Life Is Daily Struggle, Fatherless Teens Say

While politicians from Sacramento to Washington lament America’s epidemic of illegitimacy and propose stern new measures to curb out-of-wedlock births, 16-year-old Jaishawn broods about the daily pressures, deprivations and heartbreaks of growing up fatherless.

The child of an unwed mother, Jaishawn speculates that if her dad were around “my mom wouldn’t be so lonely and stressed out and take stuff out on me.” If her dad were around, Jaishawn guesses, “there’d be discipline from two people,” and she’d be less likely to cut school and smoke weed.

If her dad were around, there’d be more money to pay bills and maybe a way out of their gang-infested neighborhood. And if her dad were around, there wouldn’t be other men romancing her mother, men who Jaishawn often doesn’t like and sometimes doesn’t know.

“A whole lot of stuff would have been different,” Jaishawn said wistfully last week at the Crenshaw Alternative Education Work Center, a high school for chronic truants and juvenile offenders where 80% of the students are being raised by unwed mothers. “If my mom and dad had been together, it’d be cool.”

Jaishawn and a dozen classmates gathered to talk about fatherlessness in the wake of Gov. Pete Wilson’s State of the State address, which highlighted the governor’s concern about illegitimacy and its staggering consequences for taxpayers and communities.

The governor, citing the costs of public assistance and health care for often indigent fatherless families and the violent crime committed by unsupervised juveniles, last week proposed a $74-million initiative to discourage young women from having babies outside marriage. His plan, also aimed at encouraging the men who impregnate them to take responsibility for their offspring, includes more aggressive prosecution of men who have sex with underage girls, expanded mentor programs for at-risk youth and renewed efforts to deny welfare payments to women who have babies while on public assistance.

*

Across the nation, as in California, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, once relatively rare, account for about one-third of births. While the phenomenon crosses racial and socioeconomic lines, rates of illegitimacy are higher among disadvantaged, uneducated, urban women.

These children, researchers agree, are more likely than those in two-parent families to drop out of school, land in jail, wind up unemployed or collect welfare. They have more chronic illnesses, psychological disorders and behavioral problems. They score lower on intelligence and aptitude tests and are more likely to have children outside marriage.

Jaishawn and her classmates at the alternative high school, housed in the Community Youth Sports & Arts Foundation, are oblivious to the research, oratory and initiatives concerning their fate. They are consumed by the day-to-day strains that statistics cannot measure, struggles they describe with rough-edged grammar and natural eloquence.

The teenagers understand and sympathize with the double burden their mothers bear.

“My mom’s caught with both sets of responsibilities,” Donte said. “She’s got nobody to run to, nobody to get a second opinion. Mostly she puts her foot down when it needs to be put down, and I got no complaints. She goes overboard every now and then, but it’s not something I can’t understand.”

Jerney agreed. “Without a daddy, all the pressure’s on them,” the 16-year-old girl said. “That’s when all this stuff starts to come in wrong. There’s a place for your father and a place for your mother. Your father, like, should judge your boyfriends and your mother should be on your health side. But in trying to be a daddy, they lose track of being a mom.”

*

In describing their mothers’ disciplinary practices, the teenagers paint a picture of women who make strict pronouncements about study habits or choice of friends but do not follow through.

“I do whatever I want, just about,” Deone said. “She tells me it’s wrong, but that’s it. She never brings it up again.”

In large measure, the teenagers say, rules go unheeded because no one is around to enforce them.

Chrishawnda’s mother harps on the importance of education, then heads off to her job as a cafeteria worker. “I waited ‘til she left for work and then went back home,” the 16-year-old girl said of her behavior when she was attending a regular high school. “If I had a dad, I wouldn’t be in this school because I wouldn’t have messed up.”

*

Jerney too predicted that she would not have wound up at an alternative high school if she had a father.

“He’d of made sure I didn’t ditch, turned in my homework and wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said.

But Jerney does not wish for her father’s return, she said, because of the way he treated her mother. “I despise him,” she said. “He’s worthless.”

Jerney’s mother is married now, to another man--an advantage that few of her classmates enjoy.

Ebony’s mother remains in an on-again, off-again relationship with her father, who the girl describes as a thug, good only for the money he brings when she calls him on his car phone.

“Last night my daddy come up to the house with money and that lady be happy--happier than I seen her in a long time,” Ebony said.

Deone’s mother, as far as the boy is concerned, makes consistently bad choices in men, starting with the father he has never seen. Next came his sister’s father, who Deone says runs the streets, lives with another woman and “hurts my mom.”

“I don’t look at him as nobody,” Deone said. “He ain’t no good. He’s just like another kid to me, doing wrong stuff.”

Now Deone’s mother has another boyfriend.

“She puts him in front of her kids,” Deone said. “And I know he’s not right for her. He got my mom into all different kinds of stuff.”

*

These teenagers say their parents are setting bad examples and acknowledge that they are sometimes following them. Chrishawnda’s mother preached about “not making the same mistakes I did.” Then Chrishawnda turned up pregnant.

“It was cool with her,” the teenager said. “She didn’t say nothing to me. How could she? She let my boyfriend stay with us.”

So too for Deone, the only one in the group who has never seen his father, not even once, and who seemed free of fantasies about what life would have been with a man in the house.

“I don’t know how it’d be,” the boy said, his eyes clouded with sadness. “Probably the same. Anyway, you can’t miss something you never had.”

But Deone knows that his father got his mother pregnant and then left her, that another man did the same when his sister was born. And so he wonders about himself.

“I try to stay on track and not do nothing wrong,” Deone said. “But if I had children right now, I’d probably be just like them. They probably wouldn’t see me.”