Teen Pregnancy Problem Being Ignored. P-D Gregory Freeman 8/6/1995

Headline: TEEN PREGNANCY PROBLEM BEING IGNORED
Reporter: By Gregory Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Sun., Aug. 6, 1995
Section: NEWS, Page: 4D, Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT

BEFORE RETIRING and moving to St. Louis, Dorothy Jackson spent years doing social work in New York.
Jackson worked with families and children. "I must have worked with thousands, " she said, many of them black.

As a result of her work, she's reached a conclusion: African-Americans - as a group - have done too little thinking about the problems of teen-age pregnancy and their often devastating results.
   Jackson, who is black, says she believes the issue hasn't been addressed directly. "I'm not sure if it's fear or a belief that people would be offended or what, but I don't hear the leaders addressing this issue. Maybe when it gets itself together the NAACP will address this, but I don't see it now, " she said. "This is a problem that has reached crisis proportions among blacks and it's not being discussed. Instead, we've been coasting along, ignoring the problem."
   Although she retired in 1987, Jackson remains as concerned today about social problems as she was during her many years in New York. She says she sees many of the same problems here that she saw in the Big Apple.
   "So many kids have been born to mothers who were not married, who were too young to know how to care for them that today you have a lot of kids - not all - who are running around angry and unloved, " she said. "Many of them are angry and in pain because they didn't know their fathers. That anger often translates into all sorts of antisocial behavior."

The problem of out-of-wedlock births came to light in 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned of the consequences. At that time, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks was 26 percent and less than 5 percent for whites. Today those figures have jumped, to 68 percent for blacks and 22 percent for whites.
"Black social workers and others attacked Moynihan back then for what he had to say, " Jackson said. "But . . . he was right."

Jackson thinks many blacks aren't facing the problem head-on, allowing many teen-agers to think that it's all right for them to get pregnant. No one is telling them that teen pregnancy may be the No. 1 factor in determining whether a person will be poor later in life.
"For many girls, being pregnant means being single and independent, " Jackson said. "There's a lot of fantasizing, romanticizing - many girls think of pregnancy as a passage to womanhood."

It's difficult to get the message across to many of those girls, Jackson said. "For many of them, even when you provide them with the facts, they've convinced themselves that they can do better than other girls."
It's like people who commit crime. Although most bank robbers are caught, for example, bank robberies continue because people convince themselves that the other robbers were stupid and that they won't make the same mistakes. Ultimately, though, most do.
"Someone needs to sit down with today's black teen-agers - parents, uncles, someone - and talk frankly about this problem and how they've got to avoid it, " Jackson said. "We've been too passive as a community and we've seen the results. The churches feel that praying will do it. Well, praying won't do it all. We need more thinking about this problem."

One of the problems of teen-agers who are mothers, Jackson says, is that many of them don't know how to be mothers. Many of them have no idea how to raise a child. And while many of them are madly in love with their babies when they're very young, they quickly become disenchanted when the children get older and begin walking around, requiring greater attention, often doing things that the mothers don't want them to do.
"They have to make adjustments, like all parents do, " Jackson said. "But because of those, we often see some resentment of the child. Now the child is getting in the way of the teen-age mother and preventing her from doing some of the things she would be doing as a young person had she not had a baby."
That resentment sometimes shows up in the way mothers treat their young children. "I've seen teen-age mothers at the store say to their young child, `Get your butt over here!' and use all sorts of foul language, or toss the kids around. You don't treat a child that way. But these mothers do it because they're angry."

Jackson concedes that some might consider her words to be old-fashioned and consider her to be a fuddy-duddy. She doesn't care.
"We could benefit a great deal from some plain, old-fashioned values, " she said. "We've got to get back to them or we're sunk."

Daniel Schesch - Webweaver

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