Teen Mothers

FEW TEEN-AGED MOTHERS are as lucky as 17-year-old Rene Hines. The senior at Howard County's Hammond High gave birth 16 months ago, but is bound for Georgia State University this fall on a full basketball scholarship. A story about her in The Sun last week included the fact that she maintains a 3.0 grade-point average while performing some of the duties of motherhood.It is apparent from the story that Ms. Hines is a bright young woman. She is also an outstanding basketball player. Hammond's all-time leading scorer, she made first-team All-Metro last year and led her team to an appearance in the Class 2A state finals.

Teen parents aren't always bad parentsA letter to the editor from Sy Steinberg ("Teen pregnancies are abuse," Aug. 7) said the conceiving of a child by a teen-ager is an abuse of the unborn baby and, if brought to term, most of these infants would have abusive lives and an ''abundance of emotional problems, even if the children are reared by loving grandparents.''I have worked in the field of adolescent pregnancy and parenting for more than 20 years and feel compelled to set the record straight.

BOSTON -- At least nobody in Orange County, California, can say that marriage is a prison anymore. Instead, it's becoming a kind of alternative sentence.An adult man who has impregnated a teen-age girl in that county may still have his options open: He can either be a jailbird or a groom. He can have a record or a wedding band.Talk about your glamour makeovers. Over the past year or so, more than a dozen men have been transformed from accused sexual offenders, even child molesters, into desirable husbands.

IN THE 1994 crime bill, Congress required an analysis of out-of-wedlock childbearing, identifying causes, consequences and preventive measures. And for good reason: Many of the people accused and convicted of violent crimes grew up without fathers.The report fingers some familiar culprits -- and punctures some comfortable assumptions. "Illegitimacy" is not just a ghetto problem, nor do those proverbial "teen" mothers comprise the majority of women who give birth out of wedlock. In fact, teen-agers account for only 30 percent of births outside marriage.

~TC ATLANTA -- Several times a day, 17-year-old Delvecchio Finley might tell a vulnerable young girl, "If you love me, you'll have sex with me."But the girl usually replies, "If you love me, why are you pressuring me to do something I don't want to do?" Whereupon her eighth-grade classmates cheer loudly.Delvecchio joins the celebration. He's just acting out a skit, part of what several experts call the nation's most successful program for preventing teen pregnancy.It's called "Postponing Sexual Involvement," and many analysts say it is the nation's most effective teen-pregnancy program.

The Carroll County Board of Education wants to hear from the public before it decides whether to open a day-care center for teen mothers who attend Westminster High School. The message it is likely to hear is that the program is unsuitable for the public schools and should not be funded.If the board heeds such advice, it will be making a big mistake.No one advocates teen-age motherhood. Yet, it happens.Last year, Carroll had 53 pregnant girls under the age of 17, according to George Giese, director of Carroll's Youth Services Bureau.

After two years of planning and preparation, a day care center for the babies of teen-age mothers will open tomorrow in the county-owned Distillery building in Westminster.The opening of the center, called Raising Hopes, is the culmination of the efforts of a coalition of service providers to provide teen mothers with safe, convenient day care and other ** support services so that they won't drop out of school."We're trying to offer them an alternative, which is to have quality day care along with parental education classes, case management and counseling," said Christy Lynch, Raising Hopes' coordinator.

"Just say no to sex." Sounds like a very tough idea to sell.But as President Clinton's domestic policy advisers tackle the burgeoning problem of out-of-wedlock births -- too squeamish to pull the plug on welfare and frustrated by the failure of any other notion to "move the needle" -- it is an idea they may come back to.This kind of persuasion, with slick ad campaigns and gruesome video lessons in schools, has had a measureable impact on teen smoking rates and on drug use.Why not try it with sex?

POLICY PLANNERS and government officials have been spending enormous amounts of energy devising new programs to prevent teen pregnancy as part of recent welfare reform proposals.The challenge to the planners is stark, about 357,000 children were born to unmarried teen-agers in 1990. To create effective pregnancy prevention programs, planners must take into account the range of sexual and emotional experiences that can lead an adolescent to early, unplanned parenthood.Absent from the teen-pregnancy debate has been any discussion of the critical role played by childhood sexual abuse.

Creating an infant day-care center for school-age mothers at Westminster High School makes a great deal of sense. The Carroll County Board of Education should be commended for giving preliminary approval to the project. The daunting task is to find the money to open the center and to cover its operating costs.For most teen-age mothers, the mistake of becoming pregnant is compounded by the mistake of dropping out of high school. Carroll County social and health workers estimate that about 73 percent of teen mothers drop out of school, compared to about 3 percent for Carroll's general high school population.

