It’s Time to Talk With Your Daughter

Mom and Dad, there’s something I have to tell you. And you’d better sit down for this one.

That teen-aged daughter of yours? There’s a 40% chance she’ll become pregnant before she’s 20, according to national statistics, says Callista Hemenway, director of family life education for Orange County’s Coalition Concerned with Adolescent Pregnancy (CCAP).

I know what you’re thinking. Not my kid. Those numbers, they’re about other people in other parts of the country, or troubled girls whose parents haven’t given them the guidance they should have. Sure, it happens here, too, but not so much in your neighborhood, right?

Wrong. “We find teen pregnancy and births in every school district in the county,” Hemenway says. “In some areas, people think not much of that is happening. But it touches every ethnic group, every neighborhood, every financial level. It’s happening on everybody’s block.”

Although definitive numbers are nearly impossible to come up with, CCAP estimates that about 8,000 Orange County teen-agers become pregnant every year. “We know that around 3,000 of them give birth each year. The rest either abort or miscarry. The abortion rate is at least as high as the birth rate.”

Some parts of the county, such as Santa Ana, Anaheim and Fullerton, have a higher rate of births to teen-aged mothers, “but that doesn’t mean those are the only places with teen pregnancies,” Hemenway says. “A lot of people are putting their heads in the sand in areas where there are a lot of abortions.”

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the teen-aged birth rate “has been relatively the same over the past couple of years,” Hemenway says. But that also means that while the problem hasn’t gotten worse, it hasn’t improved, either, despite the efforts of Hemenway and others who have been struggling to reduce it.

Because of the “not my kid” mind-set, Hemenway says, “everybody in the field has a hard time accessing parents. It’s hard to get them to come to workshops. We don’t reach nearly as many parents as we’d like to. But we try to do what we can with the people that we do reach.”

Karen, who lives in the Saddleback Valley, never thought it would happen to her family, either.

“As a teacher, I have witnessed the trauma that teen pregnancies bring to both the girl and her parents,” writes Karen. “Little did I know that I would also experience this as a mother.”

When her daughter, Kim, was 15, Karen didn’t just suspect that she was sexually active. She knew.

“There’s always been quite an open communication between us,” Karen says.

So when Kim became intensely involved with her boyfriend, her mother sat down with her for an important talk.

Soon afterward, with her mother’s help, Kim was on the pill.

“Probably a lot of people would say that what I did was wrong,” Karen says. “But what’s right is what’s right for each individual family.”

Karen didn’t approve of her daughter’s boyfriend. “I tried every subtle means I could summon to end the relationship, short of forbidding her to see him. I tried that once, and she was going to run away with him. I didn’t want to lose my daughter.”

But when Kim was 18, she moved in with her boyfriend anyway. By then, she had stopped taking the pill. “It was making me real sick,” Kim says. “And when I didn’t get pregnant after I stopped taking it, I thought there was something wrong with me.”

“She seemed happy, sort of,” Karen says. “Until she came home that November evening . . . and looked at me with tears brimming, spilling over the black and blue marks on her cheeks. He had hit her again, totally unprovoked. . . . That wasn’t all. She was also pregnant with his child.”

In her letter, Karen describes what happened next.

“ ‘Of course, stay here, as long as you want. No, I don’t want you to go back to him. This is your home, too, you know,’ I murmured as I held her, stroked her long, silky hair, and tried to quiet her sobs. ‘What do you want to do about the baby, honey?’ All the while, hoping she would say ‘adoption,’ but knowing in my heart that she wouldn’t.

“All of the arguments you hear for adoption are true for so many young girls. A baby isn’t just a baby, but another human being who requires your care, your guidance, and your love for a lot of years. Look what I was still doing after 18 years! Babies demand your time, your energy. They have priority over your social life. They inhibit many young suitors. They need you and ask more of you than anyone could ever tell you. And you must give if you want them to grow up into healthy, well-adjusted adults who are capable of successfully functioning in our world.”

“I didn’t even consider abortion at all,” Kim says. “Or adoption. If I didn’t get back together with him, she (the baby) would be like, mine. She would never go away. I thought, I’m not going to have enough money to support her, but then, I’ll just do it somehow. Without my mom, I don’t think I could have gone through it all.”

Kim’s stepfather was skeptical at first, but he soon came around.

Karen wasn’t sure how to break the news to her own mother, other relatives, or the neighbors. “But times have really changed,” she says. “Everybody was behind her. The people on the block even pooled together and bought her a playpen. We’re very lucky to live in a place where people are very, very tolerant.”

Kim is now 20 and the mother of 16-month-old Jennifer. She works full time and is trying to save enough money to move out of her mother’s house. During the day, Jennifer stays with a baby-sitter.

“I am not used as a surrogate mother for the baby, nor as the grandma who is saddled with a baby while the mother runs around town with her friends,” says Karen.

“Everybody tried to tell me how hard it was going to be,” Kim says. “You just cannot understand how hard it is until you’ve been through it. It’s worth it, but it’s like a 24-hour job. It’s like your whole life.”

Although Kim does have to arrange her life around her daughter, she insists she never feels resentful about it. “If I didn’t have her, I would be dead,” she says bluntly. “The people I was hanging around with are like heavy drug people. I’m sure that without her, I would be dead or in jail or something. She’s given me a purpose in life.”

“This has been good for all of us, really,” Karen says. “It’s just so neat to see this little bundle running around giving love to everybody.”

“I know it doesn’t work out this well for most people,” Kim admits, who is reluctant to offer advice to others based on her experience. “I would say, be careful if you’re going to have sex. But if you really love each other--I don’t know; everybody’s different. That’s just something you have to decide for yourself.”

Family Politics

Politicians have suddenly discovered the family, and both George Bush and Michael Dukakis are promising help on family issues, from bringing up baby to caring for a sick grandma. But aside from visits to day-care centers and nursing homes for the benefit of the TV cameras, what specifics could the candidates offer that would make a difference in your own family life? You tell us, and we will tell them.

Is the Family Dinner Extinct?

Mom doesn’t get home from work until 6, Dad’s out of town on business a lot, and the kids have soccer three nights a week. Does your family still manage to sit down together at mealtime? Or is your kitchen more like a fast-food drive-through? Who cooks? Who cleans? And who sits at “the head of the table”?

Dad and Apple Pie

We are interested in meeting single fathers who are raising children alone. If you are one, or know one, drop us a line.

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