Promises I Can Keep

I went to a small, Christian high school and when a young girl got pregnant, it was practically a tragedy. For some reason, she would have to go in front of the entire school during chapel and make a tearful confession about what she did wrong and how her life was going to change, in hopes that this would stop it from happening to other people. Personally, I was always furious that my school made the girls do this. The father of the baby never had to go in front of anybody. It was as if the pregnancy was entirely the girl’s fault and she would have to take the blame and humiliation. These girls had such bright futures, parents would bemoan. Now their lives are over! But honestly, I think what upset everyone the most was just simply the fact that these Christian girls had sex outside of marriage.

But when the baby comes, people get over it. You can’t be mad at a baby. The girls’ lives weren’t ruined. Maybe they couldn’t continue their education or move away, but they had other things in their lives that made them happy. In the suburbs, there definitely is a stigma attached to being a pregnant teenager. College, careers, a stable home and a marriage are expected before children come along. But most girls receive help financially and emotionally from family and friends. The same cannot be said about young women in the inner cities that have children before marriage. So why do they continue to do it and why does it seem like a circular trend that never ends? This is the subject in the comprehensive study done by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas in Promises I Can Keep.

Especially interesting to me was that this study was done in the Philadelphia area, surveying the city’s poorest women on why they had children so early, but no desire to marry right away. The women from these neighborhoods were all ages, all from the lower economic class and were Caucasian, African-American and Hispanic. But what the authors found was that it made no difference the race or age of these women- they all had very similar viewpoints on why they had their children before marriage and what the men in their life mean to them.

And what are their viewpoints? Almost the opposite of what suburbanites view as “normal.” In Middle America, children are raised believing that their life should play out like the Cleavers. Go to school, get good grades, play sports, move on to a good college, start a career, work your way up to a good salary, find that special someone, get married, buy a house and an SUV, wait a few years to be financially secure and then start having children- preferably several years apart so that their college tuitions are staggered. In the slums of the inner city, people have dreams just like anyone, but they learn at an early age that they probably won’t be realized. Therefore, they value different things in their life, the main thing for women being children. Where as a middle-class woman may feel fulfilled in life through her job or hobbies, poor women rarely have these things to look forward to and feel that a child is what completes them (page 205).

Society believes that if you have a child at an early age, you are missing out on economic opportunities that you would have had. But interesting research shows that a poor person who grows up in a blighted neighborhood and has children early on in life will end up making the same amount of money as someone from that same neighborhood that waits longer to have a child. So if that is not a factor, what makes people so furious when poor women continue to have children young and outside of marriage? Some may say they are taking advantage of the welfare system, but the authors found that very few of the mothers they interviewed used that as a reason to why they had their kids. Okay, well then these girls just must not have been educated on safe sex or abstinence. Again, not true. Many of the girls were actually on birth control at one time or another and almost all definitely knew the consequences of unprotected sex. Most said that their babies were neither planned nor accidents- that they “just happened” and they knew as mothers that it was their responsibility to take care of them.

So you have to dig deeper to figure out why these young women, some still practically kids themselves, choose children over everything else in their lives. Take a look at their environment. When you wake up every morning to a neighborhood devastated by drugs, violence, crime, and a high dropout ratio, it’s easy to lose all hope and aspiration. Having a baby allows you to put your hope into someone else and gives you a reason to live- so that they can have a better future. A lot of the women interviewed said that their babies “saved them” from a life of drugs, idleness and no direction. They were forced to settle down and become responsible and found that because of this, their lives had more meaning.

A common misconception about young, unwed mothers is that they don’t cherish or revere marriage. The authors found out that this is also not true. In fact, marriage is put off until later in life because the women want to find the right person to marry, instead of settling for anything less than perfect. In neighborhoods where single mothers and fatherless children are common, it is hard to find a good man to trust. Influences such as friends, drugs and other street activities lead men astray from their baby’s mother. Also, the pressure of having to provide for a family on a less-than-stellar salary becomes too much for them to handle and instead of being ashamed of letting down their family, they leave or get hooked on drugs to forget about it. The women have learned by now what they need in their children’s lives and will not allow them to grow up around someone with bad influences. They would rather make it on their own than deal with the drama surrounding a deadbeat husband.

The responses from the women concerning why they wanted children so early on in life make sense, they really do. Everyone wants to feel love and to love. Having someone depend on you makes you feel important and special. A baby’s love is unconditional and many times these women have never experienced that. Their lives have no direction and a baby settles them down and forces them to improve. The baby becomes the center of their world and a relationship with a man is second. But even though the mother can love a child does not mean that the child is growing up in the right way. Children need more than just love and someone to “be there.”

In a way, I feel that these mothers’ motivations to have children are based on selfishness. They want someone to be with them, to love them. Having a baby makes their life better and gives them something to look forward to. But I don’t think you should use another human being’s life as something to better yourself. Even though they live for their child and put all their resources towards making it happy and healthy, they base all their self-worth on motherhood. The child grows up in that environment thinking that the only thing they can do right is raise a child, even if they are not ready financially and mentally. The cycle continues. The root of the problem is that these girls have nothing to look forward to in life, that they don’t think that they can ever get out of their impoverished neighborhood and that only having children makes them feel worthwhile. And the reason they delay marriage is because they have high expectations for how their husbands should act and what they need to provide. Until every demand is met, they see no reason to settle for anything else. Unfortunately, the men that they are exposed to come from the same backgrounds as the women- low income, low-hopes. Without access to steady paying jobs and affordable housing, these men cannot meet the demands of the women.

There are several solutions to these problems. And they have to begin when residents of poor neighborhoods are young, so that they may grow up with some sense of ideal living, instead of succumbing to their environment. First of all, children in these areas need programs that give them a sense of self-worth and open up doors to other interests other than makin’ babies. It starts in the schools with giving every student equal access to programs, sports, music, and the arts. When kids are preoccupied with other activities, they are less likely to get into trouble on the streets and have an unwanted pregnancy. Girls need to be taught different skills and hobbies so that they feel good at something other than just taking care of children. They need to learn the reasons why children are better off when they have two parents and that they can still have children later on in life when they’ve accomplished more of their dreams.

On the other hand, it takes two to make a baby grow up right. If the inevitable occurs and a baby is born out of wedlock to young parents, the father must be able to help provide for his new family. This may not seem like a hard task for the middle-class, but in the inner cities, earning enough to support three or four people can be nearly-impossible. Better paying jobs and training must be made available to urban residents who do not go on to college or finish high school. Even without an education, people still have skills and talents but without proper training or being made aware of all the job types that exist, they will end up in a low-wage, unskilled job. With this sort of assistance, fathers will be more desirable to women and more couples will marry, especially when children are involved.

For some reason, too many government and community programs don’t get this. They think the solution is more sex education (or to just promote abstinence) and relationship counseling. Instead of fixing the root of the problem, (low motivation and self-esteem, lack of jobs and opportunities, general loneliness and boredom) these programs try to fix the aftermath. These programs will only work for some people, the very open-minded and self-motivated, but do not help once the damage is already done.

It is a wonderful thing that these women value children so much. But if they were able to value themselves and other activities earlier in life, then they would not feel the need to depend on a child to make themselves feel whole. They believe that they are offering everything they can to their babies, but if they realized that there is so much more in life and if they had access to it, they would have their children after their lives have been settled and not while it’s in turmoil. These neighborhoods won’t fix themselves and they need time, resources and attention. But slowly but surely, the cycle can end and man, women and child can have a better, more fulfilling life.