At first, Nicole Lewis was surprised to hear that the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican vice presidential nominee is pregnant. But on second thought, Lewis figured the news wasn't so surprising. Teen pregnancy can happen to anyone. Lewis, 28, was a teen mother herself. Fresh out of a Virginia high school, she found herself abandoned by her friends, who didn't understand why she didn't just get an abortion, and isolated from the family she had let down. Now college-educated and working at Baltimore's Healthy Teen Network, a national teen pregnancy clearinghouse, Lewis hopes the experience of the daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will call attention to the need for services for teen mothers.

Keturah Saunders can attend classes at Wilde Lake High School without worrying about her 2-year-old daughter. In fact, Maliyah is attending school with Saunders, one of 12 young mothers enrolled in the Howard County school system's teen parent and outreach program based at the Columbia school. "It makes it easier for me to stay in school," said Saunders, 18, a senior. "I feel a little bit safer having her here." For 20 years, the countywide program has helped several hundred mothers and fathers stay in school by providing child care for their babies while they are in classes nearby.

Keturah Saunders can attend classes at Wilde Lake High School without worrying about her 2-year-old daughter. Maliyah is attending school with Saunders, one of 12 young mothers enrolled in the Howard County school system's teen parent and outreach program based at the Columbia school. "It makes it easier for me to stay in school," said Saunders, 18, a senior. "I feel a little bit safer having her here." For 20 years, the countywide program has helped several hundred mothers and fathers stay in school by providing child care for their babies while they are in classes nearby.

Teen parents aren't always bad parentsA letter to the editor from Sy Steinberg ("Teen pregnancies are abuse," Aug. 7) said the conceiving of a child by a teen-ager is an abuse of the unborn baby and, if brought to term, most of these infants would have abusive lives and an ''abundance of emotional problems, even if the children are reared by loving grandparents.''I have worked in the field of adolescent pregnancy and parenting for more than 20 years and feel compelled to set the record straight.

FEW TEEN-AGED MOTHERS are as lucky as 17-year-old Rene Hines. The senior at Howard County's Hammond High gave birth 16 months ago, but is bound for Georgia State University this fall on a full basketball scholarship. A story about her in The Sun last week included the fact that she maintains a 3.0 grade-point average while performing some of the duties of motherhood.It is apparent from the story that Ms. Hines is a bright young woman. She is also an outstanding basketball player. Hammond's all-time leading scorer, she made first-team All-Metro last year and led her team to an appearance in the Class 2A state finals.

BOSTON -- At least nobody in Orange County, California, can say that marriage is a prison anymore. Instead, it's becoming a kind of alternative sentence.An adult man who has impregnated a teen-age girl in that county may still have his options open: He can either be a jailbird or a groom. He can have a record or a wedding band.Talk about your glamour makeovers. Over the past year or so, more than a dozen men have been transformed from accused sexual offenders, even child molesters, into desirable husbands.

IN THE 1994 crime bill, Congress required an analysis of out-of-wedlock childbearing, identifying causes, consequences and preventive measures. And for good reason: Many of the people accused and convicted of violent crimes grew up without fathers.The report fingers some familiar culprits -- and punctures some comfortable assumptions. "Illegitimacy" is not just a ghetto problem, nor do those proverbial "teen" mothers comprise the majority of women who give birth out of wedlock. In fact, teen-agers account for only 30 percent of births outside marriage.

After two years of planning and preparation, a day care center for the babies of teen-age mothers will open tomorrow in the county-owned Distillery building in Westminster.The opening of the center, called Raising Hopes, is the culmination of the efforts of a coalition of service providers to provide teen mothers with safe, convenient day care and other ** support services so that they won't drop out of school."We're trying to offer them an alternative, which is to have quality day care along with parental education classes, case management and counseling," said Christy Lynch, Raising Hopes' coordinator.

The Carroll County Board of Education wants to hear from the public before it decides whether to open a day-care center for teen mothers who attend Westminster High School. The message it is likely to hear is that the program is unsuitable for the public schools and should not be funded.If the board heeds such advice, it will be making a big mistake.No one advocates teen-age motherhood. Yet, it happens.Last year, Carroll had 53 pregnant girls under the age of 17, according to George Giese, director of Carroll's Youth Services Bureau.

~TC ATLANTA -- Several times a day, 17-year-old Delvecchio Finley might tell a vulnerable young girl, "If you love me, you'll have sex with me."But the girl usually replies, "If you love me, why are you pressuring me to do something I don't want to do?" Whereupon her eighth-grade classmates cheer loudly.Delvecchio joins the celebration. He's just acting out a skit, part of what several experts call the nation's most successful program for preventing teen pregnancy.It's called "Postponing Sexual Involvement," and many analysts say it is the nation's most effective teen-pregnancy program.