There’s a lot of talk about ending teen pregnancy (although by “teen pregnancy” most people really mean unwed teen pregnancy). Many people worry about unwed teen pregnancy as the cause of poverty, especially of Black poverty (something like 70% of current births among African-Americans are to single mothers). And they talk about teen pregnancy as if it were a pathology.
I think the pathology model is mistaken. Poverty is a cause of high teen pregnancy rates, rather than vice-versa. And poor black teens aren’t pathological; they’re rational actors, who make the best choice they can given the opportunities they have. When high rates of some population – in this case, poor girls and especially poor Blacks – get pregnant, then chances are getting pregnant is a good choice for their circumstances. If we want less pregnancy among poor black teens, then we need to reorder society so that poor black teens face a better set of circumstances.
Why is unwed teen pregnancy a rational choice?
1) For teens raised in poor (and statistically more likely to be polluted) areas, with lousy food and lousy medical care, their health will probably peak at around ages 17-19. That makes the teenage years a much better time to give birth than later years. Among poor black girls and women, the infant mortality rate is twice as high among those who wait until their 20s to give birth as it is for those who give birth in their teens.
2) For those who will be relying on an extended family of older female relatives to help with childcare and support, it makes sense to give birth when mothers, aunts and older cousins are younger and more able to offer assistance. Furthermore, grandmothers may feel more obligated to offer extensive aid to their 16-year-old pregnant daughter than to their 26-year-old pregnant daughter.
3) For middle-class whites, the opportunity costs (aka “what you give up”) of early childbirth are enormous; college and early career-building are made much harder by a baby or two in tow. Furthermore, the odds of eventually getting married and having a healthy child in wedlock are very good for middle-class teens who wait until they’re women to marry and have children.
For poor teens of color, in contrast, the opportunity costs of early childbirth are much lower. Poor teens can see that their odds of affording a good college followed by a high-paying, high-status career are low. And for poor black girls, the odds of finding someone suitable to marry during peak childbearing years – or even during their 20s – are much lower. So overall, poor girls of color have much less reason to delay childbearing.
Studies have shown that, for poor women of color, economic outcomes aren’t much different for girls who wait to become mothers in their 20s than they are for girls who become mothers in their teens. One study I read (which I’ve seen referred to by Arline Geronimus, but not by others) compared sisters who became mothers at different times in their lives, for example, and found that the future income was about the same regardless of the time of first birth.
At this point, therefore, it’s no wonder that so many poor teens see no reason to put off motherhood. Rationally, they’re as well off – or better off – becoming a mother in their teens.
If we want to change teen pregnancy, we need to change the circumstances of poor girls’ lives – and especially the lives of poor black girls – until their most rational choice is to put motherhood off until they’re in their mid-twenties and married. Circumstances that need changing include, but aren’t limited to:
1) The provision of easy-access, super-cheap universal health care. The model should be France’s, where anyone can walk into any general practitioner’s office and make an appointment without having to navigate any bureaucracies or pay out of pocket.
2) Middle-class, attractive jobs need to become widely available for poor folks.
3) There need to be far, far fewer black men of marriageable age in jail and prison.
4) Detriments to health that are especially common in areas where poor folks live – things like lead paint, poor quality food, pollution, etc – need to be effectively mitigated or eliminated.
5) College education and attractive career paths after college need to become likely possibilities for poor girls – even for those who are mediocre scholars. Just as such paths are now available for middle-class and wealthy boys even if they’re mediocre scholars.
6) Much, much more serious work fighting the racism and sexism that (among many other causes) holds back women of color. Affirmative action programs should be returned to their strong forms, which haven’t existed since before the Reagan administration.
I used to wonder if I was the only liberal who thought this way. Then, a few days ago, I came across a reference to Arline Geronimus on a feminist econ list I read. She’s done a lot of research on rational choice and teen pregnancy; much of this post is drawn from her work.
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I absolutely endorse your concession to rational choice.
The money graf: If we want to change teen pregnancy, we need to change the circumstances of poor girls’ lives – and especially the lives of poor black girls – until their most rational choice is to put motherhood off until they’re in their mid-twenties and married.
Absolutely agreed.
You then go on to make a long list of incredibly difficult, expensive, or impractical suggestions. You get started on that list; best of luck. Come back when you’ve made some prorgress.
In the meantime, there are a lot of much easier ways to change the incentive structure in the direction you suggest. But none of them involve magically transforming society; they’re more that whole mean carrot-n-stick philosophy.
“Poverty is a cause of high teen pregnancy rates, rather than vice-versa. And poor black teens aren’t pathological; they’re rational actors, who make the best choice they can given the opportunities they have.”
I think there’s a lot in what you say, people don’t always make “rational” choices, but they do respond to incentives. That said:
(1) High teen pregnancy rates do cause poverty. For the mother having a child (particularly alone) makes getting work more difficult, and it increases household expenses substantially. And at a simple level: a poor black teens is one person in poverty, a poor black teens with a child is two people in poverty.
(2) I do think people underestimate the power of ignorance. If you have unprotected sex over the course of a year you have a 85% chance of pregnancy. For people who are not aware of this, find accessing or using contraception difficult, or don’t know how to control their fertility, it’s not surprising they become pregnant young without planning for it. In history, most people have got knocked up early for this reason. Even condoms have 12-15% failure rates when used in practice, over four years this is a more than 50% chance of becoming pregnant. If people are ignorant, or can’t access contraception, they’re just not able to make a “rational choice”.
Amp–
Have you read the book “Don’t call us out of name”? Your post reminded me of it. It’s by a journalist or social science professor–can’t remember which, sorry–who wrote a book about the lives of women affected by welfare reform in ’96. When she examined the rates of teen pregnancy, she basically came to the same conclusion as you: poverty was the cause, not the effect, of young single mothers.
However, in interviewing the young women who chose to have children before finishing high school, she found that the reasons they gave weren’t focused on healthcare or lack of men. Rather, it was because in many cases these girls had been performing the work of “mothering” for younger siblings for *years*–their mothers, working crazy hours in dead-end retail jobs, had to rely on them to pick up the slack around the house–and seeing no real prospects for college, good jobs, etc., they chose to start their own families and be mothers to their own children rather than continue.
I mean, I think your point about peak childbearing years being 16-19 might be true. But I’m a bit skeptical that people make choices about when to bear children based on their peak childbearing years. (We wouldn’t be seeing many affluent white women with careers putting off childbearing until their thirties if this was the case.)
Sorry, let me clarify one more thing–when you argue that “for many poor teens, unwed teen pregnancy is a rational choice given their circumstances,” I think it’s a mistake to leave out the one huge reason people have children: it’s satisfying. I mean, for white women, this is so understood that it never needs to be explicitly said, except in the reverse case when she claims to not actually want any–“Oh, you’ll want children when you’re older, you’ll change your mind, your whole life will change and you’ll never be so happy,” et cetera.
Yet you never see this even considered in the public discourse around single, poor, teenage mothers (who are conceptualized, always, as black in the public discourse). It’s really denying humanity to these women–hey, not surprising, racism has been doing this for years, for centuries.
I’ll stop commenting now and let other people have a chance :).
AB, there was a series about 15 years ago, I think in the NY Times, where they interviewed young urban poor single mothers, and about half of them gave answers to “why did you choose to get pregnant or keep the baby once you knew you were pregnant” that were essentially that they wanted somebody to love them unconditionally, and only babies do that. Almost two-thirds of the group (if I remember correctly) knew enough about birth control to have avoided getting pregnant for several years – this group was 16 or 17 and had been sexually active since 14 – and deliberately chose to get pregnant. Of the rest, several were pregnant as a result of rape or incest but didn’t want/couldn’t get an abortion, and several had birth control failures but didn’t want/couldn’t get an abortion, and several never bothered with birth control.
I think the reasons Amp lays out are good ones, but I think they are probably subconscious or are the underlying structure for why these young ladies make the descision they do, rather than what they are actually thinking when they choose to have children.
I agree with AB – whether satisfaction is a rational choice or not (whatever we mean by that – what are we trying to maximize here?), it’s the only one that’s needed.
On the other hand, the argument for the “rational” choice assumes that (1) pregnancy and the decision to continue or terminate it is a choice that can be freely made (again, I’m echoing AB here); and (2) presuming that women must have children, and that their only options are to have them in their teenage years or have them later.
And what are your sourcesAmp? This sounds very much like a white liberal guy imposing what he thinks is going on onto the lives of women. I doubt very much that the population you are defining thinks in terms of “choice” when it comes to pregnancy, be it rational or (?) pathological.
I my mind, teen pregnancy is well modeled by a pathology framework — it is a result of a patriarchal society that can’t and won’t provide resources for sexually active teenage girls. More effort is spent in creating “barely legal” porn than there is spent of ensuring that birth control, sex ed, abortion or prenatal care are available to teenage girls.
Poverty is a cause of high teen pregnancy rates, rather than vice-versa.
If poverty is a cause, not the effect, of teenage pregnancy, it’s certainly not the only one, since teen pregnancy can also be seen in affluent areas? Certainly not as prevalent, but it’s there.
And poor black teens aren’t pathological; they’re rational actors, who make the best choice they can given the opportunities they have.
The fact that you can rationalize teen pregancy doesn’t make the choice rational. If poor black teen girls (that’s who we’re talking about making the choice here, I presume) are rational actors, they’re the only teens I know who are. I work with teens and no matter what race or economic status they are, they all tend to make some real dumb-ass choices. Heck, there’s a kid I know who is white, brought up in a solidly upper-middle-class family with all the material advantages he needs, was in the Scouts for a number of years, gets good grades, plays on the local high school’s varsity tennis team, and he got picked up by the cops for breaking and entering into someone’s garage and stealing beer out of their refrigerator. Apparently this wasn’t the first time he’d done it, either.
It’s quite typical for teens (never mind adults!) to make choices that have short-term gratification (like sex) but long term negative impact. Just because a lot of teens make a choice that you can build arguments for doesn’t make that choice rational. Especially when there are so many arguments against that choice.
When high rates of some population – in this case, poor girls and especially poor Blacks – get pregnant, then chances are getting pregnant is a good choice for their circumstances.
Nope; don’t see it. People make choices against their own interests all the time; just pick up the paper any day you want and read the news. Driving hazardously, using drugs, having unprotected sex and getting AIDS or whatever, etc., etc.
If we want less pregnancy among poor black teens, then we need to reorder society so that poor black teens face a better set of circumstances.
I do agree with that to a certain extent, but I would add that we also need to ensure that poor black teens (and poor white teens, who also have a high pregnancy rate) are better educated and disciplined to make better choices within the circumstances they face. Yes, folks, I said disciplined. As I pointed out above, teens tend to make some bad choices and they need discipline (among other things) to help keep them from making the wrong ones. Of course, it’s hard for their parents to do that if they’ve only got one parent and that parent is busy working lots of hours trying to make a living at a dead-end job (or jobs) because their obligations in child-rearing when they were young kept them from getting a good education.
Seems to me that the teen-pregnancy –> poverty and poverty –> teen-pregnancy models are both inadequate. What we really have here is a negative feedback loop. Teen-pregnancy leads to poverty, which combined with an absent father (teen-pregnancy tends to lead to single parenthood) and low education tends to lead to teen-pregnancy, etc. The following statements try to find ways to break that loop.
1) The provision of easy-access, super-cheap universal health care.
