Teen Pregnancy Transcript
April 8, 2004

Participants:
Jacqueline Black
Teacher, Cleveland Municipal Schools
Tonya Block
Supervisor, Cuyahoga County Health Department
April Brewer
Social Worker, Family Services, Teenage Parent Program
Joe Frolik
Associate Editor, The Plain Dealer
Dr. Wendy Johnson
Medical Director, Department of Health, City of Cleveland
Curtis Williams II
Therapist, Minority Behavioral Health Group

MR. FROLIK: Hi. Thank you for joining us for the second discussion in our Tomorrow's Promise series. Today we want to talk about the issue of teen pregnancy. And to begin, I want to ask you, historically, I think the age of child bearing was quite young. A teenager having a baby, maybe a century ago would not have been surprising or, maybe even, cause for much concern.

Why at the beginning, here in the 21st century, should we, or are we now, why do we perceive teen pregnancy, teen childbearing as a problem. I want to ask each of you to think about what impact it has on the community, on the young people involved and on their children. Maybe, throw some ideas out and then we can begin the discussion. Jackie, why don't you take it and just go around the table.

MS. BLACK: Well, over a century ago, when we're talking about historically, life expectancies weren't as high as they are now, so teenage pregnancy has an overwhelming impact on society because we're living longer. And when teenagers start having children at such a young age, you know, I have grandparents within my program who are in their mid-40s program, where when I was growing up I had grandparents who were in their '60s and '70s. So that impact it has on society is so generational, the impact lasts a lot longer than, probably, what it did before.

MR. FROLIK: Okay. Dr. Wendy Johnson.

MS. JOHNSON: Well, I would say, now, today, we see that teenagers who give birth, the woman, teenage girls who give birth have only about a 30 percent chance of finishing high school, only about 1.5 percent of them get a college degree by the time they're 30. So, in this day and age, where, certainly, the woman's place in society is much different than it was 100 years ago, women have to be allowed to reach their full potential before they give birth. And going to college, finishing high school, things like that are really compromised if teenagers give birth before they finish, at least, finish high school and college. So we're just, really looking at making sure that every girl has the chance to reach her full potential, and has an environment which encourages that.

MR. FROLIK: Curtis Williams.

MR. WILLIAMS: Teen pregnancy has both short and long term effects. Some of the more short term, immediate affects is the health of the young mother and the father's role in the family being systematically removed, just based on him being so young. And some of the long term effects of course, will be the social economic spiral down that it puts the teen mother into, therefore affecting the community as a whole.

MR. FROLIK: April Brewer.

MS. BREWER: I think we also have to be a little bit concerned about the young mom's child being able to reach their full potential. And the knowledge base that teenagers have related to parenting issues and child development, their impulsiveness, and some other things make it a little bit more difficult for them to parent children effectively. And we want the children, also, to be able to reach their full potential and have positive parenting when they are little so that they can learn the things that they need to grow and be productive in our society as well.

MR. FROLIK: Tonya Black.

MS. BLOCK: I would agree with what everyone said, especially April. I did want to touch upon what you said about young woman having babies at earlier ages, maybe as little as 50 years ago. But it's important to note that the norms of society at that time were that these woman were having babies because they were getting married early on. They had large families, a huge support system and that was pretty much their duty, to get married and have children once they became, once they reached reproductive age.

That's not the case anymore. We have much greater expectations of our young woman and young men. And so, it has become more and more a social issue over the last five to ten decades as those numbers increase and the number of married people decreases.

MR. FROLIK: I want to talk about some of the things that, perhaps, drive teenage pregnancy, the factors that are behind it. Wendy, as a doctor you have had a lot of patients who were teenagers who got pregnant, a lot who didn't get pregnant. What are some of the, are there signals or red flags, if you will, that you, when you are practicing that go up to say that this girl might be at risk.

MS. JOHNSON: Well, yeah, there are. And I find myself, when I am in en encounter, when I'm in a visit with a patient, a new adolescent girl, and asking her some basic questions. I can kind of tell pretty quickly whether or not they are at risk, things like their family support, their social support. But I think the most important thing is their personal view of their future and their life.

I, generally ask all adolescent girls and boys what they want to do when they finish high school, what they want to do when they finish college. The girls that can answer that question quickly are not the girls that are at risk for having a teenage birth. The girls that know what they want to do, and have goals and ambition, and have those goals supported by their family are really not the girls that are at risk. The girls that are most at risk are the girls that feel lost, feel adrift, feel that there's not opportunities for them. So they look at teen pregnancy, almost, as a viable option. As you know, college is not an option for me. Finishing high school may not be an option. I don't see any jobs that really interest me that I can do, there are self-esteem issues. But there's also support issues, what is a family, what is the communities vision of that young girl or that young boys future. And if that's not reinforced, than pregnancy and having a family almost looks like a good thing in their eyes.

MR. WILLIAMS: I would have to agree with you. I do believe that the child's life expectations and how they project themselves into the future play a huge role in determining whether or not they are at risk for an unwanted pregnancy as a teenager. It's really important that programmings address just that, address some of those issues in regards to increasing life expectations.

MS. BLACK: I guess I am going to be the voice of dissention a little bit. I was a teenage mother. I had my daughter when I was 18 years old, and I came from a family that was college educated. My mother comes from a family of 13. Everyone went to school. I found when I teach my program at JFK and I talk to my young ladies, there are many factors, of course, all the things you just mentioned.

Sometimes with teenagers, as was for myself, it was a level of stupidity. It was a level of teenagers thinking that this is not going to happen to them, much like we don't look at ourselves as dying before we're 100 years old when you are that age because your reality is a little off center. My girls give me many reasons, my young men give me many reasons for why they became pregnant or made that choice. A lot of it deals with family. In my particular case, it didn't. It was just not making a good choice at the time.

MS. BLOCK: Were you not making a good choice because you didn't have the information or were you just not mature enough and focused enough to really think it through?

MS. BLACK: First love and making a bad decision, thinking that love and sex go hand in hand. That's why, a lot of times, I hear with young woman they feel that love and sex go hand in hand. Woman look at sex quite differently than young men do. You look as an issue of love and you become, I'm not going to say it was impulsive, but when the moment was there, you almost didn't know how to back out of it. And I see a lot of girls that just, they don't know how to say no, because you are trying to think, am I going to lose this young man, what is going to happen.

I didn't come up through the age of MTV with the videos and all that, so it wasn't that I had images of sex around me. It was really just a poor choice on my part at the time. But gratefully, I had all the things that you said these young people don't have. I had the support system. I went ahead and went to college. But that support system, if it's not in place, these young people are in trouble. And the support system comes from us, it's not coming a lot of times from the home where it should come from. It's coming from agencies that we have in society.

