather than separating them by sending the mother and her child to two separate foster homes. I watched these young women bond with and care for their babies, and I observed the way they were treated with utter disdain by many teachers, employers, and the community at large. That experience opened my eyes to the fact that modern American attitudes toward mothers under the age of 20 constitute a particularly nasty but acceptable cultural prejudice.
Why is a 17-year-old woman with a baby automatically seen as some kind of social disease, but a 22-year-old mother is not? These are not "teen mothers," any more than African American women are "black mothers" or women who work full time are "day care mothers." They are just mothers, like all the rest of us; giving birth to and trying to raise our children as well as we can. Imagine the outcry if the media began referring to the many 45-year-old women who spend tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments, only to end up paying a much younger woman to actually provide a viable uterus or eggs, as "vanity mothers," or "elderly mothers," or "crone mothers." I don't think this would go over too well.
While there are certain parenting practices that are acknowledged as universally harmful to children, such as physical or emotional abuse, or neglect, the converse is not necessarily true. There are many ways to be a good mother, or as Bruno Bettelheim put it, "a good enough mother." By most people's standards, I was in no way fit or ready to be a mother on that day in 1991 when my baby was placed in my arms for the first time. We were too young, we were too poor, we hadn't completed our education, our relationship was brand new and pretty unstable.... But because my son's father and I were lucky enough to be surrounded by people who both offered support and believed in our abilities as parents, we were able to rise to the challenge.
Most teenage girls who become pregnant did not intend to do so. According to a review of American teen pregnancy statistics from the journal Family Planning Perspectives, a large percentage of the fathers of babies born to teenagers are men over the age of 20. Many have exerted some sort of coercion or control over the mothers in question. And many teenage mothers find that parenthood makes pursuing their goals of higher education or career growth extremely difficult.
The answers to these important issues are to not condemn and stigmatize mothers who are teens, but instead to work toward a society where every woman, young and old, has access to health education and health care, as well as the confidence and right to control her own body. And our schools must accommodate the fact that some students are parents, and offer the same flexibility that mothers who work have begun demanding of employers in recent years. Parenthood shouldn't automatically signal an end to educational opportunities for young women.
There is nothing inherently shameful about young motherhood. It isn't a dirty secret of some kind. We should resist our cultural inclination to turn mothers who are teenagers into pariahs. Age alone does not define a woman's ability to nurture and guide her child.
Katie Allison Granju lives in Knoxville and is the author of "Attachment Parenting" (Simon and Schuster/1999). Her home on the web is locoparentis.blogspot.com.
May 15, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 20
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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