Well, that’ll lead to healthier mothers and healthier babies, but I’m not sure that supporting teen-pregnancy, as opposed to stopping it, should be our primary focus. We do want kids who are born to be healthy, though. What does this health-care model cost you and me?
2) Middle-class, attractive jobs need to become widely available for poor folks.
By middle-class jobs, I presume you mean jobs that have a salary capable of supporting someone in a middle-class lifestyle. These days, that’s pretty tough unless both parents work and contribute their salaries/wages to the family, so we’re back to getting the father involved in raising their kids.
I’m not sure what “attractive” means in this context. If your job isn’t attractive, do something to make yourself qualified for a job that is attractive to you. In the meantime, get to work.
In any case, middle-class jobs are out there. But poor folks aren’t going to get hired for those jobs unless they have the education and technical skills to be able to perform them and the work ethic to make it profitable for the employer to hire them. Providing said education, skills and ethic is not the responsibility of the employer, nor will it be profitable for that employer to try to provide them as long as they can find employees that already have them.
3) There need to be far, far fewer black men of marriageable age in jail and prison.
Then far, far more black men of marriagable age need to stop doing things that will land them in jail. Yes, racism certainly exists, and some black men are put in jail for bullshit reasons. But a lot aren’t.
4) Detriments to health that are especially common in areas where poor folks live – things like lead paint, poor quality food, pollution, etc – need to be effectively mitigated or eliminated.
Lead paint and other health hazards in buildings is the responsibility of landlords to get rid of, definitely. Polluters need to be held responsible and made to clean up the messes they have made. Where the resonsible parties cannot be held to account (companies long since out of business, etc.), then I’ll accept that it is a public good, worthy of committment of my money, to get rid of that pollution. Poor quality food, though, I’m having a bit of a problem with. At what point is that my responsibility and at what point is that the responsibility of the people buying it?
5) College education and attractive career paths after college need to become likely possibilities for poor girls – even for those who are mediocre scholars. Just as such paths are now available for middle-class and wealthy boys even if they’re mediocre scholars.
I wasn’t aware that mediocre poor black kids had big problems getting into college. My suspicion is that the real problem is kids who are absolutely horrible scholars, and that can’t be fixed even by giving them free slots into college. They’ll flunk out.
6) Much, much more serious work fighting the racism and sexism that (among many other causes) holds back women of color.
Even in this day and age there sure as hell are racists and sexists out there. But we need to be careful as to what constitutes racism and sexism, and what things that affect non-whites and women are a consequence of their own choices.
I think this author is missing the boat, big time. Through the whole beginning of the piece, the assumption of the thought process seems to be “Well, I’m going to get pregnant and be single, so let’s pick the best way to do that.” The concept of “Let’s not get pregnant until I can get a man who’ll help me raise and support that child” seems to be missing.
Now, I know that there’s a lot of young black males in jail or dead (the latter most often at the hand of another young black male), but the answer to that is that if you don’t find a marriagable man you won’t get pregnant, not that you’ll get pregnant anyway, accept that the father will be a non-factor, and expect other people (especially me!) to help support you and the kid.
There’s a key factor that seem to have been ignored completely here – education. Kids need to be properly educated in the skills they need to be employed in decent-paying jobs, which means that the current empahsis in schools on athletics needs to be keyed way down, and academics need to be stressed a lot more over “finding yourself” and other areas where feelings and emotions are stressed. Music and art definitely have a place in the curriculum, but with an idea to educate as well as allow self-expression.
Now, part of what we have here is that children whose parents don’t get involved in their education do poorer than kids whose parents do get involved. And I see this in my nice white middle-class neighborhood, never mind in a poor neighborhood. So again, two parent families are key to raising a child. If you are not going to have a husband who’s going to help you raise your kid, DON’T GET PREGNANT! Yes, I support government-supported provision of inexpensive birth control devices or medications for both genders.
The inner-city public school environment is often of poor quality and unsafe. So I propose providing a financial incentive to teachers to teach there. Yup, that’s my money I’m proposing to spend. I figure it’ll save in the long run. I also propose the development of some kind of evaluation system that takes into account the educational level the kids started at. It would be used to evaluate the teachers and clean out the ineffective ones. Make it a lot easier to fire teachers.
Also, secure the schools. Make them safe. Put cops in them. Put a cop in every classroom and tell them, “The teacher is there to teach. Your job is to maintain order.” Search kids for contraband (drugs, guns, knives, MP3 players, cell phones, etc.) on the way in and out. Search the school with drug and weapon-sniffing dogs often. Impose strict discipline on the students. Adopt strict dress codes, or even school uniforms (it’s cheaper and helps focus on the concept that school is for learning, not for partying). Make a school safer than the kids’ homes and the streets and they’ll want to be in school.
The lack of addressing the effects of educational deprivation in this author’s article is astounding to me. No single factor overrides the effects of education in upward mobility, or the lack thereof, in this society. Even racism; it’s been the effects of racism on educational opportunities that has hurt non-whites the most.
It’s instructive to me to see that Orientals do so well in American society. They have long been victims of racism in our society. Orientals have been banned by immigration law, lynched and confined in ghettos. In three wars of living memory we have demonized them, painted them as savages and slaughtered them in droves. Yet look how well they do in America. When I go to interview students at a local state-supported high school for exceptional students, I am faced with a parade of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese students, far out of proportion to their presence in the population as a whole. Why? My belief is because they are almost always in two-parent families (who often start their own businesses and work hard at them when they immigrate) that emphasize education and wouldn’t dream of glorifying their kid’s performance on an athletic team.
I tend to doubt these girls are sitting down and thoughtfully making “pro” and “con” lists and then saying “Clearly, my rational choice is to get knocked up now.”
Most people do what everyone else around them does, and sees their culture as the norm.
Yeah. Cops in the classroom. What a way to give poor kids the idea that the rest of the country is pretty sure you are just future criminals anyways.
And hey, pregnant teens shouldn’t have been having sex. Not that we are going to give them anything constructive to do – since the schools suck, it’s not safe to go out, you have no money to anyways, your other options are drinking and drugs, and the best you can hope for is a pink ghetto job, at worst, welfare or minimum wage hell.
I think alot of girls in this situation think to themselves: at least someone will love me. Someone will care about me. I won’t be worthless anymore. Plus, everyone I know had kids when they were teens.
Amp may be being a bit of an elitist liberal – I’ll give you that – but at least he actually seems to care about these kids, instead of treating them like some sort of viruses to be altered or destroyed.
Q Grrl–
You say that “More effort is spent in creating ‘barely legal’ porn than there is spent of ensuring that birth control, sex ed, abortion or prenatal care are available to teenage girls”–which is undoubtably true, particularly for white teenagers in middle-class communities–but I’m not convinced that birth control alone would solve high pregnancy rates. I live in an urban area on the east coast, my partner is a teacher in the public school system here, and let me tell you, I cannot believe how much information there is about birth control given to young women. It’s about 180 degrees opposite from my experience growing up in an affluent suburb.
I’m not sure what your background is or where you’ve lived and I don’t want to assume anything. But I’ve learned to be very, very careful about my natural inclination to expand my experiences into the universal experience, particularly around reproductive rights. The whole history of contraceptives, abortion, adoption, you name it has been pretty fundamentally shaped by class and particularly racial divides.
If anything, I think that Amp’s post is about how both the conservative and liberal view of teenage pregnancy has always assumed: (1) Young poor women don’t want to get pregnant, because ‘we’ see that as a poor choice, and thus it must *be* a poor choice; and (2) the reason they get pregnant is because they are too poor/uninformed/lacking-access/etc to prevent it. But what if #1 isn’t true? Why shouldn’t young poor women want to get pregnant? (That is, from the POV of a potential single teenage mother, why should this be a bad choice?)
I am reminded of population control organizations (aid orgs, if you want to be nice about it) going into third-world countries, starting in the 50s and continuing through today, providing contraceptives and then being flummoxed that birth rates didn’t drop. They moved to more and more “foolproof” methods that didn’t require “compliance” (ie, contraceptive shots, IUDs, and sterilization), thinking that the problem must be with the darn women who couldn’t figure out or access birth control.
Then whoops! they happened to figure out that the only way to bring down birth rates was to give women educational and, more importantly, employment opportunities. Every country that has gone through the shift of employing women in paid work has experienced the “transition” to vastly lower fertility rates.
Bottom line? Giving women the means to prevent pregnancy isn’t enough, if there isn’t some sort of “rational” reason for women to want to prevent pregnancy. (Like paid work, and the opportunity for a higher standard of life that the work presents.) The same dynamic may well be going on in very poor communities that lack access to decently-waged work opportunities: why *would* those women delay what has been an immensely satisfying life experience for most people, if they don’t have anything to gain by waiting?
Bottom line? Giving women the means to prevent pregnancy isn’t enough, if there isn’t some sort of “rational” reason for women to want to prevent pregnancy. (Like paid work, and the opportunity for a higher standard of life that the work presents.) The same dynamic may well be going on in very poor communities that lack access to decently-waged work opportunities: why *would* those women delay what has been an immensely satisfying life experience for most people, if they don’t have anything to gain by waiting?
Beautiful. Just absolutely beautiful.
I tend to be suspicious of conservative “easier” solutions; they tend to refelct the conservative belief in a free lunch (another example is Bush’s belief in his ability to cut taxes, increase spending and balance the budget all at the same time). Nonetheless, I obviously can’t specifically respond to any ideas you have if you don’t actually present them.
Looking at the lives currently led by many poor black women in the US, I find it hard to understand the claim that there is currently not enough stick. I agree about the lack of carrot – indeed, a couple of my suggestions could be described as suggesting substantive carrots.
I don’t think we should treat poor teen moms as either entirely helpless and blameless or just too stupid to keep themselves out of trouble and therefore undeserving of sympathy. Like anyone, they make good and bad choices; the restrictions of poverty just means that the consequences of the bad choices are much harder to mitigate.
By which I mean, I don’t think it’s so much that teen moms are making a logical choice as that they are making an illogical choice in an atmosphere that both encourages such choices (low rewards for good choices, peer examples for bad ones that give quicker gratification) and also makes the consequences of those choices impossible to overcome.
The key, as has been noted, is to provide more rewards for making good choices; i.e., realistic hope for future achievements that bad choices would kibosh, as well as mechanisms (birth control, abortion, programs aimed at keeping teen moms in school and getting them jobs) for overcoming the bad choices when they do get made.
As for the cost of such programs? Well, poverty is *expensive* to our society. Increased crime, disease, and homelessness come with their own price tags. Not to mention the waste of human capital symbolized by people whose ideas and talents never make it into the mainstream workforce. Investment in eliminating chronic poverty, done properly, is not just a moral idea, but makes good financial sense.
I agree with RonF that education is the item left out of Amp’s list, though I don’t agree with many of Ron’s opinions. And I think that he is right in pointing out the obvious impulsiveness of many teenagers, whatever their situation.
