Teens Get the Word on Parenting : Morning Glory’s Publications Aim to Teach--Not Preach

Jeanne Warren Lindsay’s first contact with pregnant teen-agers came in 1972 as she was working as a long-term substitute English teacher at a continuation high school in Anaheim.

A few of the students she saw were pregnant.

“These young women were so hungry for information,” Lindsay recalled. “I offered them a child-development text for English credit. It was the usual textbook for students who won’t be parents for 10 years, and there was certainly no mention of single parents. But they wanted information so badly on rearing their children they were willing to read it.”

When Lindsay was hired later that year to start a special school program for pregnant and parent teen-agers in the ABC Unified School District in Cerritos, she saw just how inadequately textbooks dealt with teen-age mothers and their special needs.

“The materials you could get, the textbooks, didn’t appear to know that people got pregnant in their teens, and yet at that time one out of five babies in the country were born to teen-agers,” she said.

In 1977, Lindsay set out to help fill the information gap.

Borrowing $2,000 from a relative, she founded Morning Glory Press, an independent small publishing company that specializes in books for pregnant and parent teens.

Since then, Morning Glory Press has published 11 books, all either written or co-written by Lindsay. It also distributes nine titles from other publishers.

Although other publishing houses offer single titles on the subject, Lindsay says, Morning Glory is the only press specializing in books solely for these teen-agers. This year, she says, Morning Glory will gross more than $300,000, with the majority of its sales to schools, social service agencies and libraries around the country.

The venture was originally run out of a spare bedroom in the Buena Park tract house she shares with Bob, her husband of 39 years. One by one, as each of their five children moved out, Lindsay would take over the abandoned bedroom for office and book-storage space. Now, Morning Glory Press has its headquarters in a spacious office built five years ago behind their garage. A modest sign on the front of the garage--itself piled high with boxed books ready for shipping--points the way to the seat of Lindsay’s mini publishing empire.

The 768-square-foot office has a vaulted ceiling and large windows overlooking the back yard. At one end is a kitchenette. An old library ladder leads to a loft, where Lindsay does most of her writing, in shorthand, while reclining on a chaise longue. If it’s sunny, she writes on the chaise longue in the back yard.

At the other end of the office, separated by a fireplace and sitting area, is the business part of the room, with its two computers, two printers, a typewriter, four filing cabinets and shelves crammed with books.

It’s a homey atmosphere, with lots of knickknacks, pictures and a poster quoting newspaperman A.J. Liebling: “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.”

It’s here where Lindsay, usually clad in a sweat shirt, typically puts in a 60-hour workweek.

Morning Glory Press is not, however, a one-person operation.

Along with two part-time workers who box books and fill out invoices in an adjoining room, there’s Carole Blum, who went to work for Lindsay five years ago. Blum’s title, Lindsay joked one morning recently, depends “on what letters she’s writing: She’s sales manager, director of promotions, office manager and customer service.”

“Well,” Blum said looking up from her computer, “at a small place, you have to do what has to be done.”

Lindsay continued to teach and coordinate the teen mother program at Tracy High School in Cerritos as Morning Glory Press grew. But she took an early retirement in 1988: “I love teaching, but I couldn’t do both. I was going crazy.”

At 61, Lindsay says she figures “I’m about 10 to 15 years away from retirement. I’ve got a lot to do.”

Among the more recent Morning Glory books are “School-Age Parents: The Challenge of Three-Generation Living,” which was published several months ago and is intended for “families facing the dilemma of adolescent pregnancy and parenthood.”

This month, the press published the revised edition of Lindsay’s 1982 book, “Do I Have a Daddy: A Story About a Single-Parent Child.” The slim volume offers an illustrated story for the child and a section in the back with suggestions for the single mother from other young mothers rearing children alone. Since it was first published eight years ago, “Do I Have a Daddy” has consistently sold about 100 copies a month.

Morning Glory Press’s biggest seller is the 1981 book “Teens Parenting: The Challenge of Babies and Toddlers,” at 60,000 copies and sales remaining steady. This book, which is recommended by the American Library Assn., offers guidelines for parenting during the child’s first two years and features extensive comments from young mothers interviewed by Lindsay.