MR. WILLIAMS: I really would have to agree with you and add that teenage pregnancy are not necessarily a tragic story. There are some successes. Looking at the majority of teen pregnancies, many of them are put into situations that are fairly difficult to get out of during the course of the teen pregnancy process.

MS. BLOCK: I would also like to add that when you look at the family, I don't think that we can just completely make the family responsible for this. It's a community-wide issue that involves, not only the schools, because a lot of people want to dump, oh, this is a problem that the school should be taking care of. This is where we should address this because this is where all the kids are. But there are many other systems that we should look to to wrap around this problem which includes, you know, the churches, the faith-based communities, civic organizations. There are many other organizations, even public and private partnerships could go a long way to helping to address this problem as far as building the developmental skills and social skill of these young people, and to let them know that they can be more successful then, maybe, they would have been had they not had a child too soon.

MS. BLACK: That's a touchy subject that a lot of people don't want to talk about. Pregnancy, you know, that's something that a lot of the places are uncomfortable with. Even the churches, they are uncomfortable with saying those words, you know, especially when you are addressing young people. We almost deny there's sexuality in a way, and we want to mask the fact that they are sexual beings. And there's some issues we need to address with that. A lot of people are very uncomfortable with that.

MS. JOHNSON: And teenagers, I think, can spot hypocrisy a mile away. So if you tell them something that you are not following yourself, they are not going to listen to anything that you say. I think we have to look at, what is the reality in our schools today. And the reality is that although teen pregnancy rates have really come down since the early 1990s, we should feel good about that, and feel like we are sort of on the right track, we still have areas of our community that have great disparity, certain high schools, certain communities that still have very high rates that we have to concentrate on first of all.

Secondly, we have to be happy about the fact that the teens are waiting longer to have sex, they're being more faithful, more monogamous. Even when they are initiating sex, they are having fewer partners than they were ten years ago. We still have a hugely increasing rate of sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea or Chlamydia. What that says to me is that there's a certain number of teenagers that are very at risk that aren't being reached, that are being ignored more or less. And those teenagers, we really have to focus on, give them access to both information, the opportunity and healthcare services that they can access comfortably in a way that they feel comfortable accessing them.

MR. WILLIAMS: I think it's also important to look at this from a more holistic approach as well, not only addressing the females, but the males as well. Males come in with a number of different healthcare issues, that they are not allowed to access certain funding sources just based on the fact of gender. That is one side of the big story of teen pregnancy. One side that I believe is ignored.

MR. FROLIK: Now Tonya, you work with programs very specifically aimed at preventing pregnancy. Can you talk a little bit about what you do, and particularly what seems to be effective.

MS. BLOCK: Well, we have done a lot of research as to what is effective. And you know, there's an ongoing debate, especially right now, politically, as to whether we should focus on an abstinence-only programming which is an eight point program that teaches that the social expectation is that you will be abstinent until you are married.

And then, there is the safer sex program in which, primarily, the message states that the best way to be safe and avoid pregnancy is to be abstinent. However, we give them information such as the effectiveness of condoms and contraceptives. And there's a lot of activities that go on just to help them to practice saying no, teaching them about how drugs and alcohol will affect their ability to make good decisions. And it's a very comprehensive program that is more, it provides accurate medical information as to how one gets pregnant, how one avoids pregnancy versus more value-based message, which really states that, you know, this is how you avoid getting pregnant and it's the only way that you can be absolutely sure that you can avoid getting pregnant.

And I really can't say that I'm married to one message or the other. I think that what is very important is, that in much the same way that any family is going to teach their child their family values, and that's either going to be, I'm going to give my child a safer sex message or our family values state that my expectation is that you will remain abstinent until you are married.

What's very important is that you wrap other things around your child, such as recreation, civil activities, have them involved with some faith-based organizations. And let them know, I have a great expectations for you. And make sure that you provide all of those resources so that they can be more successful. And that's what I mean, I believe that you take that concept, and irrespective of whether or not your message is abstinence only or safe sex. If you can wrap those other things around the kids, broad based throughout the community, then they have a much better chance of success no matter which message it is.

MS. JOHNSON: But even comprehensive sex education programs do stress abstinence as the best method. You know, just to be very clear, there's no sex education that is going on in our schools that doesn't stress abstinence as the best and the preferable way. So in a sense, comprehensive education is also value based in the sense that it stresses abstinence. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think you can have value based comprehensive education that says abstain. But the problem with abstinence only education is that it just, basically, ignores some percentage of teenagers that are going to have sex. So it's been shown in some studies of abstinence-only education, that both kinds of education actually delay the onset of first sexual encounter.

There's a lot of debate about which delays it more, but, you know, whichever delays it more, they both have evidence that both of them delay teens being sexually active. Once teens do get sexually active, if they have abstinence-only education, they seem to be more reticent to seek help, more reticent if they have STD symptoms, for example, to get those treated, more likely to, if they do get pregnant, to wait a long time to be seen, or to not seek contraceptives if they are sexually active because that's not a part of abstinence-only education. Whereas, the comprehensive sex education looks better.

There's actually an ongoing head-to-head NIH study right now comparing both ways of providing sex education to try and get some data. Right now we have data on one and data on the other, but just trying to compare the two together has not been done. So the results of that are being awaited by many people.

MS. BLOCK: My point is, neither would work in a vacuum no matter which message you are giving them.

MR. FROLIK: You just mentioned sexually transmitted diseases. Is there any evidence that all the attention that has been given to that over the last decade or more, particularly HIV, but the others as well, that that has an impact on whether or when teens become sexually active and how they conduct themselves, if they do.

MS. BREWER: I don't know of any empiric evidence looking at that, but I think it probably has had an impact. If you look at the height of when we had the height of teen pregnancy rates, the early 1990s. The early 1990s was really before the HIV message really got out to the general population. During the early '90s we had the false impression that HIV was something that affected certain populations and didn't affect other populations. And now, I think that the message has really gotten out, that we're all vulnerable to HIV, that that did have an impact.

MR. WILLIAMS: Statistically, the African American community and the African American teens are being affected by the HIV virus seriously. It's an epidemic proportion. And being one of the largest, fastest growing groups for contraction of the disease, which leads me to believe that although the teen pregnancy rates have dropped, the teens participating in unprotected sex is still an all time high. And that's the reason that the sexually transmitted infections are so prevalent.

MS. BLACK: When I get students who are pregnant, it's more than likely that it's accompanied by an STD. I have had very few young people in my program who have come to me and didn't have something. And then you have to deal with the pregnancy and the heartache. And a lot of times, young people feel betrayed, not so much by the pregnancy but by contracting the STD.

We just did an article that was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I used it in my classroom, of the numbers of students at predominantly black universities who are now HIV positive because of that whole down low syndrome with people living dual lives and not being honest with their partners. We had to talk about that because many of my young girls are dealing with young men who are recently coming out of prison, coming out of juvenile detention centers, and realistically, if they had incidents of, even, rape in a jail, they're not going to run home and share that. That's something that they don't want others to know. Our young people have become aware, if you are dealing with a partner who has been incarcerated, you have to protect yourself, not only against pregnancy.