I wouldn’t discount the importance of parental attitudes towards out-of-wedlock pregnancy. To upper-class white parents, the obvious responsible thing to do when faced with a pregnant 15 year old daughter is to pressure her to have an abortion, or if truly opposed to abortion, to pressure her to give the child up to adoption, with the real assurance that there are many well off prospective parents for the healthy white newborn baby. For these whites, the shame is having a daughter who does not follow the middle-class respectable married-first-then-kids life plan, and the responsible thing to do is to maximize their daughter’s chance of remaining in the middle class by education or by a “good marriage”. For many black parents of pregnant teens, it would be more shameful to have it be known that you abandoned your blood kin (grandchild) to strangers, especially in light of interracial adoptions by white parents and in light of fewer prospective adoptive parents who are black. Adoption, perhaps informal, by childless kin is perfectly acceptable. Both white and black parents are trying to be responsible in their own ways, even though the whites might think the blacks are being naive and irresponsible, and the blacks might think the whites are being heartless, anti-family, and irresponsible.
There is often no tangible evidence, in poor black neighborhoods, that education leads to success. The kids see the neighborhood high school graduate adults working as cooks, janitors, Walmart cashiers, etc, and don’t see many college graduate adults, since the most successful adults move to suburbia. The kids could use some black college graduate role models, and after school enrichment in the neighborhood, as well as better quality schools. Too often, the kids’ horizons are their neighborhood and “TV-land”. The kids aren’t going on school field trips to the zoo and the newspaper and the art museum, unlike their suburban counterparts. It’s no wonder their role models are athletes and entertainers they see on TV.
(1) Point well taken – the causality does go in both directions. However, for poor black women, the evidence doesn’t show that (on average) they wind up poorer if they have a child at 17 rather than 25.
Of course, there’s also the option of not having children at all; but for many people, including many poor blacks, becoming a parent is an essential life goal.
(2) I’m sure that better access to birth control and abortion will reduce pregnancy rates a bit. But many people get pregnant because they want to.
I think AB’s post #11 is an excellent explanation of why just providing more and better birth control is not going to create huge changes (although if it improves just a few people’s lives, then that’s justification enough!).
AB wrote:
No, I’ve never heard of it, but I looked it up after reading your post and it sounds great. I’ve added it to my (distressingly long) “read this someday” list.
For affluent white women, chances are great that they’ll be in excellent health in their 30s, and perhaps better able to afford top-notch medical care than they could have in their 20s. Affluence aside, it is a fact that high numbers of Black and White women end up having children in their peak childbearing years. From the article linked to in my post:
Anyway, back to your post…
You wrote:
I very much agree with all this.
Thanks for all your posts on this thread – I thought post #11 was particularly excellent.
Jeff writes:
(1) Point well taken.
(2) I don’t presume that women must have children. But I think it’s a fact that many people consider having a child an essential part of life, and will not give up on becoming a parent unless becoming a parent means giving up on something else they want even more. Nor do I really feel it’s my place to say that people shouldn’t want to become parents – being a parent is a huge source of satisfaction for many people, after all.
It comes down to opportunity costs again. I don’t assume that poor teens want to be parents any more than everyone else does. But what you give up to become a parent matters; people who give up less to become parents are more likely to become parents. Given the low opportunity costs of having children for poor black teens, it’s no surprise that many have children.
Q Grrl, you asked about my sources. As I said in the post, much of this post was drawn from the work of Arline Geronimus.
I was also thinking about Kathryn Edin on why girls don’t get married – I read a speech by her recently. Although I didn’t end up writing much about the marriage question, she points out that for many poor mothers it makes sense not to get married. From a recent article by Edin:
Edin also points out that women’s income now has more to do with if low-income mothers get married than men’s income does (although both matter); women quite sensibly are worried about being trapped by poverty in bad marriages, and about having too little power in the marriage, so are less likely to get married if they think their own income is too low.
That fits in with my general view that when we talk about something like unmarried motherhood among the poor, we should assume as a first principle that poor teen single mothers are just as rational in their choices as everyone else is.
I hoped to reply to more folks here, but now I have a dental appoitment instead (ugh!). Later.
Thanks for the sources Amp… missed the first one the first time around.
*ducks*
Yeah. Cops in the classroom. What a way to give poor kids the idea that the rest of the country is pretty sure you are just future criminals anyways.
You think poor kids need to be told that crime is prevalent in school and that their safety is at risk there? No, they know more about it than we do. Cops in the schools will tell them that they will be safe. Schools, above all else, have to be safe. If you have a idea that is more effective to create a safe environment in the schools than having cops in the schools, I’d love to hear it. But however it’s done, schools must be a safe haven for students and teachers, so they can concentrate on education when they are there. And those who seek to disrupt the educational process have got to be straightened out or moved out, swiftly. Once the kids see that the cops are there to deal with assholes and not to interfere with the kids who actually want to go to school; once they see that the cops are there to stop the drug sales and assaults and harassment (sexual and otherwise), they’ll get cool about having them there.
And hey, pregnant teens shouldn’t have been having sex.
Glad to see we agree on something. No one who is not prepared to support a child should be doing what creates them.
Not that we are going to give them anything constructive to do – since the schools suck,
Which is why I argue strenously that nothing will work until we fix the schools these kids go to. There are very strong correlations between level of education and age of first pregnancy and number of children. The higher the educational level, the more likely it is that the person will wait until later in life to have kids, have fewer of them, and be able to support without external assistance the ones they have.
you have no money to anyways, your other options are drinking and drugs,
If you’ve got no money, how are you able to afford drinking and drugs? That gets expensive fast.
and the best you can hope for is a pink ghetto job,
I’m not up to speed on the term “pink ghetto”.
at worst, welfare or minimum wage hell.
Hence my emphasis on education. If you don’t have a good education and can’t speak clear English, you are not going to be able to make a decent wage. Making jobs available (and how do people propose to do that, anyway?) does no good if the kids aren’t prepared to fill them.
Amp, this is an interesting comment on the Edin study:
“Edin and Kefalas asked each of the Philadelphia-area single mothers they interviewed to chronicle their most recent breakup. They asked them to identify why their relationship had failed, allowing them to cite problems on their own rather than prompting them with a list of potential difficulties. Nearly half the mothers cited a chronic pattern of domestic violence, while four in ten blamed repeated and often flagrant infidelities of their partner. About a third named their partner’s ongoing involvement with crime and the imprisonment that so often followed. More than a third cited drug and alcohol abuse. […]
What may be tolerable behavior in a boyfriend, at least for a time, is completely unacceptable in a husband. Further, it is foolish even to consider marriage until a man has shown that he is ready and able to meet these higher standards.
When these young women got involved with these guys, did they see him display any of these behaviors? Seems to me that they should wait until they have time to make a judgement on that before they marry him and have a child with him (in that order, BTW). I’ll certainly buy off that some guys don’t show some of these behaviors until they have been in a relationship for a while, sometimes even not until they marry. Obviously, you can’t cheat on someone until there’s a relationship to cheat on. But I’ll bet there have been clues in most of the cases, especially if there’s some time between the start of the relationship and the marriage, and the marriage and the pregnancy.
The statement that I put in bold print kind of got to me. If behavior isn’t suitable for a husband, it shouldn’t be suitable for a boyfriend, at least not one that you’re going to consider marrying and getting pregnant by. Which is what is said in the statement immediately after the bold print.
I’ve seen the comment that you can summarize as “I had a baby because I wanted someone who would love me unconditionally” before. Seems understandable, but also pretty immature and selfish to me, which is why, I guess, you’d hear it from a teenager.
AB, hell of a post.
So, folks, the question I have is this; what can be done about this? What do you expect the government to spend our money to do? What can private enterprise do? What can the people who are directly affected by this do for themselves? Where does responsibility lie, and what should the responsible parties do?
2) Middle-class, attractive jobs need to become widely available for poor folks.
How do you propose this be made to occur?
Cheap to free college education that one can support a child while getting would be a start. Alternatley, publicaly funded apprentice systems.
I’m of two minds on the “free college education for everyone” as the solution to poverty. I do believe that a college education should be available to everyone willing, able, and desiring of it, regardless of your ability to pay.
But the thing is, at the end of the day, we still need janitors. We still need grocery clerks. We still need people filling all the service jobs, all the part-time jobs, all the non-college-degree-requiring jobs. Even in the most socialist, all-the-free-education-you-want societies (Sweden, for example), the need for those jobs doesn’t go away.
I’ve read (don’t have the cite, sorry) that in some ways, college is becoming the new high school: that is, 50 years ago, all you needed was a high school education for a decently-paying job. Now, with the proportion of decently-paying jobs to job seekers even lower, employers can demand a college degree as the entry requirement. Jobs that used to require a BA require an MA. And so forth. So relying solely on education won’t solve poverty, in my view.
I think we need to find ways to ensure that people can survive–hell, thrive–on all the jobs in this country. Which would require that even janitors make decent wages, have access to affordable health care, some modicum of flexibility in their jobs, and so forth. I’m not sure this can be achieved by government fiat–certainly not in the ways that the Dems have traditionally tried, anyway–but I do think there are some policy solutions. (But this post has run on a bit long, so I’ll stop there.)
My mom taught for yearsin an inner city school for pregnant girls. This was a middle/high shoolwith severlhundred students both pregnant and with small children. The girls were between 12 and 19,and most of them came from the poorest neigborhods in town, both black and white.
It seemed that thereason they got pregnant was because that was what was expectedof them, thier mothers had them at age 16 or soand thier grandmothers had thier mothers at the same age. So these girls would have lots of unprotectedsex,because they were horny teenagers,and if they happened to get pregnant, they had and it was no big deal because thats what everyone else did. They didn’t get pregnant on purpose. My mom had teach sex ed and she said that many of the students had no idea about things liketheir own menstral cycles,let alone contraceptives. Many of the girlsfirstsexualexperiences were with much older men, sometimes with relatives(my mom said a fair fraction were molested at an early age but that is true fora fair fraction of young people of any class).
So I don’t think these girls are making a rational choice to get pregnant but rather it is sort of understood that everyone has unprotected sex and pregnancy is a just a risk you take. I think that is harder to undo than just access to heathcare although my m0m thought that proper sex ed did encourage the girls to not take so many risks.
The neigborhood I live in now is a lower class urban white neigborhood and it isn’t unusual to see pregnant teens smoking on the corner or getting in fights. There just seems to be an acceptance of high risksex and pregnancy, and I don’t know how anyone isgoing to change peoples entire outlook. When my great family came to this country in the early 1900’s they acceptedthe fact that you got married and pregnant at 16 lived right next to yu parents and got a job right away. It took generations to change that.
Cheap to free college education does no good for students that have a completely inadequate education when they graduate from high school. And then there’s the ones that don’t even do that.
I do confess to being torn. Yes, educational programs for young single parents (whether academic or trade oriented) will hopefully lead to them being able to support themselves and their children. But it seems invidious to me to make it easier to live with single parenthood. I thought the idea here was to present plans to make single parenthood less attractive though provision of better educational opportunities, not more attractive. If the state is to intervene, it should be before these young girls are having kids of their own.
It should not be public policy to support the concept and practice of children having children; of any single person having children on their own; of any person having a child that they are not prepared to support on their own without public assistance. I’m not saying that a law should be passed against it, but it should not be encouraged or supported. The state should not be in the business of replacing the role of a parent, whether you view that role to be as a traditional breadwinner or as an equal partner.
Provision of the type of educational opportunity is a stop-gap measure. Yes, it solves some kids’ problems, but it does not help solve the underlying problem of teen pregnancy.
