Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 25, 1994 TAG: 9401250061
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Neil Chethik
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Social worker Hank Millbourne of Detroit threw such a party a few years ago. It made a difference in the life of at least one new teen-age father. And, surprisingly, it made an even greater impact in the life of an older one: Millbourne himself.
Millbourne, now 40, was 15 years old and a high school student in Philadelphia on the day his girlfriend told him she was pregnant. He remembers crying on the spot. Later that day, he told his father, who said simply, "You know what you have to do."
And then his father went up to bed.
The younger Millbourne never found out what his father meant by that response. But the elder Millbourne was just the first among many relatives, teachers and friends who offered no support to a frightened teen-ager caught in a situation that could have ruined his life.
But it didn't ruin his life. Although he and his girlfriend broke up shortly after their son, Aysem, was born, Millbourne fought the temptation to abandon his child. Instead, he got a job to help with expenses, graduated from high school, went on to Cornell University, and brought his 3-year-old to live with him in his junior year.
With the baby-sitting help of friends and fellow church members, Millbourne finished college, then moved with his son to attend graduate school in Ann Arbor, Mich.
By the late 1980s, Aysem had graduated from high school, and Millbourne had moved to Detroit to work with low-income families. It was there, after receiving a grant for a yearlong teen-parent program, that he came up with the idea of a baby shower for the boys he had been counseling.
"It was real obvious that they were getting enough grief from their parents and their girlfriends' parents," Millbourne says. "They were feeling lost and left out, and yet people had all these expectations of them. My question was: How can we expect them to meet their responsibilities if we're always dogging them out?"
So one evening, Millbourne took the prospective fathers to a pizzeria for dinner, told them about his fatherhood experience, listened to their stories, and gave them gifts, including a quilt for their new baby and a picture frame for their baby's photo.
His message: Life has taken a tough turn. But you don't have to feel bad about yourself.
The teen program ended soon after that, and Millbourne subsequently went to work for an agency that provides services for people with AIDS.
But five years later, John Milberg, now 21, still remembers the baby shower as "reassuring," a refuge from the daily criticism heaped upon him. "We got to say a lot of stuff we couldn't say when the girls were around," he says. Today, involved in a custody dispute over his son, Millberg still keeps the boy's picture in the frame Millbourne gave him.
Curiously, the baby shower also resolved some conflicts for Millbourne. As he extended compassion to his young friends that night, he says, it was as if he was absolving himself for his own "mistake."
"I had gotten so many messages that [being a teen-age father] was a bad thing," he says. "It always made me feel bad about my son. That evening, I was finally able to see it as simply something that happened, without attaching a positive or negative label to it. I'm no longer sorry that my son is here."
If all teen-age fathers felt that way, what a difference it could make for their kids.
MEN-TION
In 1991, 530,000 babies were born to teen-age mothers in the United States. No similar statistics are compiled for teen-age fathers.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
MALE CALL
Men: If you were a teen-age father, what helped you make it through? Women: If you were a teen-age mother, what was that experience like? Send responses and comments to the Men's Column, in care of the features department, Roanoke Times & World-News, P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, Va. 24010-2491.
by CNB