I tell my girls that's not the worst thing in the world that can happen to you, there's a lot of other things that can go along with that. We can get through the pregnancy. But if you have other things, other issues that are coming with that, that's really what we have to dig in and really sometimes help them through, those other issues. Getting through the pregnancy, sometimes, is not the hardest things these young woman are having to deal with, or young men. It's everything that flows from the birth of that child.

MR. FROLIK: Is that what you see, April, in your program, as well.

MS. BREWER: Absolutely. And many students come in, and teen pregnancy is not the worst of their problems. Which is kind of scary, when you think about 14 and 15 year old girls who are coming in and pregnancy is not the worst of what they're facing. And yet, when we're talking about STDs and things after the delivery, and you are talking about birth control options, and they are still only looking at the pill, and the patch and very certain options that are not going to do anything to protect them about some of those other issues. But they are also facing many other issues related to their family situations and just amazing things that teenagers are having to cope with that you can't begin to imagine that they should have to deal with.

MR. WILLIAMS: I think that is exactly what makes fighting the whole teen pregnancy issue so difficult, the multitude of issues. Therefore, you must develop dynamic programming, programming that's far reaching just a teen pregnancy issue, programming that reaches into the home, reaches into the school as well as the community as well.

MR. FROLIK: One of the public meetings, the one at Antioch Baptist Church, Allysa Alec who works with adolescent health unit at MetroHealth had mentioned what she thought was another red flag in addition to what Wendy mentioned about what are your future expectations. She says she asks, do you have an adult, whether it's a parent or someone else, do you have an adult that you can talk to about anything. And again, the kids who don't have that, she said that's a red flag for her.

MR. WILLIAMS: A lot of the kids are from single parent homes where the mother has to play a number of different roles. And sometimes, based on her obligation to supporting the family, she can't always play that role as the sensitive ear. And often times, teens who are more prompted by their peers going through those teen years, actually start to take in bad information and take in bad advice, unbeknownst to the parent.

MS. BLOCK: I also like to ask Wendy, with these longer term methods of birth control like Deprovera and Norplant, do you find that young people are less interested, or they feel more, I don't know, relaxed about not using a barrier-type of protection just because they know -- it goes a long way to reducing the number of pregnancies but.

MS. JOHNSON: I think that's a real problem. I think that, I mean, we should be focussing on teen pregnancy, we have focused on teen pregnancy. We brought the rate down, we see more teenagers using contraception. But I think it's a problem with the medical community even. I think it's sort of a victory if you have a sexually active teenager and you get them to be on reliable contraception, you breathe a sigh of relief. Okay, I know this girl is not going to get pregnant, she's on the pill, she's taking it, she's on the patch, she's on depo.

But we sometimes forget about these skyrocketing rates of STDs and trying to protect kids from that. We sort of mention condoms and talk about condoms, but we don't emphasize them the same way, I think, sometimes, we emphasize other kinds of birth control.

MS. BLACK: It still is put on the woman. And I wanted to ask Curtis, you know, with you dealing with young father's in your program, do you talk to them about why condom use is down so low because the young men just --.

MR. WILLIAMS: Well, my program is a proactive program. It's, actually it's designed to prevent young men from becoming young father's. But that, a lot of the curriculum is designed to promote several different skills, from life skills to increasing their life expectations through different community based activities.

And condom usage is detail researched, as well as taught to the young men. Everything from the brass nuts and bolts of experiencing walking into the pharmacy and purchasing of the condom, that's a huge barrier for young men. A number of young men, actually, stop right there, just based on that increased level of responsibility.

MS. BLACK: Do you feel contraceptives, when we base it on that, that we're putting a band-aid on the problem. I tend to, one of the first thing I do in my classroom, we do a three generational study of a family, and we look for patterns. We look for patterns of behavior, if teen pregnancy has been a pattern in your family. And then we talk about how your mother or your grandmother was parented, and we talk about issues that come out of that.

We talk about, even after a young lady has a child, we talk about why you made the decision to have sex in the first place. And I had to do that with myself, in my classroom, because, of course, they turn around and they ask me. And you know, you had to really think back, and then we kind chuckle and say, you know, that really wasn't a good reason. And a lot of times we don't really want to talk about why young people, besides the fact they are going through puberty, why they made the choice to have sex. It's normally not, doesn't have much basis. You know, it just doesn't --.

MR. FROLIK: What do they tell you? What is the why?

MS. BLACK: It goes from, it's expected.

MS. BLOCK: Everyone is doing it.

MS. BLACK: Everybody's doing it.

MS. BLOCK: I was drunk.

MS. BLACK: I was drunk. But, most of my young woman, I don't really want say that did not enjoy, 95 percent of my young woman do not enjoy their sexual experiences at all.

MS. JOHNSON: I think that's a really important point, especially when one of the highest risk factors for getting pregnant is the age at which you first start having sex. So the younger girls who start having sex when they're, I hate to say it, but 12 and 13 years old, are the highest risk for eventually having a pregnancy. And many of those are also the highest risk for having involuntary or somewhat coerced sexual relations as well. So again, giving girls those tools to use, but also what you are doing, I think, Curtis, with young boys is very, very important because, you know, it definitely falls on boys to take responsibility and understand what no means as well.

MS. BLOCK: That's exactly right. Just to piggyback on that, most of the young girls the 12, 13, 15 years old having sex, they are not having sex with the young man that sits next to them in class. They are having sex with 18, 19, 20 year olds. That just creates an even bigger problem because it's most often a manipulative coercive situation, where it's just a control mechanism. And in some cultures, using a condom is just unacceptable. It's unacceptable because it's, sort of a, you belong to me, and don't you trust me? Why do I need to wear a condom? Aren't you on the pill? You can be manipulated when you are 14 and the man that's talking to you is an adult.

MR. WILLIAMS: I believe that teens have this counterprojection thing going on. And often, when I talk to the males as well as the females, both are definitely afraid to say no. Males automatically assume the role that they are going to be sexually aggressive, based on the fact that they identify that as a male characteristic. And females assume the role of passivity, based on the fact that they identify with that as a male characteristic. So I would have to agree with you, it's definitely going back and forth.

MR. FROLIK: With the idea of, particularly, young girls being sexually active has come up. One of the meetings, I think there was talk about, one of the health educator from the Cleveland Public Schools talked about, we had a lot of sex going on in the 5th and 6th grades. You talked about kids coming into high school, already, with one child.

MS. BLACK: Yes.

MR. FROLIK: At what point should, if we're going to be talking about sexuality, whatever the curriculum, at what age should that be starting with young people.