I think it’s a mistake to leave out the one huge reason people have children: it’s satisfying. I mean, for white women, this is so understood that it never needs to be explicitly said[…]
Yet you never see this even considered in the public discourse around single, poor, teenage mothers (who are conceptualized, always, as black in the public discourse). It’s really denying humanity to these women”“hey, not surprising, racism has been doing this for years, for centuries.
No, it’s not denying humanity to them. No one is puzzled as to why black women or poor women wish to have kids. They are puzzled at why so many wish to do so at a young age. What is actually going on is the viewing of these people through the lens of middle-class values.
That is, most of the people who engage in such policy discussions would never deliberately get pregnant until they had a degree and a good-paying job; they might do so by accident, but certainly they would see a degree and a good-paying job as prerequisites to family. Because they assume that everyone thinks like them, they cannot understand why someone would deliberately get pregnant as a teenager; they wouldn’t, so they can’t see anyone else doing it either.
LC, the issue of men older than 21 having sex with girls the age of 15 that resulted in pregnancy got a lot of notice in Illinois. It’s statutory rape laws now have a sliding scale of punishment based on the age differential between the perpetrator and the victim.
And you ask how to fight the idea of “everyone does it, that’s how things work”? I hate to say it, but there’s the carrot and the stick; provide better alternatives, and provide a greater disadvantage to doing it. The posters here tend to emphasize the carrot approach, and I agree with that as long as the carrot means helping to provide alternative choices and making them more attractive than getting pregnant. I don’t agree with making life easier for kids who do get pregnant, since we want to discourage that.
One way to make the service jobs pay more would be to make it harder for businesses to import illegal aliens (I say “aliens” rather than immigrants because not everyone who comes here intends to stay for hte rest of their life) to do labor for them; the glut of potential workers caused largely by people coming here illegally drives down wages a great deal.
I don’t know that unwed teen pregnancy is the rational choice as much as it’s the conformist choice. For several generations now – since the “man out of the house rule” was added to welfare regulations in the 1950s – it’s been normal for black children to be raised in single-mother-headed households, even though the rule has been substantially revised. Given that it’s normal for black children to be raised exclusively by women, the teenager aspect is the rational choice within the cultural circumstances.
You come close to addressing the point that I find most significant in this mess when you point out that many young black men are in prison, but you don’t go far enough. The larger issue is the need to restore the ideal of two married parents as the preferred family structure for raising black children. Keeping the boys out of jail (and out of the criminal activities that lead to jail) is a big part of the problem, but not all of it. Young black males graduate from high school, attend college, and graduate college at half the rate for young black females. Young black women can’t find suitable husband material in their neighborhoods, and many are averse to taking white boyfriends and husbands in their stead. So we have a black matriarchy in poor communities and no way out. This matriarchy is bad for children, another issue unaddressed in the post; who would prefer a teenage mom to an adult mom, especially if there’s no dad around?
The young black men are messed-up largely because they don’t have fathers in the house teaching them how to be men, how to defer gratification, control anger, be competitive, and work hard in school. The focus of the law in the last 30 years is to put men’s income into the woman’s family, but not the man’s presence and all that it brings.
The breakdown of the black family has hurt not only the men but the women and children as well. This is the direct result of American feminism’s zero-sum politics, and it’s a disaster. Men and women either succeed together or fail together, and until we realize that and stop pitting one against the other in a never-ending gender war we’re all going to suffer, just as black children do today.
Glaivester, I’m not really sure the data would support that falling wages over the past 30 years is a result of low-wage immigrants or aliens entering the workforce. I think it has a lot more to do with the shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy in this country.
I do think we have some well-intentioned employment policy that has led to a bifurcation of jobs into well-paying salaried jobs with benefits and poorly-paying jobs with no benefits and no flexibility. Preventing employers from importing illegal aliens to fill the poorly-paying agricultural and service jobs won’t magically make those jobs pay better.
What would help is updating employment policies to cover all jobs, not just fulltime jobs. (Minimum wage laws, FMLA, requirements to provide various fringe benefits such as health insurance are pretty much only mandated for full-time jobs.) Or, some of those fringe benefits could be taken over by the government (universal health care, for example), making it less expensive for employers to hire full-time workers.
RonF:
1.)Yes, kids in these schools know that their schools are unsafe. The problem is that treating them all like potential criminals is not a good way of trying to get teenagers to listen to you. I’m all for finding ways of reducing violence in schools – however, I went to one of these schools. No matter how many metal detectors or security people they installed – the scary people still had the weapons, except you didn’t. And you couldn’t report it, because then the teachers assume you are hanging out with the wrong crowd and gets all over your case.
Cops in the classroom, particularly in areas where cops are regarded as the enemy by these kids parents, is not going to be conducive to learning. It is, however, going to be creating an antagonistic atmosphere that any teacher worth half a grain of salt could tell you will fuck up the entire process.
2.)Pregnant teens shouldn’t have been having sex. Amazingly, we do agree on something. I personally feel that sex is something people shouldn’t have until they are emotionally mature enough to make rational decisions – for most people, this doesn’t occur until sometime around age 22 or 23. However, teenagers are still going to have sex no matter what you or I think (hell, I had sex as a teenager – got pregnant at 20.) There are only 3 reasons anyone I know waited until at least after high school to not have sex: Lack of opportunity, lack of opportunity and religion. Since we can’t go about forcing religion in schools (and I don’t think it’s a good idea anyways) let’s take a look at lack of opportunity. When teenagers have things to do that are valued, they can access and receive some sort of status boost from, they will spend their time on that. In poor areas, girls get status from fucking. Or looking fuckable. Guess what they spend alot of their time, money and effort doing? Not only that, but they are also alone, ALOT.
3.)Actually, you can almost always score drinks and drugs for free if you are even a vaguely attractive teenage girl. There will always be some guy who hopes to get you screwed up enough to screw him. And these are far more available in poor areas, mostly because so many of the homes don’t have parents in them due to long working hours.
4.)A pink ghetto job is a job that, while you might be able to get decent hours or insurance, has fairly low pay and extremely little advancement opportunity. These jobs have been historically restricted to women (hence the pink ghetto) and are still primarily female occupations. It includes secretarial or clerical work, elder care, child care/nannying, house cleaning, and other personal service type jobs.
5.) Most kids get by the time that they are in high school that if they go to a poor inner city school, it wouldn’t matter if they graduate valedictorian of their class. No one will think that they have a proper education until they have spoken to them. It is very hard to get a job interview when people look at your resume and see a school that they heard about last week on the news as being a hotbed for gang violence. Is it surprising that they mostly give up on education?
I think my basic point is that we not only need to have opportunities for these kids – we need to make sure that the kids get the message that these are for real. Because they are growing up surrounded by people who have given up – mostly with good reason – but given up.
RonF, what you’re worried about is a common response to programs that help the poor…the fear of rewarding bad choices and creating dependency. And it’s not an unreasonable one. But it ignores the reality that human beings…yes even teenagers…*can* make rational choices, provided they *have* those choices available to them. A great many people on welfare don’t want to be on welfare–but simply kicking them off of it does nothing to address the issues that put them there in the first place. It may just turn them from welfare-dependent people into homeless people.
Ending or reducing poverty and its consequences is an enormous task, and as far as our government goes, what I want to see them do is treat that task as the worthwhile investment it is, not as “charity.” Our programs need to focus on reclamation of the poor, not handouts–although handouts of some sort are going to be necessary to keep some of them alive at critical points. Just some of the things our government could do: Encouraging and rewarding business investment in poor areas. Micro-loans to help start small businesses. Easier access to education and training from elementary school on–which means paying teachers decent wages and investing in school infrastructure. Investing in our networks of social workers to allow them to do their jobs. Incentives to encourage people to stay and live in cities, instead of moving to the suburbs and taking their community involvement with them. Healthcare for everyone (I’m afraid there’s no way around this).
These are not profitless expenditures of “our money.” They are efforts that build a ladder out of poverty, resulting in less crime, disease, and homelessness; that will slow the decrease in property values of inner-cities, thus leading to greater tax revenues in the long run. Those who leave poverty can consume and create more goods, pay more taxes, and contribute to a higher quality of life for everyone. We are already spending the money we could be using to fight poverty; we’re just spending it on the war on drugs, police, and prisons.
I think that both AB and Emjaybee make good points that I want to applaud and extend on.
AB: I agree with you that every job should be a “decent” job. No matter how well we educate our population, we are going to need janitors, waitstaff, personal care providers, farmworkers, and so on. Like it or not, someone has to do them. So I believe that the solution is to make sure that all jobs – not just the “good, professional” jobs – have decent working conditions and pay a living wage. There is no reason that a janitoral job, in and of itself, has to be degrading and awful. Since someone is going to have to mop the floors, let’s put the dignity back in honest work. There is no reason on earth that all jobs can’t pay a living wage and have good working conditions. Even if a farmworker, say, has to pick crops in the hot sun, he can have access to a hat, sunblock, drinking water, and ample opportunities to take breaks and go to the bathroom.
That said, I like the idea of widespread education for its own sake. I’d love to see everyone get the equivalent of a college liberal-arts education – not in order to increase marketability, but because it’s good for public life, and our democracy, to have a well-educated populace. The religious right probably HATES the idea for just that reason, though I bounce with glee at the thought of a massively well-educated and critical-thinking America Throwing The Bastards Out.
Emjaybee, yes of course alleviating poverty leads to a higher quality of life for everyone and is not just “wasting our taxpayer’s money.” I wish more people would get the connection, especially those in higher office. Part of the problem is that results will not be instantaneous – too many people expect money to be the equivalent of Harry Potter’s magic wand, “Accio Results!” and the real world does not work this way.
The idea of a “Marshall Plan” for inner cities and impoverished areas appeals to me. The idea of reparations for slavery have been floated around, how about the reparations consisting of a Marshall-Plan type of restructuring and rebuilding those parts of America which do not have access to our “American Dream?” Jobs, education, health care, housing, infrastructure, and hope can all be part of this plan, and I believe that the rewards reaped will more than repay the monetary expenditures.
Now I want to address the “marriage market” (ew, but I don’t know what else to call it) and choices to bear children out of wedlock in poor vs. middle-class communities.
Kathryn Edin, cited above, is co-author of “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Childbearing Before Marriage” (with Maria Kefalas). Much of what is cited in the link above, is restated in “Promises.” Domestic abuse is rampant, many men have been in prison, many do drugs. I would wager that most middle-class young women (of whatever race) take it for granted that they will be able to find a man who doesn’t abuse them, who has not been in jail, who doesn’t have a drug problem. Not that middle-class men don’t abuse their spouses or do drugs, just that this is anomalous rather than normal, as Edin’s research seems to show that it is in poorer communities.
There is always a tremendous amount of media dust and noise about “man shortages,” but ask an average middle-class young woman what turns her off about the last man she dated and dumped and chances are you’ll hear something like “He wears socks with Tevas,” “He was allergic to my cat,” “He spent too much time watching football.” Not that those shouldn’t be deal-breakers – I would not want a man who was allergic to my cat – but I don’t think most middle-class women confront the very real deal-breakers so prevalent in the young women of Edin’s research. I think it’s hard for middle-class people to comprehend what it’s like to have all the men one meets have drug problems or be in and out of prison. And what this means is that many middle-class people do not have a clue as to how being married can really ruin a woman’s life instead of enhancing it. I think most women are better off as single mothers than married to men who abuse them and drugs. I agree this shouldn’t be acceptable behavior in boyfriends, either, but if the market prospects are so limited, and there really are NO good men there, what’s a woman to do?
