Autumn, 1997, Vol. 4, No.

BEYOND MYTHS
Teen Childbearing and the Importance of Early Education: An Interview with Leon Dash.

By Mary Ohannessian, SSA second-year administration student

Leon Dash is better known among journalists than he is among social workers. Except for a two-year stint with the Peace Corps in Africa, Dash has worked at The Washington Post since 1966. Serving as the West Africa Bureau Chief from 1979-1984, Dash has spent the rest of his time with The Post as a reporter. In 1984 he joined the Investigative Desk where he conducted two in-depth studies into urban life, both of which were published as newspaper series and later expanded into books.

The first book, When Children Want Children: The Urban Crisis in Teenage Cbildbearing (1989), received a PEN/Martha Albrand special citation for nonfiction work. The second book, Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America (1996) has received even wider attention, including a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism. Presently, Dash is working on a project about "young male killers" and is considering offers to teach from several universities around the country. He plans to accept one of these offers within the year.

In a recent interview, I asked him about his books, and how people in the social services might apply his insights to their work, particularly in the area of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing. But as an investigative journalist, Dash is not so much interested in articulating the political and programmatic solutions as he is in "looking at what social welfare is supposed to be alleviating".

In When Children Want Children, Dash goes beyond the "myths" of adolescent pregnancy, and uncovers a reality not captured in statistics. In a world where the mainstream paths to achievement are blocked at an early age, teen childbearing is often a "sought after achievement." Dash's willingness to present an uncensored view of the lives of people who remain invisible to most of societyQinvisible, that is, except in the rhetoric of welfare reformQhas made his work controversial. Some observers object that Dash has made heros out of people whose behavior is at best irresponsible. Others, raise concerns that by focusing on a distinct and small segment of AfricanAmericans, negative stereotypes are reinforced.

But in many ways, what Dash has to say about adolescent childbearing isn't something that many people in the field of social work don't already know: it's a complicated matter. In his own words, if it was simply a matter of ignorance, then it would be a relatively easy problem to solve. Inadequate schools, poverty and social isolation all contribute to the persistent problem of teenage childbearing, and is exacerbated by the racial segregation experienced m poor African-American communities. In Dash's view, however, the failure of the education system at the elementary school level has the most detrimental and irreparable consequences.

There is an irony in the fact that Dash's career is headed towards a professorship. His work has been conducted outside of universities, and he is somewhat suspect about the merit of academic inquiry into social realities. Below are excerpts from an interview that address adolescent childbearing and the challenges we face to replace myths with truth. As students and social workers, it reminds us to look beyond our immediate domain of expertise and to incorporate the insights of others outside our field.

AF: In both of your books, you make a point to state that you want to get at information that is either not available or not accessible in the mainstream body of literature of social welfare. Why did you feel the need to go beyond the current dialogue of poverty in America and what do you think are some of your biggest insights?

LD: I don't go into social welfare in terms of the work that I approach. I don't even consider it, particularly the academic perspective of people trapped in poverty ...What initiated my interest was the myths that I felt circulated around the issue of adolescent childbearing of poor, urban girls. Some of those myths were that these girls were emotionally needy and were easily manipulated by the macho teenage boys that they dated and associated with.

Now that sounded like a sexist myth to me, because I grew up in Harlem and the Bronx in New York City and I don't remember any large body of emotionally needy girls that were easily manipulated by teenage boys, sexually or any other way. In fact most of the girls, when I remembered correctly, were generally maturer than the boys the same age, and were doing most of the manipulating. Well I said, unless there's been a gender reversal in rolesQroles they're ascribing to these girlsQit's probably myth. Or the girls may be pretending to be in that position because they're playing the role of being impregnated by the boys and abandoned. But I didn't know what the truth was.

Some of the other myths that I would hear...was that the girls were having babies to qualify for welfare payments. Well, I had already done...reporting in that area...and I already knew that in most welfare families there was no food in the house, generally by the fourth week of any month. I didn't see that as any great financial incentive for any girl to have a child, particularly if she had grown up in a home that was welfare dependent. Where would economic incentive come from?