MS. BREWER: Parents should be starting it when they're tiny. I mean, you're not talking about sex but you are starting to talk about your body and what things are okay, and what things are not okay and making choices about your body. And you would hope that was starting at home, very young, before you ever got to thinking about curriculum.

MS. JOHNSON: But I think parents need tools do that. When I was young, when most parents today were young, we certainly didn't have that in the school. We didn't have that tradition of parents having that type of open conversation. And so parents today just don't know how to do it, don't have the tools to do it.

So what happens is it becomes this taboo and the barrier even gets higher between parents and kids if parents aren't given really specific tools about what age is appropriate to start, and what messages are appropriate for that age and how do you do exactly what April is talking about. You know, make people feel proud of their bodies, and understand how their bodies work and understand what is appropriate, you know, affection and what is appropriate touching and what is not appropriate.

MS. BLACK: Just like we have the booklets for parents, what your child should know before coming into kindergarten, what they should know in first grade. And parents have these books, I am supposed to read with my child at this age, supposed to do that. But in no way do we have thing for parents to know.

I know that, even my daughter growing up, that is a scary topic. You are almost afraid in a sense. We want our children to remain children. We don't want to even recognize that they're going to change and develop. We don't even want -- my parents didn't want to think about that. I am 39, my dad still has not told me that I am old enough to date. We still have not had a conversation. So parents nowadays, they really don't know how to handle.

We have little children who know every lyric to a very sexually suggestive song, but cannot tell you where they live. They will give you the cross street, but they don't know this is their specific address, but can recite some things for you that is just incredible. If we can take that energy and turn it around to something positive, we can probably make great strides.

MR. FROLIK: I want to -- you mentioned lyrics and Curtis talked about playing roles and the whole issue of the medias impact, in terms of society, and expectations came up at all three of the town hall meetings. Let's roll a piece of tape that was shot, I believe it came up in two of them. One is from the Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland and the other one is from a Town Hall meeting in Jefferson out in Ashtabula County.

THE TAPE: There are so many contributing factors to teen pregnancy, the culture being one of them. When our students are in a sex saturated culture, we haven't mentioned the media even, but you know, it's a 24/7 that, you know, sex is all glamour and no consequence. We want our cars to go faster. We want to accomplish things so quickly. It seems like young people are inundated with materialism. They want a new pair of tennis shoes now. They can't wait, even for mom or dad to get paid. It seems like, you know, the word is delayed gratification. I think the message is that sex is beautiful, sex is all right, but just not now.

MR. FROLIK: How much of an impact in your work with young people does the messages they get from television, music, movies, how much does that impact on their self image, and particularly, with regard to sexuality and sex, what they think is appropriate?

MR. WILLIAMS: I think the impact is huge. We're looking at two very different messages. We are looking at a message from home saying you are not quite ready yet, you are not quite responsible yet. You need to postpone sexual involvement. And then, you are looking at the media saying, this is what you have to do to actually become accepted by the whole pop culture community, or your peers as whole.

MS. BLACK: This is what you have to look like. This is what you have to smell like. This is how you have to talk. Every magazine, look in every magazine, go home and look at the number of adds for things, products, before you even get to the first article of the magazine. It is -- sex is such a billion dollar industry that they are just plugging it, because this is a way to make money.

MS. JOHNSON: What you said, Jackie, is really important, about the body image piece, because it's not just -- I think, you know, we see Janet Jackson on TV, we look at those explicit things, and we can get all upset and bothered about that, but I would say, even more insidious and more important are the body image of messages that, especially, young girls get.

I think teen pregnancy has something to do with that, and sexual behavior has something to do with that. It's a way you can have your body affirmed even though you don't look like the models on the cover of Glamour. And, I think that gets ignored in the whole question about decency, but it's probably just as important. It feeds into teen pregnancy. It feeds into eating disorders, all kinds of problems that our young girls have.

MS. BLOCK: I agree, and I think that we just have to really spend a lot of time and energy on, and the only term I can come up with is deprogramming the kids because it is a billion dollar business. It's not going to stop, so I constantly have to deprogram my niece. I can just tell on what she thinks, she's 11, what she thinks is appropriate and I disagree. Thankfully, I'm bigger. But yeah, it's a constant, ongoing, everyday, spending lots of time talking to her about what is appropriate, what is not appropriate, and battling what she sees on television.

MS. BREWER: And that indoctrination starting very young with the children, the teens hearing that and knowing all the words to those rap songs, and it's starting very young. They are being exposed to all those things. So that is a long process to deprogram.

MR. WILLIAMS: Make no mistakes, although the media is sending this negative message and our children are buying into it to some degree, it's really important for the home to be structured and strong enough that they can defer these messages from entering our kids, for lack of a better term, psyches, either consciously or unconsciously. It's up to the family. It's up to the parents. And now, it's extending itself to the community, as well, such as the school systems, and et cetera, in regards to dress codes and things such as that.

MR. FROLIK: Well it seems like you mentioned the deprogramming. It's at war with what you've talked about, programs at an early age, to help make good decisions, not just necessarily about sex but about other activities and stuff. So you are sort of at battle, almost, with what they see all around them.

MS. JOHNSON: Right, and it's a drop in the bucket. You look at federal funding for things like comprehensive educational programs and all the stuff that we're talking about, and you compare that to the annual marketing budget for, you know, whatever line of clothes that you want to talk about, you know, or perfume, or whatever, and you look at the grocery store checkout, and the annual marketing budget that goes into every one of those magazines up there is 10, 20, 30, 40, 100 times what we're spending on the alternative message.

MR. WILLIAMS: That's one of the big issues in regards to programming regarding teen pregnancy, the funding source. The funding source has to be committed for a long term. One of the things we recognize is that funding sources are putting quote, unquote Band-aids on the teen pregnancy issue, meaning that it's only providing enough funds that we can go into the schools and go into the community settings and just give a 45 to 90 minute lecture or presentation regarding the dos and don'ts of sexuality versus the more comprehensive programming that would allow the kids and the families to benefit from some long term approaches. Those are the approaches that are going to defend our children from the medias onslaught in regards to sexual images and such.

MS. BLACK: We have had that issue even with places like planned parenthood coming out or some other programs. They can only come out for that small time, they don't even have a chance to build relationships. If you don't build relationships with the population you are trying to deal with, you might as well forget it. They need to know -- if you came out to the school and you talked to a group of young males in my building, they need to know you are going to come back the next week and the week after that. They need to see that follow through. We are so limited.

I was saying earlier, within Cleveland Public Schools, we're down to five programs, five grads programs, they are just taking them away because the State is saying we need to put our money elsewhere. We need to get scores up. We need to get attendance up. You are not going to get scores or attendance up until you deal with a child where that child is. You are not going to get a child to get As if their home life or the way they feel about themselves is so low. You saying get an A has no bearing on their reality, so they're not approaching a lot of things in the wholistic view. They are just not doing it.