Middle-class white women also have much more ability to cast a wider net. Most inter-racial marriages involve educated people, and white and Asian women are far more likely to marry inter-racially than black women. (You’d think that black women, faced with a shortage of eligible black men, would be eager to intermarry but this is not so. I am not sure why. Are the women refusing to consider men of other races or are the men refusing to consider black women as wives? Or is it a little of both?) Also, research by Daniel Lichter (I can dig up the paper and cite it if anyone’s interested) shows that educated white women who delay marriage respond to a diminishing pool of choices by casting a wider net – i.e. marrying blue-collar men or outside their race. I have noticed this phenomenon in my local paper’s wedding announcements – I see brides with BA’s marrying construction-worker grooms. These days women can leverage earning power and educational prestige into good marriages, too. I bet their husbands think their wives are quite a catch. Poor women don’t have this leverage opportunity.
So what’s a poor teenage girl to do? I doubt she sits down and works out a strategy like a good little economist. But she probably DOES realize on some level that a happy marriage and fulfilling career are not within her realm of possibility, and that if she wants kids, she might as well have them. And that children are an important source of fulfillment to a woman who doesn’t have a happy marriage or decent job.
When economists talk about “rational” choices, they don’t mean just choices arrived at by a process of (preferably aristotelian) ratiocination and careful weighing of alternatives. They simply mean choices that do a reasonable job of maximizing expected utility. Pigeons and rats make rational choices (by the economist’s definition) all the time.
Why am I pointing this out? Because the whole series of arguments about impulse control and mores and social expectations and peer behavior is essentially irrelevant. Sure those things can accelerate or delay people’s responses to obvious incentives (OK, very occasionally they can prevent them, but that’s a matter of how you define utility functions). But as long as the incentives are pushing people in one direction, all of the social pressure and rationalization and expectations in the world are at best going to act as modifiers.
The education issue is important not just for getting people better jobs (as someone pointed out, there will always be low-status jobs to be done) but also for getting them better lives. Poor and literate is almsot always preferable to poor and illiterate — and not just because it’s more likely to be temporary. Which raises another point about those low-status jobs: in countries where education is good and free, you find smart, well-educated and well-informed people doing those jobs. The jobs are better for it, and not low-status in nearly the same way as in the US.
To respond to one of Crystal’s points:
I know this is going to anger the “race doesn’t exist” crowd, but on a number of characteristics that tend to vary bewtween the races, blacks and Asians tend to be on oppostie ends of a specturm, with whites in the middle. For example, blacks are on average more muscular than whites who are on average more muscular than Asians. On a number of these characteristics, Asians tend to exhibit more characteristics that are associated with femininity and blacks more that are associated with masculinity (Obviously, I am talking about averages here, I am sure you can find very masculine Asians and very feminine blacks). This could be one reason why interracial marraiges tend to be black man/white woman ot white man/Asian woman rather than black woman/white man or white woman/Asian man.
Steve Sailer has commented a lot on this.
From what I’ve heard and what stats I could find, the teen pregnancy rate in Black women and girls is quite a bit lower than has been. What has increased is the number of pregnancies in Black teenage women that end in abortion.
Pregnancies in Black teenagers happen for many reasons. I think it’s hard to qualify it to only several, or that it’s usually a rational choice. I know women who had children in later teens, and it was different circumstances. I could be wrong, though, but in discussions, there’s this image of the Black teen mother, but even though Black teens are still disproportionately represented, their numbers have lessened at least up until 2003.
Solutions to the problems? Eliminate racism, sexism, patriarchy, classism and white and/or male privilage. Until you do that, you will never, ever be able to implement the listed suggestions, no matter how well intended you are, it won’t happen. You have to cure the cancers first.
Environmental racism often happens in poor neighborhoods b/c sometimes that is a way to get revenue(and no one wants to put a dump in a wealthier neighborhood for obvious reasons). This is also a problem on American Indian reservations, with toxic facilities being built when money is paid to the tribes beforehand. Winona LaDuke is one of many native activists to try to counter this. Sometime’s it’s something put in your community without your choice. Other times, for money to come in, it’s the only one that you’re allowed. Unless you want to be gentrified out of your neighborhood. As we’ve learned with Katrina and other situations, a Black woman’s life at any age is not worth much at all, as far as our society’s concerned.
Another, too many Black men in prison. Actually, about 1/3 of Black men between 20-40 are either in jail, probation, or on parole, is an often cited stat. Why is that, do you think? I know the answer b/c I’ve talked to many of these men, and their families. To start with, you have a multi-tiered criminal justice system in this country, but that’s only part of it, and by itself, that’s another thread. That’s racism, classism and sexism in terms of how Black men are viewed under patriarchy. How do you begin to address a serious problem, beyond the statement, we need to make sure we preserve more marriageable Black men(marriageable may also apply to class issues associated with racism and Black men that limit access to higher paying jobs and careers)
Cops in schools, don’t make kids feel safer. The DOJ gives school districts heaps of money to put cops, probation, etc. in public schools. What’s the criteria for this? That at least 51% of the population of students must be low-income and/or minorities. It’s called the Safe Schools, Healthy students or something similar. Incidently, schools like Columbine High, in Colorado would not qualify.
I’ve been involved in cases with abusive behavior by cops in schools, from tasing young kids, to pepperspraying Black students, but not White, to handcuffing students for hours, even to assault and battery. It took two years to get a school district to reassign an abusive cop(with an average of 7 personnnel investigations a year ranging from DV, to DUI, to brandishing a firearm) out of the school.
I agree. The first way to do that is to examine more closely what the definition of “someone” is and why it is.
No, Glaivester, your comments don’t tick me off b/c of the “race doesn’t exist” argument, it’s the constant masculization of Black women that pisses me off. Historically, they have been portrayed by Whites as being less than women.
One of the first defenses four White male police officers tried to use to explain why they fired 12 bullets out of 34 total into an unconscious Black woman inside a car, was because she looked like a guy, with masculine features.
Here’s her picture, and you can decide, masculine or feminine?
article on Tyisha Miller
Yes, there are disparenties in the numbers of White man/Black woman relationships v Black man/White women relationships, and even their relative “success” rates, but these aren’t due to physiological factors related to preconceptions about what’s masculine and feminine, but likely, other sociological factors, past and present including racism/sexism’s influence in our society.
…it’s the constant masculization of Black women that pisses me off. Historically, they have been portrayed by Whites as being less than women.
Wow – to be masculine is to be inferior.
Nope, just a hell of a lot more expensive.
If that were true, that masculinity is inferior, it would be like–Wow— because in our society, the more positive traits are assigned the term, masculine and the inferior traits, feminine. Except for folks like you who would feel so threatened by the dissolution of the masculinity is good, feminity is weak dynamic in our society. You would probably never recover from it.
Actually, the two sentences don’t go together. Black women are masculinized, in comparison to White women, and in large part, so that White men can uphold the femininity of White women. Black women are also viewed as less than human, not because of being masculinized but due to the fact that the only people which society values and affords full rights and priviliages are White people, which are then divided into classes and/or genders.
I don’t really accept the principles of masculine or feminine as being absolutes, because of the history of sexism and racism that such classifications have inflicted on everyone but White men to some degree. So, I’m not really qualified to view one as being better than the other, although patriarchal society itself has done just this habitually.
Hmmm, that comment was to the latest MRO person to appear here, but I seem to have lost him….lol.
I deleted Richard’s comment in the hope of preventing this thread, which I’m finding really interesting, from being derailed.
But then I saw you had done a long response to him, which I didn’t want to delete too (I feel worse about deleting longer comments), so I’ve un-deleted Richard’s comment.
But please – Richard, you’ve had your critique, and RadFem has had a reply. I hope we can now drop that line of inquiry and return to the subject of this thread.
Um, Radfem attributed more words to me than the eight words I actually wrote. Is this some sort of linguistic reparations for patriarchy?
You’re not running a fair game here, Amp, so I’ll leave.
I want to return to something that was addressed upthread, and by Ampersand in his original post. That is, what Geronimous calls “weathering,” or how poor black people wind up in poor health early in life. The New York Times magazine section had an article on poor people’s premature aging and bad health a couple of years ago. When I read this it struck me how many poor people were ailing, broken-down and prematurely old in their forties. They had diabetes, heart disease, and a whole list of other ailments. Meanwhile, most middle-class white people expect to, and do, retain good health into their seventies.
For middle-class white women, fertility definitely starts to go in the thirties, but health is still robust. For the poor, health appears to peak in the late teens and early twenties. And this goes for all poor people, not just poor people of color – another, unrelated, newspaper article I remember featured a poor white woman who was already in a nursing home at the age of only sixty! At that age, my mom was still working! I think this is another area where middle-class folks, the ones who are the policy-makers and politicians and talking heads, do not have a clue.
It makes sense, as Geronimous points out, for someone whose healthy life expectancy is short to have kids as young as possible. A middle-class white woman who has a kid at thirty-five might have less energy than a woman who has a kid in her twenties, and will have to deal with a teenager during her menopausal years (two huge life transitions to deal with at once). But the odds are highly in her favor that she will remain healthy and active for many more years, giving her time to see her children grow up and enjoy her grandchildren. However, a poor woman who has a child at thirty-five has a good chance of either leaving that child an orphan at a young age or being so debilitated by illness that she cannot care for her child.
I’m sure the ill-health factor plays into the choice of children over career, too. Not only do poor black women face a constrained job market, with what jobs are available being mostly crappy ones, what does it do to one’s career prospects to have to retire in one’s forties due to ill health? People hit their peak earnings in their forties, many even change careers in their forties. If a poor woman of color is faced with twenty to thirty years fewer years of good health and earning capacity than her white middle-class sister, there’s yet another argument for “might as well have the kids young.”
This is a very difficult and emotionally charged issue and I am impressed at the civility of the posts. It is a vexing question: once a destructive cycle has begun, how can it be stopped? How do we respond to the fact that the young people making choices that are destructive to themselves and others–young women forcloseing future options by having children to soo, young men committing crimes that will land them in jail–while both recognizing the fact that they have hard lives and very limited options but also that they are people with agency who must be held responsible for the choices they make?
I live in a largely poor, black neighborhood in northeast DC with a long-standing open air drug market and a crowd of young men, many from outside the neighborhood, who treat public spaces as their turf. They drink in public and sometimes become violent. A month ago, a young man was shot dead in the alley behind my building as a result of a dispute over money. Barricaded inside the buildings in the neighborhood are men and women with jobs and families who have lost control of their neighborhood. I have heard many of them say that this used to be a nice neighborhood. At a neighborhood council meeting an older woman stood up and said that everybody in the neighborhood used to know her as “aunt Barb” and respected her. She said somebody showed her a gun when she told him to get off her family’s property, and now she is scared and feels she has lost her neighborhood. I heard two men talking about the place in the past, saying you could leave your things on the porch unlocked and not worry about them being stolen. No more. The people who pay the price for the upsurge in crime committed by young men in poor black neighborhoods are poor and black. And one of the major contributing factors is young men who have received minimal parenting and run amok on the streets.
There was an interesting article in the New Yorker in the past year by Kate Boo about two poor black women who took part in a program on relationship skills that were supposed to lead to fewer failed marriages. The problem wasn’t the women’s willingness to try to improve their relationship skills. The problem was finding men who were on the same page. For many women, the only way they will ever become parents is by becoming single parents. That is a rational choice.
