Teen Dads Who Don’t Run Away

In Russell James’ neighborhood, winos guzzle booze from bottles masquerading as paper bags. Abandoned row houses, their punched-out windows patched with plywood, pockmark the landscape.

Tough young men in knit caps and baggy blue jeans own the street corners, peddling cocaine and heroin with their beepers and their cell phones.

Just a few months ago, Russell was one of these hustlers. At 17, with the face of a boy but the worries of a man, he had been booted out of school and twice arrested for drug dealing. A kingpin, the authorities branded him, although he was mostly a mixed-up kid. Cash flowed through his fingers like water, a river of green in an otherwise gray world.

Yet there was something gnawing at him, something telling him that this was no way to live.

That something, surprisingly enough, was the birth of a baby, his child--a little girl.

“Before I had her,” he says, “I didn’t have to think twice about doing something wrong, worrying about the consequences. Alls I’m worried about is if I’m gonna get locked up, stuck up, shot or arrested. Now, the decisions I make revolve around her. If I go back out on the street, if I die or get locked up, who will take care of her?”

Russell’s metamorphosis from dope dealer to responsible father--a transformation that is far from complete--did not begin spontaneously. Three months ago, at the urging of his girlfriend and the juvenile judge who sentenced him to house arrest for selling drugs, Russell joined a program intended to help a segment of society that has long been virtually invisible: young unwed fathers.

He has become part of a trend that is taking root in inner-city neighborhoods across America, from Los Angeles to Washington. Young unwed fathers. The phrase conjures up dastardly images--sexual marauders, as one sociologist has called them, who lure girls into their beds, leaving them pregnant and penniless. Who would want to help such men? It is the mothers, one might more safely argue, who are deserving of--and who have received--public sympathy and support.

Over the past three decades, as the nation has grappled with the twin ills of illegitimacy and teen pregnancy, millions of public dollars and countless hours of political rhetoric have been spent on the plight of young unwed mothers.

Fathers were largely ignored. What little attention they got was condemnation for getting women pregnant and failing to support their children. As to getting them involved in the kids’ lives, that seemed so farfetched no one bothered to consider it.

“There was a lot of talk about paternity establishment, and there was a lot of talk about child support,” says Ronald Mincy, a labor economist with the Ford Foundation who wrote the book, “Nurturing Young Black Males.” “But there was very little talk about fathers.”

That is starting to change as efforts to promote responsible fatherhood emerge both inside and outside government. Most, like the Baltimore program, target fathers who are young, poor, undereducated, unemployed and unmarried.

But as this portrait of a teenage father reveals, helping these young men is far more complicated than teaching them how to change diapers or discipline their children.

On the cold day in December--one month shy of his 18th birthday--when Russell first visited the Healthy Start office in west Baltimore, he did not say he wanted help raising his daughter. He did not even say he had a daughter.

He trudged up three flights of steps and plunked himself down in a blue chair at the end of a long conference table. He felt beaten down; freshly released from house arrest, he had applied to and, thanks to his criminal record, been rejected by what seemed like every fast-food joint in town.

And this, recalls Ronald Copeland, the advocate who recruited him, is what he said:

“Man, I need a job. I need a job bad. I just come from the streets. I could go back out there, but I don’t wanna do that. I wanna live, and out there, the only thing that can happen is you die, or you kill someone.”

Out-of-Wedlock Births

The baby’s name is Jaze, which is pronounced Jazz. She arrived two weeks early, at 10:36 a.m. on June 21, 1995, a little bit of a thing at 5 pounds, 11 ounces. Six hours of labor, four quick pushes and she was out, recalls her mother, Tracey Wells. The nurses put a pink knit cap on Jaze, bundled her up and handed her to Russell.

“She’s pretty,” he proclaimed.

Thus another out-of-wedlock child entered the world. Nationwide in 1993, more than 1 birth in 4--1.2 million babies--occurred outside of marriage. (In California, the rate is 1 in 3.) Among blacks, 68% of children are born to unwed parents.

These kids face a scary future; study after study has shown that youngsters who grow up in single-parent households are more likely to fare poorly in school, turn to crime, abuse drugs and suffer from mental illness. Yet the driving concern of policymakers, Mincy and others complain, is how much these children cost the taxpayers.

That is because out-of-wedlock births have fueled an explosion in the federal Aid to Families With Dependent Children program. In 1993, children born to unmarried women represented 55% of the AFDC caseload, compared with 32% in 1973. A 1990 Congressional Budget Office study found that 4 in 5 young unmarried mothers went on welfare within a few years of their first child’s birth.