MR. WILLIAMS: As mean very little to those kids who parents have zero college experience, or even possibly dropped out of school. Not saying that's all kids, but just saying that that might be one of the areas that is not emphasized in that child's home. So it's really important that we meet kids where they stand and where their needs actually are, based on, instead of what we assume their needs are.

MS. JOHNSON: And just to broaden that a little bit, the home is really important, but let's look where we have the worst problems with teen pregnancy. And just coincidentally or not, they also happen to be the areas that have the highest unemployment, the areas that have the highest percentage of African American students.

So you have to look at society as a whole, and you know, these kids are looking at the world and they are not seeing opportunity for themselves. Part of that may be family issues, but part of that is because they come from the most disadvantaged communities. And, you know, in a sense, they are making an accurate assessment. You know, in a sense, they are saying, I'm from a poor family, there's less and less resources for me. Even if I succeed, I am not going to be able to get a grant to go to college. Even if I do, all that aid is drying up.

So in a sense, they are making an accurate assessment. They're saying, there's no opportunity for me, there's high unemployment, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't sound like a bad thing to have a baby. So as society, we have to address those inequalities, as well, and not put it all on the family.

MR. WILLIAMS: I think, in all fairness, the African community is a very diverse and dynamic community. We have a tremendous number of people that are kind of caught in the lower social economic ranges that have strong parenting skills, as well as have strong abilities to promote their kids to do better than I. And those are things that we need to continue and we need to build on and we need a support.

There's many, many instances which a single-parent mom is having an issue with a teenager, and instead of sending in the necessary supports, we only send in the police, or we only send in individuals that enter the home and say enter a delinquency or unruly charge, et cetera. Those things might be necessary in some individual cases. But in the vast majority of cases, there's other ways to alleviate those concerns in those more disenfranchised communities.

MS. BLACK: I think about the teaching staff at JFK, and that's the one of thing that the minority teachers in that building let those kids know, I too, graduated from Cleveland Public Schools. I too, may have come from a single parent, but I still succeeded. And we need more voices within the African Americans community of those success stories, from where these kids are saying that this is how you do that. Those parents need the support.

If I'm a young mother and I'm trying to make sure my child is going to school, but I'm not there to see my child off, I need to know that there's something in place to assist me with that. We have to just galvanize around each other. It's a whole community effort, whole community effort.

MS. BLOCK: I just wanted to touch upon what you were saying about the African American community. I think we have to be really careful about, when we're looking at the rates of teen pregnancy, that what we're actually looking at are the teen birthrates. And I don't know to what extent we can make the assumptions that kids in other cultures aren't getting pregnant at nearly, or the same rate that African Americans are, but culturally, African American people are far less likely to terminate a pregnancy than most other cultures so you are going to probably always have higher rates among the African American community, just because, spiritually, it goes against long standing values.

MR. FROLIK: It's interesting what you guys are saying, also, about being able to imagine a different future, because the last group we had around the table here, I think we mentioned we were talking about high school graduation rates. And I think one of the things that emerged from that was, again, you got to be able to show kids, if you stay in school and graduate what is that going to really mean to you. If you don't somehow raise the expectations, what can I do with my life?

MR. WILLIAMS: I agree. Every kid deep down inside wants to have someone to assist them in life and its oftentimes when that fear of being involved in life takes over and many instances their pride kick in and they step full-fledged ahead. So you have to develop programming that increases their life expectations. The My Destiny male program out of Summit, Portage, Medina counties, that program that I coordinated and developed, that program did a number of different things such as paired them with athletes at the University of Akron where they stayed overnight with that athlete. They were instructed to write papers about their perspective careers or their career goals and their career wishes, and so we tried to do a nice fit with the career and with the athlete, with the athletics being the drawing force.

But that had long-reaching effects on that child. College is no longer this dream over the rainbow. It's very much attainable with programming such as that.

MR. FROLIK: One of the interesting things that you did was you took the kids skiing and golfed and tried to break them from, again, sort of what they had grown up with and sort of broaden their horizons. There's all these things you can do in life.

MR. WILLIAMS: Teens have a desire to individuate. That's a natural part of their developmental process. In individuating, it's important that they get something that is theirs and theirs alone. And sometimes it's some of those extracurricular activities that is outside the boundaries of their perspective communities. In this case, it was primarily the African American community, so some -- a lot of the activities were directed in that manner.

MS. BLACK: We have to nurture their dreams. Every student that I have ever encountered had a dream. When they were in elementary school, I said, what did you want to be when you grow up and along the way someone told them that was not a realistic dream or goal for them because of who you are or where you are, what you can or cannot do and that just crushes them and then they're afraid to re-ignite it again.

You know, I had a student who said, I always wanted to be a garbage collector because I loved those trucks and I wanted to do that. And the kids in the class are like, why did you want to be a garbage man. I said, you know how much garbage men can make. I said, that is a good living because you will always -- that is a guaranteed, to a certain extent, job, and what is so wrong with if he didn't want to become a college professor. It doesn't make him any less than a person who decided to go another way. A lot of times those dreams are not nurtured at all.

MS. BREWER: I think sometimes at the point that we get them, though, we have to find a way to balance the dreams with what is realistic for them and help them develop some realistic dreams. We see hosts of young women who think they are going to be lawyers and doctors and trying to temper a little bit those dreams and still encourage that but temper a little bit with the reality of, okay, what kind of steps. Let's talk steps. What will you have to do to get there. You have a child now, can you manage that. Is that realistic or do we need to start with the LPN school and work your way into the medical field or whatever the issue is but find ways to balance.

MR. WILLIAMS: You know, when we sit here and we talk about life expectations, we kind of talk about it just from the perspective of careers, but life expectations is a very broad concept. This concept extends itself to not only one own's individual career interests but one's individual desires in regards to the roles he wants to play in the community or she wants to play in the community. What is it to be a father, what is it to be a mother versus this magical thinking that being a mother is just having a child or being a father is at this stage in the game probably doing nothing at all. So you really have to look at it from a very broad view when you are talking about life expectations.

MS. BLACK: And every child in their minds, they will give you a list of what they feel a father is supposed to do and what a mother is supposed to do. They will give you that list. It's funny to me that it's almost still in the 50s. We talk about the media and how it's kind of changed the kids.

When I did this experiment in a parenting class, the guys still wanted to be the support system. I want to be the one that supports my family financially. I want to go outside and play baseball with my son, and the girls said, I still want to be there to nurture, to provide comfort to have a comfortable home. They know, even if they've never had a dad, they still almost instinctively know, but they have no clue how to get there.

I think the mistake that we make when a young woman has a child, we automatically assume that those parenting instincts, it's just something within our DNA, is just going to kick in. I've never had to teach a child how to change a diaper because they've had younger brothers and sisters. That wasn't the problem. But how to nurture that child, how to show love, how to discipline correctly, those were the things, the skills I had to teach.