Then I had my own preconceptions. I really thought that the girls were becoming pregnant because the girls and the boys were not aware of their sexual maturity, in terms of their being able to produce a child. And that they were ignorant about birth control methods. And the two myths that I told you about and my own preconceptions were all wrong.

These children were very sophisticated by ages 11 and 12 about human sexuality. . . because all of them had had an extensive course in human sexuality and birth control by the age of 11 in the seventh grade. I didn't find that out until I began doing the research.

...A friend of mine told me in casual conversation that 53% of all the black children born in America in 1983 were the children of single mothers, and that over a third of single mothers were adolescent girls... growing up in poverty. Urban poverty. And I thought those figures were extraordinarily high. In fact, I thought my friend was wrong, but [those figures] startled me. I went first to the National Institutes of Health Child Development section to look up statistics on adolescent childbearing throughout the country, and those figures turned out to be right. I was shocked by them...

AF: So your interest was really focused on that particular issue.

LD: Adolescent childbearing

AF: When I said "social welfare", I was merging your two books.

LD: Right, and I try to keep them separate. Rosa Lee is on underclass life. And the first book is about adolescent childbearing among poor, urban adolescents.

AF: But there's a connection between the two. LD: Definitely. Underclass life perpetuates underclass life. Rosa Lee, the subject of the study was an adolescent mother who had eight children with six different men. And she became pregnant with her first child at age 13...I'm not looking at social welfare. I'm looking at what social welfare is supposed to be alleviating. And the causes of why people are trapped in those situations.

AF: In "Children Having Children"...

LD: No, "When Children Want Children"Qthat's a big difference from children having children. I'm saying that these children consciously decided they wanted the child. In fact, in a number of cases they hid the pregnancy [until] the third trimester...because they wanted the child and they knew that their guardian or parent would insist on an abortion.

AF: You already mentioned that these girls were very sophisticated and had access to birth control and sex education...What perspective do you have as to how we could make a stronger impact?

LD: There's two groups of kids. And I didn't really focus on the second group... they were a smaller group of kids who attended [another] high school and were referred to derisively by the kids that I was following as "brainiacs". So they were smart. And they were as sexually active as the kids that I was following. But there were no full term pregnancies. And why was that? Because they had futures for themselves after graduating from high school.

The kids that I was following had really been undereducated and they knew it. They were not competitive for the American job market and would have a lot of difficulty in entering it. They hadn't had the academic preparation that the other kids had and as a consequence they were looking for arenas of achievement todayQfor instant gratification. For them, having a child was a boost in their status that moved [them] from the status of adolescence to the status of adult. Although they were still children they saw themselves now as men and women.

AF: I'm hearing you sayQin terms of interventionsQthat it's not so much sexual education: it's education education.

LD: Academic education. Right. These kids were generally lost by the third grade of elementary school...So if you are not learning after the third grade of elementary school... how are you able to do high school level work? Well, that's impossible. All the school system is doing is warehousing youth to the point to where the system is no longer legally responsible for you because you're too old. And then you're asked to leave. And then they classify you as a dropout, but actually you've really been pushed out of school after being warehoused.

AF: ...Also, in your teen pregnancy book...

LD: I'd like to make one change to what you're saying. Most people say "teen pregnancy"and I, if you notice the subtitle of the book, say "childbearing". These kids were not getting pregnant accidentally. And pregnancy for adolescents connotes that term...People don't make that distinction. There is accidental pregnancy, among teenagers and adults. But when you have boys and girls who are consciously seeking to become parentsQthat's childbearing.

AF: . . . I was interested in how you started off, that there was this one "truth"Q or myths that you called them. I want to know if you think there are policy or political implications for having these myths and different levels of truth. One thing that struck me, when I took a maternal and child health class, is that you're giving out surveys and you're having 15 year-olds write about their sexual behavior and then you tabulate these surveys and you have "80% of all teen pregnancies are 'unintended"'. Then you start allocating resources and developing programs based on this statistical truth. But when you...dig deeper, and you don't treat all pregnancies the same wayQlike you just said childbearing versus pregnancyQyou have different levels of truth.

