Elaine Bell Kaplan Not Our Kind of Girl Review
When Elaine Bong Kaplan first decided to wait at black teenage mothers, the sociologist felt sure she knew why the teens kept their babies.
"I assumed that these girls had mothers who were conservative and religious, and that their mothers prevented them from having abortions," said Kaplan, an assistant professor of folklore.
The large mystery, reasoned the researcher who is herself a former teen mother, was why the teenagers fifty-fifty immune themselves to get pregnant in the first place.
"I thought, 'Here are modernistic girls – there were all kinds of taboos most nascence command when I was immature, but they'll be smarter than I was,'" said Kaplan, who became pregnant 25 years ago as a xvi-yr-old growing up in Harlem.
Imagine Kaplan's surprise to larn that teens were no better informed about nascence control than she had been and that the teens' mothers raised no objections to abortions – they vehemently advocated them.
"It'south shocking how much of what is commonly assumed about these girls proves absolutely false," Kaplan said.
Through an in-depth written report of 32 teen mothers living in a blackness inner-city expanse in the state – California – with the highest teen pregnancy rate, Kaplan concluded up finding enough discrepancies betwixt truth and stereotype to make full a book: Non Our Kind of Girl (Academy of California Press).
"What is needed [is] to understand the losses, the stresses and the large and small violences that render such teenage girls incapable of successfully completing their adolescence," Kaplan writes.
At pale, Kaplan stresses in the book – subtitled Black Teenage Motherhood: Realities Hiding Behind the Myths – is the futurity of the African American community.
"The number of black households headed past single black women with children climbed from a low of 25 percent in the 1950s to more than than 61 per centum in the early 1990s," Kaplan said. "Of these families, more than than half have daughters who were or will become mothers during their teenage years."
The subjects, who lived in East Oak-country and Richmond, ranged from 14 to 43 years of age, just all had become mothers between the ages of 14 and 17. Of the 32 subjects, 17 were teenagers raising children during the report.
Nigh of the teens had been raised in households headed by single mothers, who were "then overworked that they cannot summon enough energy to satisfy their children's emotional needs," said Kaplan.
In add-on to leaving little energy for amore, the mothers' low-status, poorly paid jobs spawned deep pessimism in the teens.
"Near of the women they knew … were on welfare, cleaned firm or worked at Mc- Donald's for $4.25 an hour," Kaplan writes. "A few were all the same enthusiastic near education, only most of the teens were convinced by their own experiences and those of the people around them that education would not help them out of their state of affairs."
Although the girls had once been average or skillful students, they had started to drift in junior high school, when teachers began giving more attention to male students because they were "perceived to be more than of a trouble."
"Black girls come to grade feeling very contained and believing," Kaplan says. "Mothers accept taught them that they volition exist working one day, but they notice themselves in classrooms where the teachers are paying far more attending to the boys. They meet a wall of silence that shuts them down."
The lack of attending at dwelling house and school made the girls "very open to boys who come up along and say, 'You're really beautiful and special,'" Kaplan said.
Neighborhood boys, meanwhile, were beginning to grapple with their own limited options in neighborhoods with high male unemployment, Kaplan found.
"They were starting to realize that gild expects them to get the caput of a household and back up a family, simply all effectually them they meet show that they will not exist able to live upwardly to these expectations," Kaplan said. "Racking up sexual conquests is one of the few ways they tin can demonstrate that they are capable of existence 'a real man.'"
The boys tended to seduce the girls with such gestures as going out of their manner to meet their mothers and pointing in shop windows to the furniture they would supposedly one mean solar day own as a couple.
"These girls go perceived every bit deviants, but they really accept conventional and traditional values," she said.
When the relationships turned sexual, the girls lacked basic data to protect themselves, Kaplan plant.
"The myth that they could not get pregnant on the showtime time was very pop among the teen mothers," she said. "Hoping to discourage their daughters from becoming sexually agile, many adult mothers withheld data. One told her teen that birth control pills would make her sterile."
At school, sex education was either too abstruse or too infrequent to compensate for deficits at home. Asked whether her school offered sexual activity education, one teen mother responded, "Aye, only I was absent that day."
Even though none had prepared their daughters to fend off sexual advances, the mothers "blew up" when they learned of their daughters' condition. One mother so was infuriated at the news that she punched her daughter's doctor.
"The common perception is that blackness, single mothers encourage their daughters to become pregnant so that they tin reap additional welfare benefits," Kaplan said. "In fact, mothers still in poverty felt similar their daughters were throwing away the family's simply shot at upward mobility. Meanwhile, middle-class mothers feared that the teen's condition would threaten their hard-won respectability."