But children want that mom and dad. They instinctively know certain things that a mother and a father. They have read about it somewhere in a book or they have seen it on television and they say, oh, and they really, truly deep down -- I don't think any mother, single parent wants to -- you didn't want to be that single parent. You want that partner, and it may not have worked out for you in that way, but you still have a longing for that completeness. All children want a family. They know that that's what their building block is is that family.

MR. FROLIK: April, you also work with a lot of young moms and stuff. What are sort of the issues you work on with them or the most important things to help them make a good life for their child and so that they don't dig themselves into a deeper hole.

MS. BREWER: There's so many issues that we need to work with them on. Some of them are life decision issues, making positive decisions about their own life, staying in school, building that future, making their step-by-step plans for what will be their life so that they can provide a positive future for their own child.

In addition to dealing with relationship factors so emotionally they're stable enough and have support systems behind them to be able to manage emotionally what it takes to raise a child along with all of the parenting skills types of issue. Maybe not changing a diaper but especially the nurturing issues, modeling for them sometimes what that look like so that they can see that there are other ways to talk to a child or to change a child's behavior and direct a child's behavior.

There's just so many issues, it's hard to know where to start sometimes. I'm sure that's what they feel like, just overwhelmed. It's hard to know where to begin.

MR. FROLIK: Right. One of the issues, obviously, that comes up with all working parents or we would hope young going back to school parents is the whole day care issue.

Now, I think you said now at John F. Kennedy you are not physically set up to do day care. Only a couple of the Cleveland schools are. Down in Akron and Summit --.

MS. BREWER: No.

MR. FROLIK: So what is the impact? Where do they find day care or if they don't, how does that impact, again, on their ability to stay in school, to get their life on a firm upward footing.

MS. BREWER: It definitely impacts that. Some of them are lucky enough to have family members that are in a position where they can and will provide that. Although I'm always hesitant to believe when aunt so and so says she will watch your child every day, you try to encourage them to make backup plans because somebody gets sick, somebody has appointments, somebody decides this is too much to do every day and says next week I'm done. Helping them to work through that system.

Title 20 through Human Services is a wonderful resource for those who qualify for it and can manage to navigate the system to get there, but that's quite a set of steps that it takes for that, too. Young people often need help knowing how to do that because they need that step-by-step process to know how to follow. And knowing how to choose appropriate child care. What do you ask. They're so limited oftentimes by, okay, if Title 20 will pay for it, I have to use this day care because it's the only one that is nearby where I need. They don't always have the option of assessing different day cares and asking questions and do I like it or do I not. This is what I have.

But helping them to know how to make the best of that, or if they do have choices, how to choose wisely. But the hardest ones are because all of those resources are based on a family income, there are often many teens whose families are lower income working or day care is so expensive they don't have to be that low income to not be able to afford a sudden $500 a month extra payment when they don't qualify for benefits. They are really in trouble.

MS. BLACK: Many students, because that funding is drying up, they issue scholarships. But a lot of these programs have X amount of dollars that they are given and if you have so many people applying for the same pot of money, you have to get in there quick.

I've had students who come to school in tears because it's finals week and they're like, I have no one to watch the baby, but they are determined to take that final. So I end up going downstairs, sitting in the main office with an infant while they take a final. But you do -- you have to, because if they are coming to school to take that final, it's almost your responsibility in a weird kind of way that you want to sit there and help them as best you can.

Even as adults, day care costs are so high that even there are working women, there are families now that we think make good moneys that the wives choose to stay at home because the whole income is going to day care. So that's not only a problem with the teenage parents. That's a problem nationwide with day care. It's incredible.

MS. BREWER: And Title 20 funding has been reduced, not increased.

MR. WILLIAMS: Welfare reform has truly affected that area in regards to teen parenting issues and et cetera. And I think that a lot of the teenagers that are being affected don't have a clear understanding of the new policies and new procedures. I know Welfare reform was this comprehensive reform that they went out and they said, everybody, these are going to be the necessary changes, but I'm not quite sure if those changes effectively hit home because people are being affected in negative ways.

MS. JOHNSON: The other problem is there's so much emphasis on work and so little on education in the Welfare reform that we have developed and been handed down now that it really catches the teen pregnant mom who has not finished high school or just turns 18 but she's back a grade because she's not, you know, she had her baby, she's back a grade.

She wants to finish high school. She's 18 now and she doesn't qualify a lot of times for being on her parents' support. She's on her own. She's not finished with school and she's being told by the system that she needs to go out and work if she's going to keep health insurance, basically. So really basic requirements.

MR. WILLIAMS: One of the things you recognize is that they're not necessarily going out and finding these grand jobs. They are being stuck in the not social services by the service industry, you know, which means that they're caught up in that cycle of not having adequate insurance which, therefore, is going to eventually bleed into the child's care, appropriate care, so that becomes a tough cycle.

MS. BLACK: They become minimum wage workers throughout their adult life and they don't get a chance to ever get into a field where they can actually earn a substantial amount of money that is going to be able to provide adequate housing, health care. Health care is a big issue because what most teenagers don't know when they become pregnant, underneath their parents' insurance, it will cover them through that birth, but if that child needs any care, if that new infant needs care beyond that, that grandparents' insurance does not pick that up. And so many people, even the parents, they think, well, my insurance, if it covers my child, why doesn't it cover my grandchild. So we have to make sure day one that they have proper insurance just so they can get proper prenatal care.

MR. WILLIAMS: That points to the need for community programs, community programs such as in Summit County, A Brighter Future Ahead which is a painting program that allows teens to gain skills in an area for which they can go out and receive an equitable dollar and receive benefits and et cetera and allows them to be marketable outside of those service industries.

MR. FROLIK: Specifically in regards to health care and stuff, maybe Tonya and Wendy, talk a little about here in Cuyahoga County, some of the programs for new -- some of them are for all new parents but especially the focus on very young parents and stuff, making sure that they get the follow-up they need.

MS. BLOCK: Through the county, there is a program Welcome Home that is a home visitation program that sees every first-time mom and every teen mom so if you are a teen mom even more than once, you are going to get a home visit at each delivery. For the teen moms, there's also a social worker involved who will do an assessment to see what the needs are and try and hook them into services. For example, transportation, day care, making arrangements for school and trying to keep them up with their, just making sure they have plans in place so that they can get their life back on track as soon as possible.

But, as Wendy was saying, with the emphasis being on work, it just really creates a cycle because those parents that have low economic income who are being forced to go out and get work, not only are they being forced to work what used to be 20 hours a week, it has now increased, so they are out of the home more, and as we survey youth in the community, we find that 40 percent of them are reporting that they spend one to three hours home alone every day.

