USD Magazine, Fall 1995

responsibility and proved to be excellent mothers, she says. However, the statistics for California and the nation as a whole reveal the more telling story of babies and their young mothers struggling to survive on food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. CAI recently reported in its annual California Children's Budget - a document that analyzes the state's spending in areas related to children - that the state's teen birth rate has climbed 20 percent since 1987. For every 1,000 girls from ages 15 to 19, 154 become pregnant and about half of those choose to give birth, the report says. More than 70,000 babies - or 12 percent of the births in California each year - are born to teen-agers. Research shows that babies born to teens are more likely to be premature, of low birth-weight and lacking prenatal care, factors that put the mother and child at a disadvantage even before birth. Half of the girls who become pregnant as teens don't finish high school as of age 30, the report states. The lack of a complete education to fall back on or a second parent to provide financial support inevitably leads young mothers into poverty, which has predictable, harmful effects on the baby's future. Problems in school and problems with health are two of the more common consequences of living on the brink of financial disaster, Kalemkiarian says. With the clear understanding that teen-age childbearing is harmful to both the mother and child, CAI teamed with state Sen. Diane Watson of Los Angeles to propose the law requiring public schools to teach the parenting course. "There has to be some place where we start saying it is not a good idea to have a baby as a teen-ager, either for yourself and what it's going to do to your life, or to the baby's life," Kalemkiarian says. "The odds are against you, it's just as clear as anything." Hanging ln The Balance In proposing the parenting curriculum and winning approval of the 1992 bill, CAI and the other sponsors met little resistance. Fellmeth, Kalemkiarian and Kathleen Quinn, CAi's director of development, followed by applying for grant monies to fund the writing of the curriculum. Soon after the bill passed, CAI secured $30,000 from the San Diego-based Jacobs Family Foundation and hired Mills to draft the course work. Early this year, a foundation headed by singer and actress Barbra Streisand granted CAI $10,000 to print additional copies of the draft curriculum and pay for an evaluator to visit school sites once the classes are up and running. The institute's work to get the curriculum in the schools by September hit a discouraging note this summer, however. The superintendent of public instruction, Delaine Eastin, who originally co-sponsored the bill with CAI and Sen. Watson, has not yet certified the program as "funded," Fellmeth explains. State education officials are now debating whether or not CAI should have gathered an additional $50,000 in order to get the curriculum to schools in time for the 1995-96 academic year.

exercise Mills suggests is having the students comparison shop for household items like food and clothing. Also in budgeting, the students could be asked to list entertainment expenses, such as movie tickets or buying music CDs, and then compare the costs of those items with the essential costs of food, rent and utilities. Mills also suggests an exercise that would have the students observe a young child, maybe a sibling or cousin, and take note of the attention and care the child requires at every moment. Children are not teddy bears that give effortless love, CAI Executive Director Bob Fellmeth likes to say. "Changing dia– pers is not the most fun thing in the world; you're going to have to do it 12 or 16 times a day," he says. "You're going to have to be up all night, very consistently. You're going to have to be dealing with ear infections and antibiotics and staying home. "You're not going to be able to do the things you took for granted, like going out to the movies. Basically, you are engaged in extremely difficult, responsible, important, hard work." Teens: Pregnancy ls A Way Oul Typical of young people, who often have no fear and feel invincible, teen-agers about to become parents have little under– standing of the odds working against them. Quite the contrary, teen-age girls often believe having a baby will give meaning to their lives. A cuddly baby represents someone who will love his or her mother unconditionally. For the boys, or men - many of the fathers are four to five years older than the teen mothers - fathering a child is often a status symbol. He who gets a girl pregnant is seen by others as a macho guy, Fellmeth says. In the 1990s, the ideal male is tough and "sexually you run around engaging in conquests, getting notches on your belt," he adds. But that ideal does not include taking responsibility and, con– sequently, there is a deplorable lack of fathers supporting the mother and baby emotionally or financially after the child is born. The unwed pregnancy rate is 30 percent in California, a figure Fellmeth calls "incredibly bad." "In today's society, if you don't have two parents working for a child, it's going to be very hard to attain adequate sustenance for that child without public subsidy," he says. Judging by the number of teen-age births each year, few young people think further than their idealized vision of parenthood when making the decision to bear children. Budgets and the other realities of caring for another person 24 hours a day are far from their consciousness. Researchers: Teen Pregnancy ls A Palh To Poverly Kalemkiarian is the first to acknowledge she has met teen mothers whose lives were changed for the better once they had a child. Those girls rose to the occasion, thrived on the added

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