What Welfare Cuts Would Mean to a Teen Mom’s Dreams

LaToya is the kind of child whose optimism is almost shocking. She has been told by the people closest to her that she won’t amount to anything, but LaToya refuses to believe them.

At 15, she has a sense of the possible that is heartwarming in a girl who delivered a son at 13. She is consumed with the daily concerns of school and mothering--homework if she can fit it in, doctors’ appointments for the baby--and dreams of becoming a cosmetologist. You might expect politics to be the last thing on her mind.

But LaToya and some other teen mothers at Business Industry School, a Mid-City continuation high school, are incensed at Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposed changes in the welfare program. They are particularly upset by two things: He wants to slash payments and proposes that money for single teen-age mothers be sent to their parents or guardians.

“We’re going to make an appointment--go down to his office and protest him,” says LaToya. “We’re going to tell him that people like us need that county check. The things he’s saying about teen-agers aren’t true. We have feelings and needs just like he does. He don’t even know the stories about us.”

LaToya’s story is much like those of her classmates. She lives with her 20-month-old son, Kayvon; her sister; two brothers, and their grandmother in a three-bedroom, federally subsidized apartment off Washington Boulevard. It’s a neighborhood with the usual gang troubles: lots of shooting, lots of fighting, lots of barred windows.

There are a few dismal chairs in the living room, worn wall-to-wall carpet and a big TV. Every room, in fact, has a TV. LaToya loves “Beverly Hills, 90210” because the kids on that show lead such enviable lives. “Their parents are there for them,” she says. “I wish I had it good like they got it.”

LaToya shares a bedroom with her sister and sleeps in a twin bed with her son. Sometimes, she says, Kayvon kicks so much in his sleep that her kidneys hurt. Or he stays up so late that she can’t do her homework.

LaToya and her siblings have different fathers. Their 37-year-old mother, who has been in jail a couple of times, drifts through now and then. Her mom’s relationship with her kids, as LaToya tells it, has been a series of disappointments for the children. Last March, after LaToya’s brother got sick and her mother was not around to approve medical treatment, the grandmother became their foster parent.

Her grandmother, says LaToya, is angry and sick. They don’t get along.

Today, LaToya’s mother is visiting. Her eyes are glassy and red. LaToya says it’s because she has high blood pressure. She’s pretty sure her mom is not high on crack right now.

“Her problem is she has an attitude,” LaToya will say, sounding tough. I have seen her weep, though, when she talks about her mother, and in such moments the depth of her sorrow seems fathomless. Sometimes, she dreams about being rescued by her father, a man she has not seen in years.

LaToya became pregnant at age 12. It sounds silly to her now, but she didn’t know that sex could do that. She’d never heard of abortion. Her mother never told her the facts of life, as she imagines everyone else’s mother does. LaToya knew about intercourse, though: She had been raped the year before.

She believes that if she gets her own welfare check, she will be able to get out of her grandmother’s house, escape the tension and unhappiness. She applied last month; if approved, she will receive $535 a month and food stamps after she turns 16 in October.

“I hate my life,” LaToya says. “I deserve better. I have confidence in myself that I’ll get the county check and use it wisely--move out, make something out of myself, pay my bills, take care of my son.”

If Wilson’s proposed cuts are enacted, her monthly check would drop to $482 if she stays in school, $410 if she drops out.

Why, she wonders, does the governor want to cut a subsidy you can barely live on as it is? And why does he think her welfare money should go to her guardian? Doesn’t he understand what her home life is like? If she could meet him, she would try her best to make him see how desperately she and her classmates need that money.

“Most of us are young,” LaToya says. “We can’t get a job right now. This money is just till we get on our feet. I’m not gonna be on the county all my life. I want to make something out of my life.”

(Statistics support her argument: The state Department of Social Services reports that the typical family is on welfare for less than three years.)

Wilson, who so impressed voters with his pro-child talk when he was running for governor, turns out to have an odd idea of what it means to help kids.

“What we are bound and determined to achieve in California is a shift from the remedial to the preventive mode,” he said when proposing his welfare cuts just before Christmas. Checks should go to parents and guardians, he said, to end the “insidious incentive” the money gives teen-age mothers to have more children out of wedlock.

Translated loosely--and antagonistically--this means we put our money into preventing pregnancy, rather than into supporting impoverished children.

LaToya knows that the key to escaping the poverty trap is education. Unfortunately, she doesn’t get much support at home. When her sister talks about becoming a lawyer, she says, their grandmother snaps: “You ain’t gonna be no lawyer! You ain’t gonna be nothing!”

Hard to imagine the governor and the grandmother having much in common. But somehow when the old woman delivers her punch to the ambitions of LaToya and her sister, she sounds a lot like Pete Wilson.

Only more upfront.