And opportunity is what causes them to become involved with delinquent behavior, and they have got opportunity all around them. So it's just a cycle that never ends. And so the health care, as far as health care goes, there are things in place that can address it, but I think we really need to look at how do you prevent that piece in the first place.

MR. WILLIAMS: I agree with you. The days of inappropriate sexual activities in the back seat of the car is over with. The couch is a new found establishment for those activities and it's important that parents do appropriate monitoring of their children. I recognize that a lot of parents would like to believe that their children is responsible enough to stay home for extended periods of time, but that's a crucial time for them where they are trying out different ideas and being challenged on their own personal decision making, et cetera.

MS. JOHNSON: Tonya's point is well taken that a lot of single moms especially don't have a choice. If they're going to keep health insurance for themselves and their family and put food on the table, and there's a hierarchy of survival skills here and our society is saying to these moms, your kid is not as important as you being at work X number of hours a day, and so there's a lot of hard choices that moms in those situations have to make that we may judge them harshly for after the fact, but they are choosing between food on the table and letting a 12 year old stay home for a few hours.

It's a very hard choice to make. But to add to what Tonya said about the programs that you asked earlier, the City also has a program that deals specifically with in the City school system another home visiting program for pregnant teenagers, Healthy Family Healthy Start program. We actually deal with all high risk pregnancies in the City of Cleveland, but pregnant teenagers is a special subset of that and we have a program in the schools that does -- the Welcome Home does one visit after -- after the baby is born, the Healthy Family Healthy Start program does from the time they get pregnant through to the delivery and actually until the child is two years old.

MS. BLACK: They, actually, also coordinate tutoring, so we have that program based at JFK. We have a lady who works directly with me and the pregnant moms in the building and she actually arranges tutoring.

The interesting thing is, as I am thinking about the tutoring, what is also not known, if you are the father of the child, you can also come out of school to be that support. You can take a couple weeks off school to support that mom. They never emphasize that with a young man. We almost take him out of that loop and he's just as important as being home and being that caretaker.

And many of my young guys say, I can't take necessarily the six week but I can come home for a week and also have those tutoring opportunities for me, and when you tell them that, it just almost changes their whole attitude. We just concentrated on the moms so much that there are programs in place within the schools that allow that young man to have some of the same opportunities for care taking when the newborn comes home.

MR. FROLIK: We have had a number of references to young men and that was something, again, that came up at almost all of the community meetings, a real desire to see more on that front. Let's look at some footage and then talk very specifically about the men.

THE TAPE: A lot of us in this room work with the young women and if we can do a lot of work with them, this is good, but a lot of them don't feel terribly empowered, and there's a whole another piece of this which is the boys. I have had some that are actually proud of having fathered multiple children on multiple girls.

We begin to think global when we think about how we're going to help our young men be responsible for what they bring into the world or what they should not bring into the world, so how do we begin working with our men, our young men, you know, ten, eleven, twelve and younger in a very special way because, you know, third and fourth grade they are talking about stuff that I didn't talk about until I was in college.

MR. FROLIK: Curtis, when we were talking the other day, you mentioned that when we talk about preventing teen pregnancy, it's almost like we're working just one side of the street too often. Why do you think it seems like men have been sort of the afterthought in this process.

MR. WILLIAMS: I think it has a historic history as well as more of an immediate history. Historically the whole Title 10 funding that came down in the early '70s, that funding was directed towards women in need. In the late '70s, it started moving towards adolescents in need and that need was determined by a female that was attempting to receive medical care because she was -- wanted to not plan -- -- have a planned pregnancy or to postpone having a pregnancy all together. And I believe it kind of got stuck there with being a female issue.

Once you place funding on something, you put certain criteria in regards to those fundings being specifically directed toward females, then that allows institutions to start to piggyback. Social services is a very tongue and cheek type of occupation. A lot of the money is moved from hand to hand, so if an agency has a large number of females that need the service, then they are going to promote those young ladies to actually go out and attain those services. If those services are specifically for females, then they are going to ignore the other clientele which is the male populus.

MS. JOHNSON: The Title 10 program, which is a family planning program, a program that provides family planning contraceptive services to women, it's emphasized on young women. I wouldn't say teenagers or adolescents, but the emphasis is definitely on certainly women of child-bearing age and younger women. But, you know, we send a massage to women, I think, that this is all on them, that it's all their responsibility, that, you know, if they get pregnant, it's their fault and we sort of don't address the role of the man.

And I think the Title 10 funding sort of a function of not just occurring in a vacuum but a function of our culture saying if you get pregnant, and this goes back, obviously, a way long way, if you get pregnant as a woman, you wanted that, you did something wrong, that was your fault, and it doesn't say the same -- not the same messages are given to boys.

MR. WILLIAMS: The assassination of the male image is huge. We look at it throughout all the different media formats, and I believe in many instances some of the more younger males buy into some of those images and et cetera. I believe that one of the big issues is once a teenager or a young lady becomes pregnant, the male is often villainized at that point. That moves him away from playing his role as a father or it doesn't even allow him the opportunity in many instances to play the father role.

MS. BLOCK: And society plays a huge role in making sure the father became isolated in situations like that just with the social welfare system, and for a very long time, the male was not allowed to be in the home or anywhere near the home in order for that mom to continue receiving services, so we learned through that process that he better not be around, and years and years of that set up, you know, the social norm that we now see, that he's not involved.

MR. FROLIK: Jackie and April, with the young women that you're involved with, roughly what percentage of them are still involved with the fathers of their children?

MS. BLACK: For me, I would say less than 20 percent of my young women are still involved even throughout the pregnancy, sometimes as soon as pregnancy is announced the young man and they don't want to recognize it. He is just as afraid as you are, so his running is not necessarily a sign that he didn't have any love or affection for you. He's scared because he recognizes, uh-oh, I'm not bringing -- this is not a puppy that has a life expectancy of this, this is a child. So it's roughly about 20 percent of my young women who really are able to establish any long-term relationships with these men.

MR. FROLIK: I guess I shouldn't say the relationships still involved with. The fathers who are involved with the children, even if there's not really a relationship or an affection between the mom and dad.

MS. BLACK: It's low, and that goes back to what everyone has said. Society has played down the involvement of men. Within my program, when I get these girls in class and they are coming through guidance, guidance very seldom asks a young man entering into Kennedy, by the way, do you have a child or by the way. They don't tend to ask them that. Then you find out, a young woman will come to me and say, you know such and such in the building, he has a child, and I have to go seek that young man out and invite him.

Young men are not comfortable to a certain extent dealing with a female. I always felt there needed to be a counterpart for my program in the high school that was a man because I cannot teach a young man -- I can read out of a book that says these are the things that you need to do to be a father, but to give them the experience of being a father. So a lot of times they are hesitant because they have grown up only hearing messages from women and they don't have those messages, that support system from the men even in the teaching.

