ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 8, 1996 TAG: 9609100021
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: William Raspberry
SOURCE: William Raspberry
SOME UNSOLICITED advice for high-school teachers: Have your youngsters read Suzanne Chazin's article, ``Teen Pregnancy, Let's Get Real,'' in the current Reader's Digest.
While I'm at it, it wouldn't be a bad idea if our policy-makers took a look, too.
For the youngsters, Chazin's piece might help strip away some of the romantic myths - ``We'll get married,'' ``My baby and I don't need a man,'' ``I can still get an education and a good job'' - that more often than not turn out to be false.
The policy-makers already know how seldom these youthful dreams work out for children who have children. They also know that the trend of teen-age unwed childbearing is up: from 16.7 per 1,000 teens (aged 15 to 19) in 1965 to 46.4 per 1,000 in 1994 - some 350,000 new unmarried teen mothers every year.
What they may not understand sufficiently is that this is not solely a phenomenon involving low-income black youngsters from America's inner cities. Chazin's article looks at three white middle-class girls to make just this point.
And she offers sexually active youngsters some sobering statistics: ``More than half of teen-age mothers are not living with their child's father by the time the child reaches grade school. More than a quarter have never lived with the father. ... Only 20 percent of never-married mothers receive formal child support.'' Fewer than half of unwed teen-age mothers marry within the next few years, and those who do are twice as likely to divorce within five years as women who marry in their 20s.
The dismal numbers call to mind what William A. Galston, a former White House policy adviser, used to call his favorite statistic: Americans who finish high school, reach age 20 and get married before they have their first child have only an 8 percent chance that the child will grow up in poverty. For those who don't do these three things before having their first child, the odds that that child will live in poverty rise to 79 percent.
As Chazin's piece makes clear, it's hard for children to foresee the consequences of premature sex, or to imagine that their delightful little babies can turn into anchors that hold them in poverty. That's why I urge high-school teachers to have their children read and discuss the article.
The reason I urge it on policy-makers is a little more difficult to state. Talk of welfare reform used to conjure up a picture of lazy women, mostly black or Hispanic, turning out veritable litters of children to be cared for by hard-pressed taxpayers. That picture never was the whole truth, and even to the degree that it reflected any truth, it was difficult to think of realistic solutions. Demanding that a confidence-less, skill-less, never-employed unmarried mother of six children go out and find a job is more exasperation than policy. For most such women, the prospects of self-sufficiency are so dim as to hardly be worth discussing.
But today's welfare-reform discussion proceeds from a different mental image: not of 35-year-olds whose chances have pretty much passed them by but of teen-agers about to begin that dismal journey. The pressing welfare question today is how to induce teen-agers into making decisions that will keep them from becoming unwed teen-age mothers.
And whatever the unfairness of that formulation, it is the young women that our efforts need, at least at the outset, to address. Of course it's true that boys as well as girls need to be taught sexual responsibility, need to understand the dismaying consequences of too-early sex, need to recognize that children do need both parents in their lives.
But it is also true, as Chazin's article reminds, that the direct consequences of sexual imprudence fall most directly on girls. We used to acknowledge that fact and gear our advice to accommodate it. Then we decided it was unfair to put the burden of sexual responsibility principally on the girls, and our public discussions changed to accommodate our new nonsexist attitude. The results have not been encouraging.
Maybe it's time to take Chazin's advice: Let's get real.
- Washington Post Writers Group
LENGTH: Medium: 76 linesby CNB