Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for July 15, 2007 TEENAGERS...CONCRETE FOR BRAINS?

From The Providence Journal...

Adolescent motherhood a likely prescription for failure

According to RI Kids Count, researchers estimate that if all of Rhode Island’s teen moms had waited until they were 20 to have babies, the state’s prison population would be down 11.2 percent. The sons of teenage mothers, they say, are 2.2 times as likely to be incarcerated.

Crime is hardly the only issue here. Premature pregnancies increase all kinds of social problems, from dropping out of school to poverty. In fact, 1 in 10 babies in Rhode Island is born to teen parents, and of those, 85 percent are poor. Premature pregnancy is a big part of families getting caught in a vicious cycle of poverty.

Many, if not most, of the parents of the troubled kids that I’m profiling this summer were teenagers when they began bearing children.

Dr. Patricia Flanagan, a physician, spoke recently about teen moms at Bradley Hospital, at the request of the Infant Mental Health Association. She is the medical director of Hasbro Children’s Hospital’s outpatient services and also directs its teen and tot clinic.

She says, “We all bring lots of things to being a mother — personal histories, personal beliefs. Adolescents bring developmental constraints as well, and these constraints have very real consequences.”

She says teen moms tend to fall into two types. One type loses herself in the child. The baby is an extension of the mom’s life and personality.

The other treats her baby like a doll, a thing, a prized possession — dressing the child up, showing the baby off. As one teen mom said, “I got something that’s all mine, that nobody can take away from me!”

In both cases, the baby isn’t understood as a person in his or her own right, an evolving being with a unique future and a changing set of needs. After all, teens are in the process of forming their own identities. Though perfectly natural, a young parent’s egocentricity keeps the baby’s self from becoming entirely real.

Before adolescence, Flanagan says, “Young kids think concretely. They can be taught abstraction, and they can feed back what you just told them, but they live in the here and now. They have great difficulty taking on other people’s perspectives, and they have trouble thinking about cause and effect.”

It’s only in the course of adolescence that the brain develops the uniquely human ability to think abstractly, to put feelings and sensations aside, and to reason through issues. The brain’s “executive function” doesn’t fully mature until our early 20s. Until then, as Flannagan says, “The whole world is what I know and what I feel.”

Parenting is tough enough without the handicap of being a concrete thinker. Budgeting to have enough money for diapers at the end of the month is abstract. Walking into an unfamiliar room and assessing the room’s potential dangers to a child — hot coffee, electrical outlets, lamp chords — is abstract. Heck, the idea that I could get a baby nine months after a little fun between the sheets is too abstract to be completely real. Flannagan notes that adolescents believe that if you don’t think about it, it might go away. “The biggest mistake everyone makes around teen moms is to assume that motherhood is adulthood.”

So while the adolescent brain is still developing, teens need grown-ups to provide that executive function for them. Everyone would love adolescents to be conveniently independent about making great decisions in their lives. But they aren’t equipped for it. Not only that, taking risks is also developmentally normal at this age. So their decisions need constant monitoring and adult input. This is time-consuming, embattled, frustrating work. Furthermore, teens often assert their new sense of adulthood by fighting with their parents, or ignoring them, so parents per se aren’t in the best position to provide enough help and supervision.

Flanagan strongly encourages adults to engage kids in conversations about intimacy. But for heaven’s sake, don’t start by lecturing them on how to prevent pregnancy. “Start by asking questions about what they want from one another in a relationship? And what do they want to do for themselves aside from a relationship? Would you like to finish high school? Would you like to save the money to buy a car? What do you want? Allow the kids to talk.”

Teens have no experience with risky social situations, so they wind up doing what their friends or would-be friends want. Flanagan warns, “A lot of sexual activity is not exactly happening by choice. Social power, not knowing what to do, not being in control of the situation, drugs, alcohol — these all affect choice. Help them think through choices beforehand.”

The bottom line: Kids who have big plans and goals — who want to play piano in a band, travel in Australia, go to college or win a medal — are not the kids getting pregnant. But goals are abstract. Kids need tons of help formulating them, planning how they’ll get what they want, and avoiding the kinds of social trouble that can prevent dreams from coming true.

If we really want to prevent premature pregnancies, we need to pack all of our kids’ lives with surrogate parents, teachers and after-school activity leaders who can help kids figure out who they are and what they want. Increasingly, I’m amazed by how little face time most kids get with adults willing to listen to them.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.