You know, business, men kind of want to keep that hands off. They don't want to even deal with those issues. You know, go see Miss Black. She deals with that kind of stuff, and it drives you nuts because it's like, no, you deal with it because you have raised, you know, a son, you had a father, you are a man. There are some things that I am not going to be particularly good at because of who I am and they need that counter-balance, so I think we need more men to step up to the plate.

I congratulate him, but if you even look at this panel, there's four women and one man. There's very few men who are in this I want to say this industry, you know, in this game of prevention of teen pregnancy. Very few men are in it, you know, very, very few.

MR. FROLIK: April, your program. What's the involvement of the fathers typically.

MS. BREWER: You see the whole range. I don't know if I can divide it into percentage, but you see those who are not involved at all. Their relationship has ended completely. There are those in the middle who are no longer involved with the teen mom but they are involved with their child in some way, and then there are those who do manage to have a longer term relationship. Maybe not long as we would like to see, long forever, but a longer term relationship together, so you do see the whole range.

I don't want to make it sound as if there are no fathers out there participating with their children because there are. There are fathers who go to the prenatal appointments with the young moms. There are fathers who go to see that ultrasound happen and there are fathers who come to our program occasionally in the evening. Not on a regular basis, but occasionally we do see fathers who come in to be with the young mom, if no other reason than because she coerced him to be there.

But there are fathers who are involved and sometimes that can be a real positive thing.

MS. BLACK: Don't you think, also, too, that a lot of, if a young lady is going to the Welfare department to get services, the first thing they ask her, who is the father of your child. A lot of young men feel the only thing that society wants from them is that child support check, if I cannot provide financially for my child, and what young man who is 15 or 16 realistically is going to be able to provide any kind of steady, sometimes even steady financial.

Sometimes we make them feel if you can't buy X, Y, Z for this child, they have this -- sometimes young women have this expectation this child needs 20,000 different things before you bring the child home and realistically that's not true. If a young man feels that he cannot financially step into that, that also kind of draws him further and further away. We place a lot of emphasis on child support. It has its place, but that should not be the first thing that you ask a young mother, well, do you have a Social Security number.

It's amazing. That's one of the first questions. Do you have a way in which you can, do you know where he works, do you know this, and that would scare me, you know, because you are telling me this is the only role that you really, truly want me to play. And another thing, too, I know within my own family because the young man was villainized, my mother and father were so upset about the whole pregnancy that it could not be Jackie's fault. She had to be talked into this, and they really didn't even -- when I went into labor, my father left a massage downstairs at the hospital that, first of all, I wasn't even a patient there, so if anyone came and said if I was there, my father just did not know how to deal with that. He didn't know how to let my daughter's father into that picture.

And for many years, I had a problem with it because I was still trying to make things okay. I wanted everyone to not be upset with me because I had a child so whatever you told me, I needed to do. That's what I did, and I did not allow him to get that relationship until my daughter was in the fifth grade. And that has had a long-term impact on my daughter as well as him, so you are almost trying to undo some damage. But one thing we have to understand, when you are a teenagers, you only know what you know. You only know what you know.

MS. JOHNSON: I think that is the most important thing. These relationships are starting amongst immature individuals, you know, so you have a relationship the root and the basis of which is not very deep in a lot of cases. And so to expect and then you put a pregnancy on top of that, you put a child and the responsibility of a child and you put, you know, all the issues that are between this girl and this boy about what happened and how they were treated, you know, and we were talking before about the age differential sometimes and about the issue of coercion and all of that.

It's very hard to take a situation that arose on that very, very rocky soil and make it into some kind of loving, normal, long-term relationship. So there's very rocky shoals to negotiate here, and we have to recognize that, you know, to wish for these harmonious relationships between fathers and mothers in this situation is very, very difficult. It's ideal and we should try to, you know, to address those issues, but if you are going to do it, you are going to have to address some of the root causes of these issues. You know, what happened in the initial part of that relationship that made it problematic to start with.

MR. WILLIAMS: I would like to say that society pushes the male away in its entirety, but I have to admit that many of the males need to step up in regards to their roles in their families and recognizing that oftentimes they are villainized and it is difficult to -- it may be difficult to act as a role of father for your child, but you have to take on some of those archetypal male characteristics which is be aggressive or at least to the extent where you are willing to challenge the system in regards to seeing your son or challenge that young lady in regards to seeing your daughter or challenge the family as a whole. Males need to make the necessary steps to play a significant role in their child's lives.

MS. BLACK: They need a cheerleading section. They need someone to say that these are your rights as this child's parent, and that's why I say we need those males to kind of push. As females, we're not -- that's not our nature. We're not overly aggressive, so we almost need a man behind him saying I am going to take you down there and navigate you through this system. We're lacking that. They need -- I think even within our society, when you look at the rate of divorce, when you look at a lot of things within the family structure, Americans family structure is crumbling. We are crumbling at the very root of what -- I don't want to say what this nation was built on but how we were as humans.

It's just so much easier to walk away and not fight for getting over hurdles than it is just to run away and say, well, you know I tried, it didn't work out and I am just washing my hands of it. We don't really get in there sometimes and help them dig through. We have to emphasize we are not looking for you two to get married. I'm not saying that you will or you will not, but this child, just like you want that family, a family does not mean a mom and a dad that are married anymore. That's changed. A family unit is who you are related to, sometimes even by blood relations.

But if that is your blood, and I tell my young men, be careful where you spread your seed because many young men, they are just casually dating this girl, have their opinion of this girl and she gets pregnant and they are angry with this girl. I don't like her lifestyle. I don't think the friends she hangs out with. But I say when you are spreading, when you are going into and you are making a human life, these are all the things you need to think about before you even make that decision. Do I want to be tied with this person for the rest of my life.

MS. JOHNSON: Just to respectfully add something maybe to what you said, Curtis, rather than disagree, I would say that, you know, building on what Jackie said, traditional roles of aggressivity and passivity maybe are part of what get us into this problem in the first place, so I think I hear what you are saying about the assumption being that the man is going to walk away, so there is an image issue. But I think that in those situations, you know, what I see in my practice in those situations where the father, the teen father is responsible not only to the child but also to that mom in the sense of treating her well and being there for her during a very difficult time for her, those boys are just lifted up on a pedestal. Those boys are really something special, and I think people recognize that. People in the community recognize that. People in both families recognize that.

So if the boys can actually step up to the plate and get over what I think is a lot fear and I think it's a lot issues of what the masculine role is supposed to be, and if you can get beyond that, those images, I think, and those stereotypes, I think the boys that are able to do that are really held up as role models in the community and lauded by both families.

MR. FROLIK: As I listen to you, I think about how difficult, we really throw these very serious adult roles on people who, like you say, are still basically children and that goes to how do you become a father, how do you remember to take your pill every day if you are