Teen Pregnancy a Hard Lesson for Teacher, Family

When word spread at San Marcos Junior High School that 20% of the high school girls were pregnant the previous school year, teacher Don Nelson was more than capable of handling a timely class discussion on premarital sex.

He knows the textbook answers to sex and sexuality; he teaches family life education as part of the school’s seventh grade health and science curriculum.

If asked to share his personal values, he is comfortable and confident in doing so; he is a former minister.

And he knows the reality of premarital sex; his youngest daughter got pregnant when she was 17.

Several weeks ago, when parents from his school met to discuss revamping the sex education curriculum in seventh and eighth grades in light of the high school experience, Nelson listened patiently but with some skepticism that curriculum adjustments would do much good.

“They were talking ideals,” Nelson said later, recalling that meeting and the effort to reduce teen-age pregnancy. “But I don’t know that there is an answer.”

Indeed, if there was a household that would not be expected to produce a teen-age mother, it might be that of Don and Jeanette Nelson, who live in Vista.

The daughter, the youngest of their five children, got pregnant five years ago. She and the father of the child married before the child was born. They have since divorced and she moved out of state to work and raise her son.

The Nelsons say their experience may help other parents cope with a similar trauma. Having an unwed pregnant daughter is nothing short of traumatic, they say.

Don and Jeanette Nelson met through their parents’ church in the small town of St. Louis, Mich., population 4,000. He was a sophomore in high school; she was a freshman.

They married in 1951, after Jeanette’s high school graduation, and they farmed. Six years later, with three children ranging in age from 5 to 1, and with a leaning towards ministry work, Don enrolled in a Church of Nazarene college. He graduated in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in religion and, at age 30, was assigned a small church in Richton Park, Ill. The family by now had grown to four. Two-and-a-half years later, Nelson moved to a church in Jackson, Mich. That was 1963, the year Beth -- their youngest -- was born.

After three years in Jackson, Nelson left to head a larger church in Alpena, Mich. And, after three years there-faced with the economic realities of raising four daughters and a son on a minister’s salary-Nelson brought his family to North San Diego County in search of a teaching job.

He was hired in 1968 by the San Marcos Unified School District, where he has been since.

The family has not been without misery and despair.

In 1978, a son-in-law was killed when he lost control of his motorcycle.

And last July, a 3-year-old granddaughter was killed and a son-in-law was in a coma for seven weeks when their car was struck by a drunk driver near Lake Tahoe.

Jeanette Nelson vividly recalls the trauma of learning her young, unmarried daughter was pregnant. “One afternoon, she sat down in a chair in the dining room and said, ‘I’ve got to tell you something. I think I’m four months pregnant.’

“Wow, what a blow,” she said, suggesting that five years have done little to deaden the impact.

“You have such hopes for your kids to excel in life. . . . “

Much of the shock was because Beth didn’t seem to be the type who would allow herself to get pregnant, her parents said.

She was active in the local Nazarene Church, and her best friend was the minister’s daughter. In her sophomore year she met a boy at church--much the same way her own parents met--and they began dating. He was a popular student at Vista High School. He was her first love, and they dated steadily. Despite her father’s insistence that she date other boys, she was loyal to him. “If you date around too much, the other kids start talking about you,” daughter told father.

Did mom and dad ever suspect that the two teens were sexually active?

“I don’t think I was naive,” Don Nelson offered. “I felt she was dating too much. And I was aware of how kids have time on their hand at lunch, and that they’ve got their cars.

“But these two kids were together in church activities, too, and I thought that was a safe place for them. And they never stayed out past midnight.

“He was a nice, good-looking boy, and his parents were even more strict than we were. Maybe that was some of the problem--they took his responsibility from him as a teen-ager, so he never learned to handle it on his own.”

Had the Nelsons talked to their kids about sex?

Don Nelson: “I told the kids, ‘Don’t bring any babies home for me to raise.’ And I remember telling (Beth’s boyfriend) that if he had any ideas, he’d better take the necessary precautions. But I don’t remember talking to the girls.”

Jeanette Nelson: “Looking back, I wish I had taken more time to talk to our children. But I always seemed so busy.”

Don Nelson: “Maybe we had our heads in the sand. We thought the church would do it, or the school would do it.”

Don and Jeanette Nelson remember five years ago as if it were yesterday.

“When I found out, I asked the boy if he had told his parents. He said no. So, they went to tell his parents,” Don Nelson said.

“His dad got out the Bible and said the honorable thing for them to do was get married. That made me livid, because marriage is not a solution to a problem. I told the boy that he didn’t have to marry my daughter, that the baby could be put up for adoption. Beth never considered having an abortion.”

Jeanne Nelson said she left the decision up to the two teen-agers. “She was the type of girl who wanted to do things her way, and not be told,” she said.

The couple got married within weeks; her pregnancy was no secret to the guests at the church wedding.

Said Don Nelson, “One thing you find out that really hurts you as a father is that, legally, you have no say in whether she gets married, puts the baby up for adoption or has an abortion. Once she’s pregnant, you have nothing to say about her future. Boy, if you don’t think that’s hard for a father to deal with.”

The baby was born in November, 1980.

The couple lived in a Vista apartment and struggled to make ends meet, each holding a job with overlapping hours. In time, the marriage soured; the couple separated in the fall of 1981, and Beth, with her baby, moved back home with her parents.

“Even though this happened, we’re still your parents and we want to help. We love you,” they told her. The college money they had saved for her was used instead to buy her a car.

In 1983 the divorce was final, and she began reconstructing her life by moving out of state -- partly to escape her former husband’s debts -- by getting a job and by volunteering as a counselor in a church group.

How can the number of teen-age pregnancies be reduced?

“There’s got to be something done about the moral consciousness of America and the exploitation of sex in the media,” he said.

“We’re pushing adulthood on our children. They’re using make-up in the seventh grade.

“What I tell them as a parent or teacher won’t make much difference in changing their attitude about sex,” he said. “There’s nothing more disgusting than a glutton, and society is a sex glutton.”

He sighed with frustration. “I don’t know what the answer is.”

About their own daughter’s pregnancy, the Nelsons said they felt disappointed in her, and felt that they as parents had failed.

“Of course we look back and wonder what we did wrong. Maybe we should have gotten her that horse,” Jeanette Nelson said.

Her husband said: “Finally, you have to say to yourself, ‘We did the best we could. We did the best, for that time and place.’ ”