WHEN CHILDREN WANT CHILDREN
The Urban Crisis of Teenage Childbearing
Leon Dash
New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc.
270 pp., $18.95
The facts are dismaying: More than half the black children born in America today are the children of unmarried mothers, and more than a third of those mothers are poor teenagers. Washington, D.C.'s Human Services Department statistics show a tie-in between high concentrations of the poor and high rates of teenage pregnancy. The crisis of black teenage childbearing is the problem of inner-city alienation and despair writ large. But, as Patrick Henry wrote, "We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth." We are especially apt to shut our eyes if that painful truth is out of sight, as in the bleak, run-down inner cities most American eyes don't have to see.
In fact, it is everyone's problem. Adolescent parenthood most often means reduced or abandoned education, marginal or no income-earning capacity, and welfare dependence. It not only perpetuates the cycle of poverty, it enlarges it by locking the children of these children into the same dead-end social and economic patterns. It breeds violence, crime, lethal drug trafficking. Teenage pregnancy crosses color lines, but the rates for poor, black, especially unmarried, teenage girls are disproportionately high.
Leon Dash, a black journalist for the Washington Post, decided to examine the crisis of black urban adolescent childbearing at the source. For twelve months he inhabited a roach-infested basement apartment in one of Washington, D.C.'s poorest neighborhoods, a place called Washington Highlands. He won the trust of his neighbors and repeatedly interviewed six black families in an attempt to unearth the roots and reasons from those most intimately involved in the experience of teenage childbearing.
All the adolescents in the study were sexually active, pregnant, or parents. The first result of his labor was a six-part series for the Washington Post titled, "At Risk: Chronicles of Teen-age Pregnancy." When Children Want Children is a fuller version of the series, incorporating the story of the project's genesis and the difficulties involved in its makings.
Wrong On All Counts
Dash says he began his research with some typical assumptions; among them, that the high incidence of pregnancy among poor black urban teenagers was a result of ignorance about adolescent reproductive capacity and birth control, that girls were falling victim to manipulation by macho boys, and that black girls were having babies to qualify for welfare payments. By project's end, he found "I was wrong on all counts."
What Dash discovered was that the unmarried mothers he interviewed chose to have children, that none of their pregnancies was accidental. The study's adolescent participants all cited essentially the same reasons for childbearing: because in the dreary, often loveless, world of poverty and broken homes, a baby is someone to love and be loved by, to call one's own; because to America's black underclass, living in a ghetto milieu with few opportunities for
...
Read Full Article
|