The teens' reason for refusing their mothers' advice to terminate their pregnancies had more to do with a lack of support than religious convictions.
"When I thought about it, I idea that maybe I could accept somebody to beloved me meliorate considering I can't beloved my mother and she doesn't love me," i teen confessed. "Maybe I'll feel beloved by having my own child."
Past defying their mothers, the girls became further alienated from what in most cases was the just source of adult support.
"If you're not going to have an ballgame, become out!" yelled one of the mothers. Mothers who did not kick out their daughters frequently stopped speaking to them. Ane refused to see her grandson for several years. Most of the older teen mothers said they were never able to mend their relationship with their mothers.
Adding insult to injury, all but 2 of the girls were abandoned by the fathers of their children. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many of the fathers claimed that the children had been fathered past someone else.
Earlier sociologists found that extended family played a key function in the survival of black families, but Kaplan found no such network for the teens.
"Extended families were really a feature of rural black communities," Kaplan said. "Urban black families alive at greater distance from other family members and their resources are used upwardly faster by higher housing and food costs, so they accept less to share."
Welfare did non plow out to exist much of a safety net, either. Kaplan shows how the girls struggled to make ends meet with $490 in welfare and $60 in food stamps at a fourth dimension when housing in even the cheapest, drug-infested neighborhood ran $300 a month.
In their churches and even the local center for teen parents, the teens felts scorned, they said. In exchange for help, both groups urged the teens to publicly admit having made mistakes with their lives.
"They brand yous experience the shame," one teen explained.
The teens ended up feeling and so stigmatized and insufficient of options that when Kaplan asked how they might support themselves without welfare, about saw just two alternatives: becoming prostitutes or selling drugs.
"The adolescent mothers I saw were deprived of every resource needed for any human being to role well in our guild: instruction, jobs, food, medical care, a secure place to live, honey, respect, the power to connect securely with others," Kaplan writes.
But vast improvements in education, work options and general understanding of and respect for the needs of adolescent girls will break the cycle of black teen pregnancy, Kaplan warned.
"Without increased fiscal resources, family policies and support from social service agencies to rebuild extended families, these mothers will continue to feel alienation and failure," Kaplan writes. "The tragic consequences of such a social scenario will be the further erosion of the black customs in general."
Facts at a Glance
Of the 32 teenage mothers interviewed past Kaplan, the number
* who grew upward in households headed by a single mother: 24
* whose mothers had been teenage mothers: 13
* whose families had been on welfare more than five years: 5
* who currently were receiving welfare: 17
* who received prenatal intendance: 2
* whose mothers never forgave them for having children equally a teen: 22
* whose mothers refused to allow an abortion: one
* who felt they could rely on other family unit members for support: 4
* who moved out of their mothers' houses because of the need for more space: 12
* who moved out of their mothers' houses considering they could non endure the serious conflicts betwixt them: 20
* who felt that the fathers of their children were supportive: 2 (Both were unemployed and depended on the teen mother'south welfare check.)
* whose boyfriends themselves were raised past unmarried mothers: 29
What Most the Babies of Babies?
An often-disregarded victim of teen pregnancy, sociologist Elaine Bell Kaplan points out, is the teen'due south child.
"Adolescent girls need tremendous support to handle the concrete and emotional changes they inevitably experience," Kaplan writes in Not Our Kind of Daughter. "A teen mother may not exist able to push aside her own needs … to adequately mother her own child."
Counselors at centers for teen mothers reported the "bitter disappointment" experienced by the teens when their newborns did not immediately express affection. 2 girls who had been abandoned both by their own fathers and the fathers of their children expressed the promise that their sons would give them, as one put it, the "male love that I miss." Another admitted that she "loved babies, merely not when they get older."
"The evidence is overwhelming that teen mothers choose to have their babies as a way of coming together their own emotional needs – whereas the reverse should be true," Kaplan said. "Babies often demand far more love from these mothers than they can give."
Raising children puts tremendous demands on whatsoever parent'southward time, energy and emotions – demands for which, according to Kaplan, the teen mothers are simply not prepared.
"In response, they may withdraw or become angry or depressed," Kaplan writes. "This lays the background for emotional maternal impecuniousness for the infants, setting the phase for afterward developmental issues."
The gap betwixt teen- age expectations and the reality of motherhood probably explains a sorry fact that Kaplan learned from social workers: The average historic period of babies put upwardly for adoption by black teen mothers is two years old.
"Having babies allows these girls to indulge in a fantasy of recovery from their impoverished lives, but fantasies tend to come to an end sooner or afterward," Kaplan said.
Source: https://news.usc.edu/11356/Exploding-the-Myths-About-Black-Teenage-Motherhood/