Tracey typifies this trend. She is a fast talker, opinionated and headstrong, with close-cropped hair dyed the color of butter and huge gold loop earrings.

Just 20 years old, she had her first child at 16. She gets $373 a month from AFDC for her two other children and $77 for Jaze, plus about $400 in food stamps. The older children carry their father’s last name, Aiken. He is in jail, awaiting trial on charges of attempted murder.

She has no regrets about motherhood; on the contrary, after two boys, she says, she was delighted to have a girl. Yet the arrival of Jaze was not the sort of blissful occasion most Americans associate with the birth of a child.

For starters, Russell denied he was the father. He tries delicately to explain his on-again, off-again relationship with Tracey, which began in this very neighborhood where they met when he was 15 and she was 17.

“At first,” he says, referring to Tracey, “she didn’t know who the baby’s father was. Well, she knew but she just didn’t know how to tell me, ‘cause the person she was with, I guess they wasn’t ready to let go of each other. And I was with somebody else. . . . Somewhere down the line, she ended up telling me that it was mine, and I didn’t know what to believe.”

Sometimes they talk about getting married, spinning adult middle-class dreams of a future with a house and jobs and good schools for the kids. She calls him Pooky. He calls her Baby. But they also bicker constantly--”fussin,’ ” as Russell calls it--over the past.

“He was like, ‘Man, that ain’t my baby,’ ” Tracey says. She turns toward him with a venomous look. “And, I’m not gonna put no baby on you that you say is not yours.”

She told the hospital the baby was Aiken’s. Russell had misgivings but did not protest. It was not until months later--long after he had joined Tracey in a dingy two-bedroom apartment of a row house her mother rents--that a blood test proved he was the father.

But by that time, no test was needed. Somehow, Russell had come to an understanding with himself. “If I was man enough to lay down and start a family,” he says now, “then I have to make sacrifices to keep that family.”

In Russell and Tracey’s world, wrangling over paternity is common, says Elijah Anderson, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist. His 1992 book “Streetwise” paints a bleak portrait of young black men, jobless and aimless, with attitudes on sex and fatherhood that are cavalier at best.

“To be sure,” Anderson writes, “there is a fair amount of promiscuity among the young men and women. . . . In self-defense, the young man often chooses to deny fatherhood; few are willing to ‘own up’ to a pregnancy they can reasonably question.”

But there is mounting evidence that the common assumptions about unwed fathers are not always true.

Parental Concerns

In 1993, Robert Lerman, a scholar at the Urban Institute, published the first profile of young unwed fathers, culling statistics from a survey that tracked 600 men during the 1980s.

The vast majority--80% of those ages 19 to 26--did not live with their children. Yet at the same time, nearly half lived close to their children, visited them often and made support payments.

Unwed fatherhood, Lerman learned, was most widespread among African Americans, even compared with other men from disadvantaged backgrounds. Yet black unwed fathers were, on the whole, more attentive to their children than whites or Latinos, probably because they tended to live closer to them. While 37% of white fathers and 30% of Latinos never visited their children, only 12% of blacks never did.

“We have a program called Women, Infants and Children,” he says, referring to a $3.7-billion-a-year federal nutrition program. “Why shouldn’t it be Parents, Infants and Children? I think we are too often assuming that the fathers are not going to do much.”

Russell defies that assumption. He fixes bottles, bathes the kids and changes diapers with the dexterity of a pro. He voices the fears and yearnings of parents everywhere. It is easy to forget he is only 18.

“Where’s the money going to come from to support us?” he wonders. “Who’s gonna put clothes on her back? Who’s gonna put food in her mouth? Who’s gonna put food in all our mouths? I want her to have everything. I want her to have more than what I had.”

Russell once thought he might have more. He was always a big kid, with thick arms and a powerful chest and an endearing smile. He dreamed of college and a career in football. He still keeps the letters, sent unsolicited, by university admissions offices.

They are squirreled away in a closet in his mother’s apartment, tucked inside what Russell calls “my important box”--a New Balance sneaker box that also contains his arrest papers and his football card collection. The box sums up this teenager’s life--the boy in constant struggle with the man.

The streets put an end to his college dreams. At 15, he got sucked in by the promise of fast cash: $2,500 to $3,500 every two days at his busiest. The money is all gone now, squandered on clothes and gold jewelry and toys long ago broken or discarded.

