Off to a Good Start : Teen Parents Learn to Care for Their Children and Their Futures at Conference

At first, Norma was thrilled when she found out she was pregnant at 15. Having a child seemed like the perfect way to escape her own unhappy childhood.

“I felt that nobody loved me, and I needed somebody to love who would love me back,” she said. “I thought, ‘The baby will be so cute. I’ll dress him up, and he’ll be like my doll, and when I want him to shut up, he’ll shut up.’ ”

Norma has five siblings--including one older sister who gave birth at 14 and another who had a baby at 17--and she was raised by a single working mother who was constantly struggling to make ends meet.

“She never had time to be with us, and when she did, she was too tired to do anything. I felt alone, like no one cared for me,” Norma said. “Now that I’m older, I understand that she had a hard time supporting us.”

At 18, Norma is no longer living in the fantasy world that enabled her to romanticize teen parenthood. She is married and has two children, ages 3 and 2 months. Her husband has a job, but they are barely getting by on his modest income.

Norma plans to graduate from high school in June and start college in the fall. Meanwhile, she is feeling so much stress that, she admitted, she sometimes spanks her 3-year-old son out of frustration.

“I stop and think, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this.’ And then I ask him to forgive me,” she said.

Raising children, she has discovered, is nothing like playing with dolls.

Norma was one of four young mothers who shared their stories last week during a conference that drew about 400 pregnant girls and teen moms--and a few dads--to the Pan Pacific Hotel in Anaheim.

The second annual “Good Beginnings” conference--sponsored by the Adolescent Pregnancy Childwatch Coalition, the Junior League of Orange County and the Orange County Private Industry Council--attracted more than twice as many teens as the first.

Kathleen Goldberg, president of the coalition, said the conference was organized in response to some startling statistics:

* Orange County’s annual teen birthrate has climbed steadily, from 2,929 to 4,745, in the last decade.

* 70% of teen mothers have a second child before age 21.

Goldberg said she hoped teen moms and mothers-to-be would leave the conference not only with practical information to help them take care of themselves and their children, but also with reassurance that they are not alone and that they still have promising futures.

It was clear during the panel discussion in which Norma participated that the conference was also a place where anyone with an idyllic view of teen motherhood would get a strong dose of reality.

Speaking on the panel with Norma were three other teens who have been forced by early pregnancy to grow up too fast.

Rebecca, who is 18, said her boyfriend and parents tried to talk her into having an abortion, but she was determined to keep her child.

She ended up receiving support from her parents, who made room for the baby in their home. Rebecca, who takes her 2-year-old to a day-care center at Orange Coast College while attending school full time, still sees the child’s father, but said she’s now “very careful” about birth control.

“I’m not ready--emotionally or financially--to have more kids,” she said.

Barbara wasn’t ready, either, but at 17 she is married and has two children, ages 3 and 1. She said she felt grown-up at 14 when--without even thinking about using birth control--she began having sex with her 19-year-old boyfriend.

Today, however, she realizes that she was “still a baby” when she became sexually active. If she could relive her early teens, “I wouldn’t be going out with anyone at 14,” she said.

Barbara and her husband are struggling financially and often fight about their money problems, she said. She will probably have to get a job instead of enrolling in college after she graduates from high school in June. Her disappointment was evident when she said: “I want my kids to have a better education than I’m getting--and a better future.”

Toni, 17, never kidded herself about her ability to care for a child. She knew she wasn’t ready for parenthood.

She was homeless--living out of a car with her unemployed mother and brother--when she got pregnant at 15. Toni said she and her brother managed to pick up some money selling drugs, but they often went to sleep hungry.

Toni didn’t see a doctor until she was six months pregnant. But then she took action. She broke up with her boyfriend and decided to give the baby up for adoption.

“I didn’t have the will to take care of myself, let alone a child,” she explained.

Through an agency that arranges open adoptions, she found a couple who wanted her baby, even though they knew she had endangered her child by using marijuana and alcohol during her pregnancy.

The couple took Toni into their home during the last two months of her pregnancy, and the adoptive mother was at her side when she gave birth to Robbie 15 months ago.

Toni and the adoptive mother, who brought Robbie to last week’s conference, have become friends, and Toni said she plans to stay in touch with Robbie as he grows up. However, she added emphatically, she feels no maternal bond to him.

“He’s not my kid. I’ve never regretted giving him up,” she said.

When she learned recently that Robbie had a congenital heart defect, she was relieved that he was with a family who could take care of his medical needs. “I don’t know what I would have done,” she said.

For the past year, Toni has been concentrating on getting her own life straightened out. She said the counseling services offered by the adoption agency helped her entire family. Her mother and brother have found jobs, and they now can afford to live in a two-story townhouse. Toni, who said she and her brother have given up drugs, is planning to go to college and hopes to eventually become an attorney.

Pearl Soria Raya, the keynote speaker at the “Good Beginnings” conference, encouraged Toni and the other teens in her audience to pursue their ambitions.

She pointed out that being a teen mother slowed her down, but didn’t stop her from reaching her goals.

“Being a teen mother didn’t mean I was going to be a failure,” said Raya, who is 35 and works as a coordinator of Recreation and Community Service for the city of Santa Ana.

Raya got pregnant when she was a junior at Santa Ana High School. She married at 17 and divorced three years later, just after giving birth to her second child.

Raya, who remarried 1 1/2 years ago, graduated from college nine years after getting her high school diploma. Her progress was slow because she had to earn a living, but she was determined to finish school so she could have a career in social services.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she told the teen moms at the conference, “but anything’s possible.”

She’s grateful that her mother and teachers pushed her to stay in high school and helped her discover that she had options other than being a homemaker.

“Expand your horizons,” she advised. “Find out how other people live.”

Raya suggested teens find an adult with whom they can talk--someone who can serve as a positive model. “Listen to their advice,” she said. “Take it to heart, because they’ve lived a life you haven’t lived yet.”

Raya also urged teen moms to give their children the attention they need. She said she was too immersed in her own problems to focus on her offspring when they were young. Now she wishes she’d spent more time with them.

“Talk to your children, touch them, kiss them. Think of them first,” she stressed.