“It’s been the book that’s kept us going,” said Lindsay, who is currently revising “Teens Parenting.”

“My husband says, ‘Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken,’ but I’m not going to have a 10-year-old book out there.” Bob Lindsay recently retired from Rockwell International and now serves as Morning Glory Press’s vice president. Jokes Lindsay: “He prides himself in never packing a book or typing an invoice.”

In revising “Teens Parenting,” Lindsay and two co-authors are expanding it into a three-book set: Separate books will deal with pregnancy and newborns, caring for a baby and toddler, and discipline from birth to age 3.

Lindsay spent October and most of December interviewing teen-age mothers and fathers for the revised edition, which she hopes to have in print in time for her exhibit next June at the annual American Booksellers Assn. convention in New York City.

Lindsay says she believes that the reason her books sell so well is less a matter of her talent as a writer than it is the words of the dozens of young people she interviews for each book.

By quoting extensively from her interviews, she said, “that means I don’t have to preach. Kids are terribly sensitive to being preached at, and sometimes they need to face a little reality. If those realities are described by their peers, they’re more likely to accept information.”

The interviews are her favorite part of the job: “All these moms share their very personal lives with me. That’s awfully special. I owe so much to those kids. If they quit talking to me, that’s where I’ll be finished.”

After 13 years publishing, Morning Glory Press is just now beginning to branch out.

Next spring will see its first book that Lindsay had no part in writing: “Surviving Teen Pregnancy: Your Choices, Dreams and Decisions” by Shirley Arthur, a former teen-age mother from Denver.

“I’m really excited about her book,” Lindsay said. She also is about to sign a contract with another Colorado writer who shadowed a teen-age mother for a year and has written a book from the young mother’s point of view.

Like any publisher, Lindsay said, she receives a lot of manuscripts in the mail. Many of them are either not well-written or are inappropriate for Morning Glory Press.

“One manuscript came in written like a romance novel,” she said. “I didn’t get past Page 5. We don’t need romance novels. We need things that kids will think are real.”

Lindsay does the typesetting for her books on her Macintosh computer and also designs most of the advertising layouts, writes the press releases and develops promotional campaigns for each book. Before a book goes to the printer, she said, “I get input from other people in the field, including teachers and occasionally students at school.”

Although she retired, Lindsay continues to serve as a part-time consultant for the teen mother programs at Tracy High and at Cabrillo Lane School in Lakewood. She spends half a day each week visiting new mothers in their homes a month before they return to school.

Lindsay believes that keeping in touch with teen mothers is vital for someone who writes and publishes books about pregnant and parenting teen-agers.

“That’s the only way I can know what a teen parent today is thinking and what her world is like because it’s not the same now as it was 15 years ago,” she said. “People stereotype teen parents an awful lot, and I’m awfully uncomfortable with the stereotypes.”

Lindsay also is active in the National Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy and Parenting. She recently resigned as the volunteer editor of the group’s quarterly newsletter and has started publishing her own, PPT Express, for teachers and others working with pregnant and parenting teen-agers.

Two or three times a month she attends professional conferences around the country, at which she displays the Morning Glory Press line of books. She also receives frequent invitations to conduct workshops on pregnant and parenting teens and on adoption from the birth family’s perspective, a topic she has written four books about.

Like many women her age who had children in the ‘50s, Lindsay said, she believed that she had to stay home with the children when they were growing up.

Although she did not go back to work until 1970, she did return to college in the late ‘60s to earn master’s degrees in home economics and anthropology. “I think I kept my sanity by going to school. I like working an awful lot. If it had been another era, I don’t think I would have stayed home that long.”

She stroked the Siamese cat curled up on the sofa next to her.

“The thing I like so much about working is the freedom I feel. Really, nobody tells me what to do, and that’s terribly important to me,” she said, picking up the cat and noting that she had not yet been asked how Morning Glory Press got its name.

“This is Morning Glory, and she’s 18 now,” she said. “When you have five kids, you don’t name it after one of them. You name it after your cat.”