He lied to his mother when she asked him if he was dealing. Sheila Moss is a single mother herself. Now in her late 30s, she has long been separated from Russell’s father, who left her to rear three children on her own. Russell is her oldest child; she refers to him as “my baby.” Eventually she got tired of her baby’s lies and threw him out. “I always tried to teach him, when you do things, there’s gonna be consequences,” she says.

Depressed, he went to live with his cousin. “I thought, in a way, that there wasn’t no hope for me,” he says.

Giving up the dealing has not been easy. The idleness gets to him; “I ain’t got nothing to do,” he complains. Most mornings, he stays home to help with the kids; most afternoons he plays basketball.

On the streets, junkies still hit him up for money. His old drug buddies pressure him to come back: “They say, ‘This nigga on lockup.’ Or they say something like, ‘You whipped?’ Or they say, ‘Did Tracey let you out?’ ”

Russell shrugs off his critics. “They just go to one girl’s house, the next girl’s house. The majority of the girls be ugly, at least the ones I’ve seen.”

A Healthy Start

It is this mix of the boy and the man that the people at the Healthy Start office in west Baltimore are trying to fine-tune into a father.

The focus of Healthy Start, funded by the federal government in 22 cities, is the child. Its goal: to reduce infant mortality. Each city handles the program differently, but, in each, the primary clients are mothers and their babies.

Joe Jones is a 40-year-old former drug abuse counselor who worked for the predecessor of Healthy Start in the early 1990s. When he started his job, he expected to run into opposition from his clients’ boyfriends. Quite the contrary. The men were begging for help--drug counseling, job counseling, you name it.

“It became clear,” Jones says, “that if we wanted to stabilize these families, we couldn’t just work with the mother and child.” He sketched out a plan for a support group for the “significant others” of the women in Healthy Start. At the first meeting, in June 1993, three men showed up. Today, 120 are enrolled at two sites.

The idea, Jones says, is to get fathers involved in the lives of their children as early as possible, preferably before they are born.

Birth is what experts call “a teachable moment,” the point when young fathers, still puffed up with pride, are most attentive. Later on, interest wanes. Lerman’s study found that while 57% of unwed fathers with children under 2 visited once a week, the percentage dropped to 22% by the time the child was 7.

Jones’ strategy is to make both parents want to stay involved in their children’s lives, even if they are no longer together. Healthy Start requires its male clients to study a “fatherhood curriculum,” which touches on such issues as family health and domestic violence. They must attend prenatal visits with their pregnant girlfriends and accompany their children to the pediatrician.

Fighting Joblessness

Yet as much as it concentrates on fathering, Healthy Start cannot ignore a harsher reality: rampant joblessness. It quickly became clear to Jones that too many of his charges were “inappropriately employed in the drug trade.” He needed to find them legitimate work. Nobody else would.

He came up with a clever plan. Healthy Start had $12 million in federal grant money to remove contaminated lead paint from inner-city houses, where it posed a health danger to children--including Tracey’s 3-year-old son, who suffered from lead poisoning.

Why not have the contractors hire his young fathers? Jones proposed that Healthy Start subsidize the salary--$6 an hour for the first 30 days, then $8 an hour--for one year. After that, the fathers would become employees. The toxic paint would get removed, kids would be safe, dads would have jobs.

The contractors were not exactly enthusiastic--”most people in their right mind wouldn’t work with these guys,” Jones admits--but they had little choice. If they didn’t hire the men, they didn’t get the contracts. The first crop of Healthy Start lead removers started work six months ago.

Jones is urging Russell to join the lead abatement team, but it could take six months for him to get hired. He is thinking instead about applying to a trade school to learn automotive repair. He wants to get his high school equivalency diploma. He complains he is broke, forced to rely on Tracey and her mother for food and shelter, reduced to borrowing petty cash from his mother and his father, whom he sees occasionally. He wants to do something, anything, and fast. The longer he does nothing, the more he worries he will not be able to resist the lure of the streets.

“I’m looking toward the future,” he says, “whereas I’m worrying about am I gonna make it or not. Not as far as getting killed or locked up. I’m talking about making it financially. Am I gonna make it in my own house? Am I gonna get everything that I used to have before--I know it’s a lot of money, the car and all the clothes--but get it in a positive way, from a job, you know?

“That’s all I want. And Jaze, well, I know she’ll be raised. But I don’t know how she’ll be turning out. I wanna know, are we gonna be in it like the vows say, the wedding vows, through thick and thin, sickness and health? That’s what I wanna know.”