Gregory Freeman: Program Aims To Teach Teens About Making Life's Decisions. P-D 12/17/1996

Headline: PROGRAM AIMS TO TEACH TEENS ABOUT MAKING LIFE'S DECISIONS
Reporter: By Gregory Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Tue., Dec. 17, 1996
Section: WAR PAGE, Page: 5B, Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT

FIFTEEN STUDENTS PILE into the small classroom at Normandy Middle School.
They are tall and filled out, young men with deep voices, young women with lipstick. One might think that they're adults, but their belongings, clothes and other items betray them: a young woman with a lollipop, a young man with blue jeans that sag endlessly.
When Debra Robinson asks these students their ages, most reply 14.

Robinson is no regular teacher. And this is no regular class.
She's on staff with the Annie Malone Children and Family Service Center. These youngsters are participants in the "Teen Take Charge of Your Life" program operated by the center. If all goes well, most of these students will avoid teen pregnancy and make other positive choices for their lives.

On this particular day, the topic is communicating with parents. Many of the students say they don't talk much with their parents.
   "I don't ask her nothing, and she doesn't say nothing to me, " one young woman says.
   "Me and my dad are cool, we just don't talk about `real' stuff, " chimes in one young man.
   The students nod as Robinson says: "Sounds like some of you really don't want your parents to know your business. Do some of you think that if you ask your parents about the opposite sex, they'll think you're doing something?"
   "Umm-hmm!" one girl exclaims.

"But you know, it might be how you take it to them, " Robinson suggests. "This is the age you need to be talking to your parents, probably now more than any time. You need the wisdom and guidance they can share."
One girl tells Robinson that she rarely talks to her mother about much because "she never asks me about anything."
"But when you don't talk, you help build the wall between you, " says Robinson, herself the mother of a 20-year-old. "I know you think that parents have been old all our lives. But each one of us has been your age. You're not going through anything they haven't gone through."

Discussions like these go on in schools throughout the area. Students are exposed to six weeks of the one-hour sessions through the program, started by the Malone Center in 1985. Support groups exist for those students who want to continue with the program.
"When we started the program, it was designed specifically as a teen-age pregnancy prevention program, " Robinson told me. "The main feature was, and continues to be, abstinence. A lot of teen-agers never even heard of the word. A lot of them think that when puberty hits, boom! They've got to get busy. We try to tell them that they can make choices and that they should look at making informed choices. And we talk about the consequences of their choices: pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and AIDS."

Robinson said it's important for youngsters to realize they have choices.
"A lot of girls come from teen-age pregnancy situations, " she said. "Their mother may have had them as a teen-ager, their sister might be a pregnant teen-ager, their aunts might have had their kids when they were teen-agers. So some young ladies assume that that's normal, that it's expected.
We don't down mothers who have had babies as teen-agers, but we try to tell the students that there are choices and that there are consequences to whatever choices you make."

Robinson suspects the program succeeds, in part, because youngsters are able to discuss their problems with an adult who isn't with their parents.
"This is an age where the relationships that some young teen-age boys and girls have with their parents break down, " she said. "Kids sometimes aren't real comfortable talking to their parents about things like relationships or even what they need to do to achieve their goals.

We try to offer them advice that most parents would probably appreciate."
   Smart advice, like the decision on whether to have sex is one that should be made in advance, not in the heat of the moment.
   Or that young people who want to make something of themselves would do better to align themselves with other students who have plans for the future rather than those with none at all.
   "It all comes back to choices, " Robinson said. "The bottom line we try to get across to the young people is that they have a good deal of individual power of choice. They can make positive choices and enjoy the results of those or they can make negative choices and suffer the consequences of those. We're trying to teach them how to make positive choices."

Daniel Schesch - Webweaver

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