ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610070129
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
THOSE WHO worry over such things have spent the decade in doleful reflection on several trends: single parenthood, marital breakdown, child poverty, pauperization of divorced women, haphazard collection of child support payments. The trends have been bundled together - often with some reference to a decline in ``family values'' - to explain much of what has gone wrong in our society.
I don't disagree with the explanation. I've offered it myself. And yet as reasonable as it may be to note the compounding effect of the several trends, it may, now and then, be more instructive to disaggregate them - to separate widowhood from divorce, ``deadbeat dads'' from men driven (by ex-wives and judges) out of their children's lives and, above all, ``Murphy Brown'' from teen-age mothers.
That last separation is powerfully made in a new report, from the Manhattan-based Robin Hood Foundation, ``Kids Having Kids.''
One of the report's most striking findings is that many of the worst consequences of teen parenting could be substantially moderated by simply waiting a few years.
Several scholars, largely working independently, looked at adolescents (roughly 175,000 a year) who have their first baby at age 17 or younger and then compared them with women who delay their first births to age 20 or 21 - still two or three years younger than the national average for first-time mothers.
The younger mothers are 50 percent more likely to give birth to low birth weight babies, who, if they survive, are significantly more prone to respiratory problems, mental retardation, dyslexia, hyperactivity - and yet are likely to be seen by a physician only half as often as the children of the 20- or 21-year-olds.
Children born to the younger mothers are likely to receive less emotional support and cognitive stimulation, two or three times more likely to become runaways, and (for the boys) 2.7 times more likely to land in prison than those born to the older group.
As for the mothers themselves: Seventy percent of the adolescents will drop out of high school, and they will spend nearly five times as much of their young adult lives as single parents, compared with mothers in the older group.
What about the boys? Well, as it turns out, the fathers of babies born to adolescent girls are often not boys at all. The fathers are, on average, two and a half years older than the mothers and in 20 percent of the cases they are six or more years older.
The Robin Hood report may be least convincing when it tries to tot up the societal costs of adolescent childbearing - not because these costs are trivial but because they are necessarily nebulous.
The report lists the total of such costs as averaging $1.3 billion a year for increased medical care, $900,000 for increased foster care placements, and $1 billion for higher prison costs - all costs that would disappear if the young mothers waited until 20 or 21 to have their first child.
One more useful bit of disaggregation. The tendency in discussions of such social issues as teen pregnancy is to think of ``those people'' - principally African Americans and Hispanics - as the main source of the problem. And it is true that the teen birth rates for these two groups are extraordinarily high - over 107 per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19.
But the rate for non-Hispanic white teens is also high at 40 per 1,000. This compares to Japan's rate for teens 15 to 19 of 4 per 1,000, Denmark's 10, Australia's 22, Canada's 26. The nearest U.S. competitor is the United Kingdom, with 32 teen births per 1,000.
The lesson of those numbers is that teen-age pregnancy is a socially and economically costly American problem. And as the Robin Hood report reminds, Americans had better get busy figuring out how to fix it.
- Washington Post Writers Group
LENGTH: Medium: 73 linesby CNB