LD: I think so.

AF: In terms of policies and programs that you're aware of, do you see consequences or any negative impact of having these different levels of truth?

LD: Well I don't study policies and programs. I never look at them. I look at the phenomenon and get involved with the people who are acting out the phenomenon that we can capture statistically. What I do find, however, is that no one told me the truth until they had been active with me and I had been interviewing with them for a period of four to six months. I have no trust in the surveys.

AF: What I'm reading into you is that there is this difference between statistics, facts and truth.

LD: Yes. What are genuine human motivations.

AF: From my perspective, trying to learn how to develop better policies, I think we can pay too much attention to statistics.

LD: Right. Well, none of the kids who were in the projects told me the truth in the first interview. And none of them told me the truth until I had known them four to six months. One of the girls held out for 11 months, when she was pregnant with her second child, before she was willing to tell me that her first pregnancy had been intentional. So that tells me what they're writing down is answers on surveys.

AF: And then we tabulate it up and lobby accordingly.

LD: Right, and allocate money for sex education when these kidsQthe girls were sharing information at 11 years old about human sexuality at an adult level when they were 11 years old at pajama parties.

AF: ... In [Rosa Lee] you talked about the complexity of individual stories and the challenge of separating the individual threads...One of the challenges is: how do you move from separating those individual threads into more collective action?

LD: It's very clear. Rosa Lee was illiterate. She attended public schools in Washington growing up in poverty. Five of her eight children are illiterate. None of these people are learning disabled. They attended public schools growing up in Washington. What is happening that leaves Rosa Lee, five of her 8 children and four of her five grandchildren illiterate?

AF: So educationQwe're back there.

LD: Yes. It's a very common thread. If you grow up poor, you're not served by the public school system. Whether you're growing up in rural poverty or urban poverty.

AF: Which you trace but to rural poverty.

LD: Right.

AF: ...You talk about education as the common thread but there's all these complexities, individual thingsQdrug abuse, crime all these different threads that go into...

LD: Right. But everybody can overcome drug abuse and so on and so on. But no one can overcome the absence of education.

AF: But how [do]] we address it7. You have your education lobby and your drug abuse programs, and your sex education programsQall of these things are schematically designated.

LD: Right. The clue is that most of these kidsQwhen you test out the men and women who are locked up in the DC. Prison system all of them are reading at the third grade level. What does that tell you?. . . If you have a child reading at the third grade level and that child is entering at 11 years old into the seventh grade, then the child has a higher probability of becoming a teenage parent and a drug addict than a child who is better educated and can handle the work...

So where do the resources need to be put? It's very clear, and educators know this. They need to be put where they're not being put: at the elementary school level....what I'm talking about is not rocket science. Everybody knows what I'm talking about. They find it politically difficult to implement these programs because the people who pay taxes for public education are going to raise hell when you tell them we're going to put all this money into resources for the poor people in our community...

AF: [In your books], you don't talk about race very explicitlyQyou talk about Rosa Lee's alienationQyou write about African Americans in the inner-cityQbut you don't make [race] a focal point. It's more about the lives of these people.

LD: Right.

AF: How much do you think race has to do with the problems that you explore in Rosa Lee? You go back to the share cropping era...

LD: What I think happened to [Rosa Lee's] grandparents and parents in Northampton County had a direct impact on her, and what happened to her grandparents and her parents was because they were black and isolated [on a] plantation in North Carolina. So they're growing up in a segregated system where they were denied education, and [Rosa Lee's] mother having to cross the dismal swamp to even get to the nearest school. In that scene where the water was always higher than her short legs could carry her. I think that the denial of education had a direct impact on Rosa Lee...their racial isolation in Northampton County, I feel I clearly state, really had a definite impact on what became of Rosa Lee.

AF: And is that more of a historical legacy that gets carried on...

LD: From generation after generation, exactly..

AF: And so in terms of the role that race plays ...

LD: It's significant. I think its all interconnected.

Mary Ohannessian is a second-year administration student at SSA. Her field placement is at the Chicago Department of Public Health, Family Planning Services.

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