I think the only way you stop the vicious cycle of teen mothers who have no options, man of whose children grow up to be teen mothers or to contribute to the awfulness of their neighborhood by comitting crimes is by socially stigmatizing it, as ugly as that sounds. As I wrote above, this neighborhood hasn’t always been this way. The patriarchy has been around as long as the neighborhood has and so have sexism and racism, but the violence and drug use have not. How do we get back to the good old days? By making it not alright for young men to father children and take no responsibility and not alright for young girls to have children until they have at least learned a skilled trade. It worked with smoking in this country. I know it doesn’t seem fair to stigmatize people who have already faced so many disadvantages in life. But if they don’t suffer stigmatization, future generations will suffer as the cycle continues indefinately into the future.
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I hope this isn’t too controverial.
One of the reasons I’ve been scrupulous about not having a child is that I don’t think I’d be able to suport it adequately; and that I think it would be wrong to bring a child into the world that I’d have trouble providing for and that wouldn’t have the best chance. This isn’t a incentive based around how a baby would effect my own life (a “rational choice”), but is rather a judgement about how it would effect the life of the child.
It’s essentially also the reason for much of the concern over high teen pregnancy rates causing poverty – children should not suffer this.
Why don’t poor teen mothers think this?
Is it because they don’t have full control over the decision (want to stop pregnancy but can’t)? Is it because poverty is less terrible to the poor, than those who aren’t poor? Or – and this is the implication of a “rational choice” approach – is it that the benefits to the mother matter more those to the child? Or am I just kidding myself when I say that I haven’t had a child for its sake, and not for my own?
Amp;
I don’t really disagree with much you say, it’s just a question of nuance.
“for poor black women, the evidence doesn’t show that (on average) they wind up poorer if they have a child at 17 rather than 25.
Is this they don’t wind up poorer in terms of income (which I suspect), or in terms of the money the mother has to spend on herself (which I suspect falls, as it is diverted to the baby). I think there’s a sense in which a child, as an extra source of expediture, may cause the mother to fall into (or fall deeper into) poverty.
Nik, I think that there are many poor women who would argue that money isn’t the most important thing you can give a child. I agree that growing up in a middle-class household creates more economic opportunities for you, but I don’t think I’d necessarily call it selfish to have a child when you’re not middle-class, any more than I’d call it selfish for middle-class women to have children when they’re not affluent.
If you really examine it, everyone has a different line they draw about what constitutes “providing” for your child. What if you can’t fly your kid to Europe for spring break? If that’s OK, what about not being able to afford sending your kid to a private school, rather than a public school? Piano lessons? New brand-name clothes whenever they want it? Or what if you live in an apartment, and don’t really have good odds of buying a house with a yard anytime soon? I think someone could make pretty convincing arguments that depriving a kid of any of these makes the kid less well off than they would have been otherwise–but importantly, is not the same as dooming the kid to a terrible life.
I tend to think any decision to have a kid is a bit selfish–my god, how else could you deal with the demands of small children if you *don’t* get something out of it?–and when it comes down to it, probably involves whether you think you can love the kid and give it and a standard of living not too much worse than the one you grew up in.
Ken, poor single mothers are already stigmatized by society at large, and that hasn’t decreased the incidence of first-time childbearing by poor single women. And I don’t see that, in neighborhoods where single motherhood is more common than married motherhood, local opinion would make much difference. There are enough single mothers in such neighborhoods that one’s friendship and kinship circle will contain some, and there are enough examples of good mothering and poor mothering by single mothers that the observer can pick and choose the conclusion desired.
Someone commented earlier that the Matriarchy of poor neigboorhoods and lack of a man,and singlemotherhood in general is unacceptable. I’m not sure any of this is true. It is true that in the conditions of our society itharder for a single parent to raise a child, but it is not the case that the child must be disadvantaged or emotionaly scarred. This discussion presupposes that single parenthood is inherently damaging, but I don’t think it is the case. In fact it might noteven be the case that teen pregnancy isinherently damaging…under certain conditions it might not be the worst thingtoever happen. Asfor the necessicity of a man inorder to teach boys how to be competetiveand all that, Ithink it’s the pervasiveness of a hypper”masculine”culture stressing just that sort of thing that lands young men injail in the first place. Anyway, it seems that people are assuming alot of possible sexist and definitly culturist(forlackofa better term) thingsthat need not be the case.
LC- Right on. Those who blame feminism for the plight of young women in poor urban areas have got it backwards- feminism has made the middle and upper class better, and sexism keeps the inner city down. I think that there is a culture of male privledge in the ghetto. I’m basing this on what may be unfair conclusions, but even just watching the raw misogyny of the Chapelle show makes me think that feminism hasn’t made much headway in urban poor America.
For most people of whatever age parenthood is a rational choice. Adultery is not a rational choice and it is the reason that teenage pregnancy is stigmatized. Single people can commit adultery, the question is how to prevent it without behaving like Salem, Mass. did to Hester Prynne. With legal equality of the sexes and the races and with antibiotics and hybridized crops [non GMO] marriage at 16 is less likely to entail a life of hungry painful desperate drudgery than it did in 1900.
Adultery feeds the drug trade and vice versa. Men enter the drug trade in search of sexual partners. Some ply them with drugs. Many expecting to fend off competition by intimidation and attract women with their fallible power. And single mothers can supply a home for men to make and prepare drugs and criminal activity because the children are regarded as b-stards (filters’re working), a prejudice which is the real cause of low outcomes in the lives of people born to single mothers – whole communities, whole castes, “bathtubs” (!) full of debauchery frightening to anyone engaged in the same behavior with more money to support their lifestyles.
One such ruin – Orleans Parish, “Fat City” – is now regarded as our country’s love child, landward of a dead littoral zone containing Iraqi oil loaded under threat of suicide bombing and damaging the weather above.
I’ve participated in discussion sessions with gang members, Latino and Black, who are trying to get out, which is a lot more difficult than it sounds, because even with the violence, there’s a lot about gangs that are attractive to young men and women, and kids.
A lot of it is breakdown in the families, sometimes abuse, sometimes having parents who love you, but are occupied a lot by trying to support their families. Or it’s multi-generational in term of gang membership. Not all come from single mother households, quite a few from two-parent households. Others living with grand parents, or other guardians.
if there’s trouble within a family, its members are less likely to be able to access resources to help them. One example, is an African-American 13-year-old who was shot to death by police officers after a pursuit in a stolen car. He was branded by the media and police as a thug, but only six months before, he was a different kid, in an honors program at school, in a family with two parents. What happened, is his father died and his way of coping with such a loss amidst others coping with that loss as well, was to turn to hang with gang members.
The investigation of that shooting led to the revelation that the officer who shot this kid, lied about being in the path of the car in his statement. So the suspicion about the circumstances of the shooting were very well placed. But, it’s hard not to feel that it’s also a tragedy of what happened to this kid after his father died. If he was from a middle-class family or better, he might have been sent to counseling, which costs money.
As far as crime in poor neighborhoods, a lot of that also has to do with lack of economic investment in those areas, and lack of sufficient municipal services. Not as much regular services like street cleaning, even trash collection or removal of junk left on real estate that’s up for sale. A realtor told me that if furniture was abandoned at a property he was handling in a poorer neighborhood, the city would take days to respond, in the wealthier neighborhood, they would remove it within the day. Simple things like sign repairs, traffic light repairs, graffiti removal, dealing with abandoned buildings(apart from WHY those buildings are abandoned) this demoralizes people who live there AND it attracts people from the outside looking for soft spots to set up drug enterprises and gang hangouts.
I thought men entered the drug trade to earn money. It pays much better than most jobs that exist in the areas where it exists, in terms of money, and status through what you can do with that money. Not that it doesn’t happen in wealthier neighborhoods, because it does, and in their schools, but LE focuses its “war on drugs” efforts in poorer neighborhoods at dealers who are at the bottom level(and this is how the drug war has impacted poor women predominantly) instead of going after those at higher levels in the enterprise. Most of the people arrested in our city, sell drugs to support their habits, or themselves. Some do it as a gang enterprise(predominantly Black gangs with crack, White supremacist and a few Latino gangs with meth) But TBH, the gang enhancements attached to these drug dealers aren’t holding up in court, even with our more fascist judges, so there doesn’t seem to be really as much of a concrete relationship there.
If we want less pregnancy among poor black teens, then we need to reorder society so that poor black teens face a better set of circumstances.
We used to have less teen pregnancy, in all races.
We did re-order society.
Now we have more teen pregnancies.
What did we do? We subsidized it. We made it a financially viable option.
And we did this for all teens, all women, not just black teens.
If you want more of something, subsidize it.
What potential solutions do you see?
Um – actually in the 1950’s there was a hell of a lot more teenage births. The difference was that these teenagers were married – or they gave up the babies for adoption.
Even now, the highest rates of teen pregnancies occur in women aged 18-20 – LEGAL ADULTS.
I think preventing pregnancy before HS graduation is pretty important. Mostly because the parents are still MINORS. But once you are a legal adult, no one should have the right to tell you how, or when, you should be having children.
Nancy P,
Good points. I don’t want to suggest that single women in all cases damage the children they raise and that the only solution is to bring in men to the rescue. But raising a child, especially while working, is very hard to do as a single person. As you say, there are good single parents and bad single parents. My own parents divorced when I was seven and I was raised by my father durning the week and by my mother on weekends. I came out fine and so did my brother and sister. But I think that if any of us had had problems (there were far fewer really dangerous temptations in rural Wisconsin in the 70’s and 80’s than there are in Northeast DC today), my parents would have had fewer resources to solve them than if they had been married, were taking turns supervising us, and had only a single household to support with their two incomes instead of two. For children who have really precarious lives, lots of temptations, few positive role models, and overtaxed schools, having the limited resources of a single parent increases the chances of falling victim to the worst elements in their environment.
Maybe you are right that social stigma is impossible in an environment in which almost nobody is married and where single mothers are the norm and in which it is the rule that only a small minority of young men care for the children they father. But I think that such stigma is beginning to emerge. Bill Cosby’s controversial comments here at Howard University last year are one example. I heard another black comedian doing a skit on the fact that 85% of black couples who do marry divorce the over day. This could eventually add up to change in the long run. Certainly the thought of women and men who are already despised in our society coming under further criticism is not a pretty one. Compassion is the first reaction of any decent person. But the status quo is devestating and the only question to ask in looking for a solution is: what works?
Radfem points out that many men choose dealing over their other job options that don’t pay well. A sociologist at the University of Chicago did a study of the drug trade in the Robert Taylor Homes on the south side of Chicago. He found that, in fact, low level dealers made less than minimum wage. What drew them to it was the lifestyle and the prospect of working their way to the top where they could make real money–for a short time until they were killed or imprisoned. I can’t see this as a rational calculation. You don’t have to have a college degree to make a decent living. Skilled carpenters, plumbers or electritians do pretty well for themselves–a lot better than nickel and dime dealing or working at a Burger King. There are ways out that are within reach. The question is: why don’t more people reach for them? Maybe young men who turn to dealing and petty crime are making rational choices, given their values and aspirations. If these don’t change, the first victims will be themselves and those in their communities.
