Father Figures

After the pregnancy prevention programs have failed, after the advice to stay in school has been disregarded and the warnings about the dangers of gang affiliation and drug use have been ignored, Dadisi Elliott tries to pick up the pieces. As coordinator of the Responsible Teen Fathers Program in Long Beach, he knows all too well that boys to men isn’t just the idea of a group of ballad singers.

The task he faces is daunting: to teach young fathers how to be parents, in some cases how to be husbands, and to counsel them on how to find jobs so they can contribute financially to their children’s lives. Part of the challenge is fighting society’s naturally protective feelings toward women.

“Too often, the idea you run up against is that teenage girls who get pregnant are the victims and the men involved are the perpetrators,” Elliott says. “Even within the helping professions, that idea is persistent, so the incentive to have programs for young men isn’t there. But the boys are affected by becoming fathers too, and having negative attitudes toward them doesn’t help solve anything.”

Elliott’s program operates out of the Job Start Center, which is funded by the Long Beach Private Industry Council. Long Beach, an ethnic and racially mixed area with many recent immigrants, has some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in California. The center is housed in a former storefront at the Long Beach Plaza, once the hope of economic revival but now an eerie ghost mall, a depressing symbol of the neighborhood’s poverty.

On a windy afternoon last week, 19-year-old Michael Jackson Jr. walked through the deserted food court to the Job Start Center, carrying his 1-year-old son and namesake. He is not yet a success story, not one of the teenagers who learned to operate a computer or passed his high school equivalency exam and did well in a professional internship the center found for him. But he would like to be.

“Having a baby made me want to be more responsible,” he says. “It’s what made me grow up.”

Baby Michael is in his father’s charge while the 17-year-old mother is at work. Jackson is the quietest member of a small group that gathers with Elliott and social worker Michael Frye. Part gripe fest, part therapy session, the meeting gives the young men an outlet for their frustrations and suggests ways they might cope with already troubled lives. They have much in common.

“In many cases, they’re the children of young parents, and history repeats itself,” Elliott says. “A lot of parents are uncomfortable talking about how the human body works, so a lot of young people don’t have a clue. There are a lot of myths out there. I’ve talked to 13-year-old boys who think they aren’t old enough to get girls pregnant. There’s a terrible lack of education and information.”

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And while statistics show there has been a steady decline in teen pregnancies nationwide, California still outpaces the rest of the nation in such pregnancies. L.A. County leads the way, with 64 teen pregnancies per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19, according to 1997 figures, the most recent available. The state’s teen pregnancies, and the recent decline, cut across ethnic groups.

The young men in Long Beach on this day seem most confused about how to live in harmony with the mothers of their children.

“A female is always going to think that you’re cheating on her,” says Donald Ray Hart Jr., who met the mother of his year-old son when she was 15. She’s 20 now, and at 21, he doesn’t know how to handle her jealousy or her rages.

Elliott explains that the less confident a woman feels, the more suspicious she tends to be.

“If you don’t love yourself, you can’t believe that anyone else would love you,” he says. He encourages the fathers to bring their girlfriends in for joint counseling sessions.

“Of course, we’re talking about young people here, who in many situations don’t have long-term, committed relationships. But in many, there is a committed relationship, and they stay together after the child is born. When there is an emotional bond, we try to capitalize on that.”

The unspoken question that hangs in the air is, if the young men’s parents had spent this much time talking to them about their problems, listening to them, and offering solutions, would they be here? Elliott, 45, with tinges of gray in his close-cropped hair, moved to San Diego in 1977, after a stint in the Navy. He attended Cal State San Diego and began working in community services there. He knows the boys see him as a father figure and admits to parental feelings toward them. His first name, which he chose in his 20s, means “critical” or “questioning” in Swahili. He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to teen parents who had married before his older brother’s birth.

“My father was in the Army, and he provided financial support. But physically and emotionally, he was an absent father,” Elliott says. “That’s part of what motivates me to do this work. I’ve worked as a youth counselor and found that issues around fragile families focus on absent fathers. When I’ve worked with young men in the juvenile justice system, so many of them have been abandoned by their fathers.”

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The dramas that inform the lives of abandoned children and young fathers are not new. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic American musical “Carousel,” the story of a rebellious young man who is killed trying to steal enough money to support his unborn child, opened on Broadway in 1945. Its most affecting moment is a musical soliloquy in which the expectant father reveals how having a child makes him want to be a better man.

More than 50 years later, the boys gathered in Elliott’s group express the same feelings.

“When I was gangbanging, I didn’t care about anything,” says Hart, a fine-featured young man with the build of a football player. “I was shot twice in one year. I’ve already been to the pen once. When I had my son, my whole perspective changed. I didn’t want to do that no more. My son is everything now, and I put him before myself.”

Richard Martinez, another former gang member, is 21, the father of a 2-year-old girl. The first time he met his father, he was 11.

“I don’t want to be that way to my daughter,” he says. “If my daughter hears me fighting with her mother, she’s going to think that that’s all right, and I don’t want her to think that. I never had a stable life, and that’s what I want for my child.”

Job training is the most important element of Elliott’s program, but he considers the psychological counseling important as well.

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“When indigent men have close relationships with their children,” he says, “they begin to aspire to more. We need to broaden understanding of the problems of teen fatherhood. Many of our fathers are dead broke. They’re not deadbeat. They don’t have jobs, and they don’t have the training to get a job for even minimum wage. Our concern is, how do we get these men prepared? Of course, we want those young men to get off welfare and financially care for their children. But without a job, or without skills that make them employable, that isn’t possible.”

Elliott fights the idea that a father’s only role is financial, one that’s commonly expressed by the teenage mothers and their parents.

“That isn’t a valid attitude,” he says. “We live in a time when father has come to mean paycheck. I have grave concerns about that, because it ignores all the other things a father can provide to his child, even in the absence of economic capacity.”

Mimi Avins can be reached by e-mail at mimi.avins@latimes.com.