Poverty does not take the same toll in all communities. There was another very interesting study of Chicago called Heat Wave, about the heat wave in 1995 which killed hundreds of people in Chicago, mainly the elderly with no air conditioning. The sociologist who undertook the study found that the death tolls were much higher in the primarily black neighborhood of Bronzeville than in the primarily Mexican neighborhood of Little Village despite the fact that poverty levels were the same. He found that social networks in Little Village were much stronger. Neighbors looked in on one another and people who needed help got it. In Bronzeville, the neighborhood social networks were much more atomized and so many people suffered and died alone.
The majority of black Americans are middle class. But many poor black Americans live in circumstances of social and cultural collapse that cannot be explained entirely by their poverty or by racism. Much more has to be done to give poor urban neighborhoods–white, black and hispanic–their fair share of city resources, and much more needs to be done to create decent schools with low student to teacher ratios to give children greater opportunity. But the fundamental institution in our society is the family. If children, especially those living in fragile society with few economic resources, are to have their best chance of succeeding, they need a solid family to guide them. This cannot be provided from without and without it, we can’t hope for much improvement.
The sociologist who undertook the study found that the death tolls were much higher in the primarily black neighborhood of Bronzeville than in the primarily Mexican neighborhood of Little Village despite the fact that poverty levels were the same. He found that social networks in Little Village were much stronger. Neighbors looked in on one another and people who needed help got it. In Bronzeville, the neighborhood social networks were much more atomized and so many people suffered and died alone.
I would expect that, since Mexico is hotter than the US, that the native peoples would be better adapted to hot weather, and that the local communities would be more attuned to issues WRT heat.
I know that one mexican tradition is the fiesta, a midday break when the heat is greatest.
My wife BTW, is Philippino and she finds N Cal weather to be very cold. She now has several coats and is looking for another with a hood. I can sympathize, although I rarely get cold.
And our sons like colder weather as well. While I can ‘tolerate’ the weather in the Philippines any heavy activity and I’m blinded by rivers of sweat. My son cannot sleep in the heat and we had to buy an air conditioner. I think that your adaption to your local climate is a big factor in severe weather. A blizzard would not bother me much (been there, done that, many times). My wife would not even touch snow when we took a trip to Reno and it snowed in the pass. She would not even leave the bus when we stopped to put the chains on. I was not cold at all, she was freezing. The exact reverse of the situation when we are both in her homeland.
So basically, I think that regardless of the comminity situation, those adapted to hotter climates will do much better in a hot spell. They won’t have the dehydration and other problems that can kill the locals to begin with, or in much much smaller proportions.
Actually, he found that the social net and thus survival rate extended to non-Mexicans living in the neighborhood as well. The temperatures in some peoples’ non-air-conditioned and poorly ventilated apartments were as high as 130 Farenheit. This is not simply a matter of being better or worse accustomed to high temperatures.
Who said anything about it being a rational choice, because it can certainly be a violent lifestyle? But it’s a choice too often exercised anyway. Some of them do quite well especially if they deal in weapons including firearms as well. Two guys who lived below me some years back, probably could have paid their rent four times over, if they hadn’t spent all their money on other things. The downside, is prison and/or death, most likely the former, and once you’re in prison and get out, the liklihood of having most jobs is gone, b/c many businesses don’t hire felons, and the ones that do, you might have to compete with nonfelons.
Prisons that teach job skills teach you skills that make private corporations that use prison labor weathier. They don’t help the inmates.
Drug dealing might also be chosen over jobs that don’t exist, as well as ones that do not pay well. Fast food jobs are competitive if they exist at all in many poorer neighborhoods, to work in one I put in seven applications first, then used a connection just to get an interview at a regional chain. Out of perhaps 40 employees in one franchise(usually less) with about 30 at the bottom rung, maybe about four of those will get F/T hours, and it’s a battle for those spots. Raises are at 10 t0 30 cent intervals where I worked, every six months, and it’s on a curve, meaning there is one 30 cent raise, a couple of 20 cent raises and maybe the rest of them 10 cent if you meet the standards in your evaluation. You lose money to taxes and SS, which you can file a return on, but it’s gone for up to a year.
I’ve heard enough derisive jokes about fast food workers during my tenure as one, and other times to know that it’s not a job most people would do anything but tell other people to take(kind of like that janitor job a while back) We expect other people to look at a low-wage no-benefits job as nirvana that we deride, though for many, it is. Then tsk, tsk, when some of them don’t want it.
Contruction, plumbing, usually you have to be a journey men to get hired. There is some people in my old neighborhood who do that but the opportunities are too limited, though I would love to see that situation improve b/c the pay can be good.
Here, we’ve had job training programs that teach skills like resume writing, interviews, and there’s some that offer vocational training. But the jobs, often promised, are instead given to university students nearby. One business which received redevelopment loans to be built, hired within the neighborhood for a year(conditional to one of the loans, that it be a year minimum) then found reasons to lay them all off after that year period and fill the jobs with White university students. Some of the people I knew who got layed off, were good productive employees.
Better schools, smaller class sizes, and not penalizing schools which perform poorly without considering why. A bunch of our schools might lose funding under the “No Child Left Behind” Act, when part of the problem in those schools, is that we need more campuses.
I recently received a list of jobs from this business(which is a mall filled with stores, restaurants, etc.) and they were all minimum wage, P/T and there were few of them b/c most of the businesses(i.e. from large chains) bring in their own employees from outside the city. One business, a Denny’s which hired more people from the neighborhood had to lay its entire graveyard shift off, b/c the police had pushed the management to close before midnight due to drive-by shootings that occurred from out-of-town gang members in its parking lot.
Actually, he found that the social net and thus survival rate extended to non-Mexicans living in the neighborhood as well.
And how do you explain this?
The temperatures in some peoples’ non-air-conditioned and poorly ventilated apartments were as high as 130 Farenheit.
Sounds like our apartment in the summer. I’ve seen at least 110 F before. You need to get some fans, block the sun from the windows as much as possible, and take cold showers as necessary. The cup showers in the Philippines were very refreshing to me. There are many ways to cool off, but all you really need is water, a fan, and shade.
We also figured airflow, that is, the fans should draw air through the living areas, not just circulate hot air around one room (which is still better than nothing).
This is not simply a matter of being better or worse accustomed to high temperatures.
It’s not clear to me that this has been eliminated as a factor.
And when your home gets to 130 F, most people would do something. Going to an air conditioned mall is one solution on real hot days. You may notice that they are crowded in such conditions.
Noone doubts that it is easier to raise children in a 2 parent family with at least one gainfully employed adult. I think that shaking our collective fingers at unmarried teen mothers is not a winning strategy, if the goal is to improve the lives of those women and girls at risk.
I still say that decent schools, after school free activities such as the Girls Inc. club provides, mentoring by adults outside the poor neighborhood (race matching desirable, but not essential), and a realistic expectation that the girls could go to college or trade school, would all do far more to reduce unmarried teen pregnancy than fingerpointing at the girls . Plus, these actions would help teen mothers improve their lot, thereby helping the children.
Anonymous forgets that frail old people without cars may have difficulty getting to airconditioned locations.
A few thoughts.
The midday rest is the siesta, not the fiesta (which means a party).
Also, people should be more careful to say what they mean. Anonymous, in post 60, uses the term “teen pregnancy” when he obviously means “single motherhood” or “teen single motherhood.”
Now to magikmama:
But once you are a legal adult, no one should have the right to tell you how, or when, you should be having children.
No one was suggesting that they should. Anonymous was simply suggesting that society should be paying for it.
Anonymous forgets that frail old people without cars may have difficulty getting to airconditioned locations.
Am I? WRT to Mexican immigrants and non-Mexican immigrants without cars, why the difference in survival rates?
I’ve posited that your genes make a difference WRT survivability. I think Ken disagrees. But I would suggest that were these Mexican immigrants living in Ohio during a blizzard, that they would fare less well than the locals WRT survivability. I’m certainly not suggesting that anyone should die or anything like that, but people do die in extreme weather and your natural adaption seems a reasonable factor to me.
Glaivester Writes:
September 23rd, 2005 at 4:36 pm
A few thoughts.
The midday rest is the siesta, not the fiesta (which means a party).
Mea culpa, thanx for the correction.
Also, people should be more careful to say what they mean. Anonymous, in post 60, uses the term “teen pregnancy” when he obviously means “single motherhood” or “teen single motherhood.”
That’s a point I had not yet considered.
But as has been mentioned, long ago they married much earlier than today, I understand that 13 or 14 was common and at 25 she was an old maid. Today they are both still in school and not yet legal adults.
But it is curious that in the days of single motherhood by choice, no one has blame for anyone but the purported father. Often, he is not the father, but this does not seem to let a man off the hook for the blame.
Nancy P,
I would agree with what you say about the ineffectiveness of finger waving, but I also doubt that much can be done through policy to give poor women better lives apart from a couple larger policy initiatives: universal health care and better schools mainly. This is not trivial, but really making a difference in somebody’s life takes more than that.
I remember when one of my friends told me that his mother did not want him to come to play at my house because my parents were divorced and another telling me that his mother had said that she was concerned about his being my friend given that my parents were divorced but that he was mature enough to make the right choices (his parents have subsequently divorced). That stung. It took me a long time to overcome the shame of that kind of stigma in a small Wisconsin town (that and the shame of poverty, my dad’s $200 muflerless cars, my crummy clothes, our shambles of a house). Maybe that kind of burden makes the problem worse in many cases, but I think that the threat of social stigma keeps many people from making bad choices as well. I would be curious to hear what Radfem has to say about her experiences. Have you seen anyone succeed despite the odds? If so, what seemed to be the determining factor(s)?
Anonymous,
If it is actually genes and not social conditioning you are talking about, remember that African Americans’ genes come mainly from Africa and that they lived for generations in the deep south before coming to Chicago.
Having at least one adult person in your corner is a big factor. Ideally, it’s the parents, but often it’s not. That’s one reason why I think it’s important to have youth programs in place at parks and community centers. Children and teens need guidelines, boundaries and they need both authority and love to learn boundaries and how much they can be tested and to develop social empathy. When they don’t get that, for a variety of reasons, they don’t do well. The will to persevere is something that is usually developed over time.
Gang involvement is often done at a young age, at least here(beginning 7,8) to fill a void. I think that if people especially young people feel alienated from their families for one reason or another or are not getting needs met, often they will try to find it elsewhere. And gangs like having younger members b/c punishment for juveniles prosecuted for criminal conduct is less than it’s for adults.
For gang intervention programs, which are usually those set up for teens or older age groups than preventive programs, it’s often a “last chance” opportunity or the prospect of facing serious time in the present or future.
A woman I work with has four foster children ages 3 to 6, and is now for all practical purposes, a single parent b/c it’s a permanent placement. She loves what she’s gotten herself into, but it’s really, really hard to try to instill life lessons into kids, who had left a two-parent household, abeit one with abuse and neglect. Fortunately, she’s very compassionate, very patient, and is taking a firm stance with them when it’s needed. And she’s an advocate for them, which they likely never had. So I think that’s a huge difference for them in their lives that hopefully will negotiate its way through a better course than it could have.
(they’re cute kids, but yeah, they are a handful, especially four at once.)
Maybe for the 13-year-old, who’s name was Devin Brown, I mentioned earlier, it would have made a difference if he was able to at least in a small way, fill the hole left by the death of his father, with another male role model. His mother seemed to have done what she could, but she was grieving too.
When you expect little of children, you get what you expect. Stigmatizing out-of-wedlock births in practice means blaming children as well as their mothers. And don’t forget, children who hear their mothers abused as tramps by other adults are going to be both resentful of the finger-pointers and absorb the message that they are “bad seed”. Children in difficult circumstances need MORE, not LESS, support. And this might include a sympathetic teacher, a mentor, a church which doesn’t spend its time on personal attacks on unwed mothers, etc.
Some people do get out. Often they credit their mother, often a supportive teacher.
Radfem,
It sounds like really meaningful, effective intervention has to be on a very personal level. Some of the people you know have made a real difference and those are the kind of programs that should be supported. But I wonder whether enough people could become involved to make a large-scale difference. I think that if the big picture is going to change, the change will have to come from within poor black communities. Maybe something like the Nation of Islam.
I think we have come to the “last one out, turn off the lights” point on this thread. This is a really exceptional blog. It wears its politics on its sleeve, but the posters are civil even when disagreeing and are not out to shrilly score points, or interact only with those with identical views. There is even a list of right-wing blogs and more right-wing blogs on the margin, and a recommendation in one of today’s posts for a “smart anti-feminist” blog. I’m impressed. I’ll be back.
Ab (post 36)
Preventing employers from importing illegal aliens to fill the poorly-paying agricultural and service jobs won’t magically make those jobs pay better.
Yes, it will. When the supply of labor goes down, its price goes up. You keep hearing about aliens taking jobs that “Americans won’t do.” Well, Americans won’t do them at the current wage. So if the aliens were not available, the employers would have to pay higher to get people to work at said jobs.
So if the aliens were not available, the employers would have to pay higher to get people to work at said jobs.
Possibly.
Other possibilities would be increased automation or re-engineering of the jobs or the work processes that make those jobs necessary.
Other possibilities would be increased automation or re-engineering of the jobs or the work processes that make those jobs necessary.
The likely possibility is that employers would have to pay available workers until an alternative, such as increased automation, was available more cheaply. This isn’t likely in much of the agricultural industry.
Actually, there is evidence that the agricultural industry would be more automated–in Australia, for example, they’ve mechanized the process of removing grapes from vines. In the US, the investment in capital to do so is seen as prohibitively expensive, and as long as there is a ready supply of workers at a cheap wage there’s no reason to change. Or look at the Midwest: enormous farms run by one family, which is possible because of threshers, combines, etc.
Not to mention that the agricultural producers in places like California are squeezed on the revenue end by the worldwide market for their products. If apples or grapes or citrus fruits can be imported from other countries with very low labor costs, it’s not going to make sense for them to raise wages–I’d wager they’ll just convert the land to another use.
Blaming immigrants is just a case of being able to get angry about something tangible, rather than the impersonal process of globalization. It seems pretty unfair to the immigrants.
WRT farm labor, there’s only so far the individual farmer can go in terms of paying the workers. The farmer rarely delivers the harvested crops directly to a venue for purchase by a consumer – farmers’ markets and roadside stands are only a fraction of the produce delivery system. Most of the time, the farmer sells to a cooperative, which then sells to grocery stores or other retail; or the farmer has a contract with a grocery chain; or the farmer has a contract with other food producers. When paying the workers, the farmer has to look at the prices he will be able to get when he sells upstream. For instance, if red raspberries are scarce, a farmer may be able to get as much as $100/flat for them. In that case, s/he may be able to pay as much as $2.50/pint to the workers that pick them, but the workers may only be able to pick 10-20 pints over 4 hours. If there is a bumper crop of red raspberries, however, the farmer may only be able to sell the berries for $16/flat, which means s/he might only be able to pay the workers $0.30/pint, but the workers may also be able to pick several flats over 4 hours. (I’m saying 4 hours because red raspberries get increasingly mushy and hard to pick the warmer they are, so they are generally picked only in the early morning.) If farm labor is to be paid a wage that will make those jobs attractive enough for Americans to be willing to work them, consumers have to be willing to pay the increased cost for food, and I don’t think that’s realistic. Plus, even when unemployment is high and farm jobs are the only ones around, many Americans would rather sit around and collect unemployment and welfare than take these jobs. Real life example: Michigan in the 1980s still had to bring in migrant workers to harvest the fruit crops, despite unemployment rates that exceeded 60% in some areas.
Coming it seems at the conclusion of this lengthy thread Amp,
TCF apologies if his points are redundant. Yet, as your familiar recommendations clearly go into greater detail, while adding key familial aspects that are insightful, I believe responsibility and accountability within the Black community are not being address.
My parents were raised in the pre-Civil Rights South of Jim Crow segregation. Meaning, if there were such social ills threatening their structured, God-fearing, enclosed community, the responsibility to sorting it out fell to local church leaders, elders, parents, teachers, etc. You were held accountable for your wayward children. Yet, there was always help when you needed.
TCF takes further issue with the accepted notion of an underclass cut off from education, opportunity and employment. The solution being to gather together all the above and situate it within walking distance from those who cannot attain it otherwise.
It is no mystery that the problems in education, race and opportunity follow income lines.
America’s schools are de facto separate and unequal, especially if one compares mostly white suburban schools with inner-city schools largely populated by minorities. Take Illinois: in the suburbs north of Chicago, largely white school systems spent from $10,627 to $17,291 per student in 2002-2003, whereas the Chicago city schools spent only $8,482 per student (Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation.)
With such discrepancies in perceived worth, what does one expect? What are the chances that poor kids will dream and believe in their dream to make choices that will make it possible? Who will tell them what they can achieve, and see they are supported through it.
In the homes of many of our kids in Church in Mississippi (fully 1/3 of the congregation are children of color whose parents do not attend) there is much “discipline” but not a lot of privacy, direction or peace. One of the most chilling memories I have is of a kid named Johnny (true story) one of the worst behaved, violent kids in our corps. (Though one felt compelled to love him very much) He told me one day in drop dead seriousness when his guard was down, that he wanted to become a Medical Dr. His home was a chaos of violence and relatives where Johnny had to be a tough. He was already in 7th grade; I had no way of making his dream come true. Though we continued to be supportive and open the doors to our Smart Center, Johnny spent 4 hours a week with us, the rest was very distracting. (This family, one of the mothers had shaken an infant to death of one of her teenage daughters, she was developmentally disabled. We had held her just days before… there was NO CHANGE in this home or attention from the Government as it was a within “that” community.) What a loss we share when we lose minds and souls to ignorance. The answer is simple Love. The Hebrew Bible contains only one commandment to love the neighbor but no less than 36 commands to love the stranger. Blessings
Something I have not seen addressed in these comments is the basic premise that women should be having children when they are older (late 20s, early 30s). But why is that? I think that this assumption is bizarre, frankly. Why shouldn’t women have children while their bodies are most fertile and best able to deal with birth? Why aren’t we wondering why we expect people to have children in their 30s?
I would love to see more support for young mothers, both married and single. Support groups. More community centres and more encouragement for actual community-building where more people than just the parents feel invested in the children’s lives and well-being. And how about support for parents who go back to university or job-training, or who chose to start their careers _after_ they have children instead of before? Why not make it acceptable and reasonable for women to have children first and establish a career after?
A woman should be able to choose having a child when she wants. It’s her body, and FTMP, she’ll be the primary force in that child’s life for 18+ years, especially if the father’s not around.
For teenagers though, it’s a very conflicting, confusing part of their development and maturation. Physical maturation is way ahead of emotional maturation particularly now, with better diets, health but also the influence of estrogen-mimicking chemicals in pestisides and other chemicals placed in the environmentIi.e hormones in cattle). Sometimes these young teenage women are already surrogant mothers to younger siblings.
Also, over 2/3 of pregnancies in teenage girls result from sex, consentual or coerced as in rape, with or by a man who’s an adult. I think the average age is around 26 years for the male. There’s many reasons why older men have sex with younger women, one may be love and affection but there are other more negative reasons as well.
stigmitization of teen mothers, especially in comparson to the fathers(whose status it often enhances) is also an issue. Stigmitization in this case does more harm than good imo.
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I am new to blogging but have experience with teenage pregnancy having had one myself. I grew up in a middle class family that resided in a town with maximum security prisons. I had a baby when I was 17, I was in catholic school at the time and they showed little to no empathy for my situation. It is an automatic taboo scarlet letter to be pregnant. Well…I proceeded to go to and finish college with the help of my family and I lived at home with my child. I taught school in an area populated with prison convicts families that move closer to be with their spouses/children while they serve time. The kids I taught were some of the most inspirational people I have ever met. They are determined and many of them know better than their parents. However, some of the children believe that their parents are innocent of the crime committed (some may be) but the stats would point to many of them are guilty and sending mixed signals to their children.
Ahhh…back to teenage pregnancy. It is my impression that these towns that have a high population of prison inmates families DO NOT have access to public universities that they need. The nearest community college in the town I speak of is 35 minutes away..hardly within walking distance or even driving distance for someone without sufficient transportation. Satellite classes are also not in place for these areas. It would be great if we could give every teen the same advantages but we simply cannot. What we can do is improve our educational institutions and encourage teens to take steps toward self responsibility and social responsibility especially for their children. New York healthcare/medicaid is very good and many of these teens should be encouraged to turn to planned parenthood as well. There is hope….
Having children is one of the major survival instincts. It is also one of the most wonderful things that can happen in your life. Poverty does NOT change that. Nor does race, or age or even country of origin. What many of these posts have missed is that when you are born and raised poor, poor is all you know. It does not seem as hopeless(consciously) as it truly is. It seems normal, and having children is normal. When there is not much in your world to look forward to getting pregnant feels like giving yourself christmas. The stigma of getting pregnant in a poor neighborhood is nothing compared to a middle class one. It has been happening a long time. Sometimes it is by accident and sometimes on purpose but for the girl ( in her eyes) it gives them respect and attention only afforded adults. P.S. RonF children of these poor black teen moms pay taxes and even contribute to online blogs. Maybe you have missed the boat!
Please stop endorsing negative and non-productive behavior within our community…and then posting it online. Being poor is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to condone this behavior. In fact, being poor is AN EVEN GREATER INCENTIVE TO DELAY CHILDBIRTH. Intentionally bringing another human being in the world while poor will only compound the problem and the child will then have even less of a foundation to build themselves as you.
Have you noticed how grown our kids get at such an early age?..It’s not cute it’s a shame.. It is b/c they are surrounded by “adults” who are still acting like children!..irresponsible and unaccountable.Please just stop it. We owe our children more. I apologize if I’ve offended anyone, but I say this with love and concern for us as a people..Work hard and get YOURSELF together 1st.
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Sometimes I fear for the young mothers of today because of the economic status that paints dark and dreary clouds over our community. I am speaking from the mouth of a single parent and I feel that many young ladies have made some wrong choices. Why is it that when a young lady gets pregnant, in most cases, the father drifts away once the child is born. Why does the mother almost always have to carry the burdons of raising the child. It’s at these difficult times when the mother begins to realize that she has made the wrong choice. If only she had completed high school and had gone on to college where she could have found more gainful employment. I totally diagree with what is being condoned here also. We are capable of lifting ourselves to higher standards.
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I disagree with the whole thing because all young black females are not poor.I just didn’t like that heading, it was a little disrespectful.
That’s actually pretty true, good comment
you disagree with the whole thing because the heading was a little disrespectful? That’s odd.