front cover of Destinies of the Disadvantaged
Destinies of the Disadvantaged
The Politics of Teen Childbearing
Frank F. Furstenberg
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
Teen childbearing has risen to frighteningly high levels over the last four decades, jeopardizing the life chances of young parents and their offspring alike, particularly among minority communities. Or at least, that's what politicians on the right and left often tell us, and what the American public largely believes. But sociologist Frank Furstenberg argues that the conventional wisdom distorts reality. In Destinies of the Disadvantaged, Furstenberg traces the history of public concern over teen pregnancy, exploring why this topic has become so politically powerful, and so misunderstood. Based on over forty years of Furstenberg's research on teen childbearing, Destinies of the Disadvantaged relates how the issue emerged from obscurity to become one of the most heated social controversies in America. Both slipshod research by social scientists and opportunistic grandstanding by politicians have contributed to public misunderstanding of the issue. Although out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy rose notably between 1960 and 1990—a cause for concern given the burdens of single motherhood at a young age—this trend did not reflect a rise in the rate of overall teen pregnancies. In fact, teen pregnancy actually declined dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s. The number of unmarried teenage mothers rose after 1960, not because more young women became pregnant, but because those who did increasingly chose not to rush into marriage. Furstenberg shows how early social science research on this topic exaggerated the adverse consequences of early parenthood both for young parents and for their children. Researchers also inaccurately portrayed single teenage motherhood as a phenomenon concentrated among minorities. Both of these misapprehensions skewed subsequent political debates. The issue became a public obsession and remained so during the 1990s, even as rates of out-of-wedlock teen childbearing plummeted. Addressing teen pregnancy was originally a liberal cause, led by advocates of family planning services, legalized abortion, and social welfare programs for single mothers. The issue was later adopted by conservatives, who argued that those liberal remedies were encouraging teen parenthood. According to Furstenberg, the flexible political usefulness of the issue explains its hold on political discourse. The politics of teen parenthood is a fascinating case study in the abuse of social science for political ends. In Destinies of the Disadvantaged, Furstenberg brings that tale to life with the perspective of a historian and the insight of an insider, and provides the straight facts needed to craft effective policies to address teen pregnancy.
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front cover of Latina Adolescent Childbearing in East Los Angeles
Latina Adolescent Childbearing in East Los Angeles
By Pamela I. Erickson
University of Texas Press, 1998

Preventing teen pregnancy has become a national goal, but a one-size-fits-all strategy for achieving it may never be found. Because varying social and cultural factors lead to pregnancy among different ethnic/class groups, understanding these factors is essential in designing pregnancy prevention programs that work. This book explores the factors that lead to childbearing among Latina adolescents.

Pamela Erickson draws on both quantitative data and case histories to trace the pathways to motherhood for Latina teens. After situating her study within current research on teen pregnancy, she looks specifically at teen mothers enrolled in programs at Women's Hospital in East L.A. She describes the teens' relationships to their babies' fathers and their own families and discusses how these relationships affect whether teen mothers want to become pregnant, their use of prenatal, postpartum, and family planning services, and their ability to prevent a repeat pregnancy. Erickson describes culturally appropriate intervention efforts and assesses the limitations of prevention programs in institutional settings such as schools and clinics.

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front cover of Mediating Morality
Mediating Morality
The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era
Clare Daniel
University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
The approach the United States has taken to addressing teen pregnancy—a ubiquitous concern in teen education and perennial topic in popular culture—has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Specifically since the radical overhaul of welfare policy in 1996, Clare Daniel argues, teen pregnancy, previously regarded as a social problem requiring public solutions, is seen as an individual failure on the part of the teens involved.

Daniel investigates coordinated teen pregnancy prevention efforts within federal political discourse, along with public policy, popular culture, national advocacy, and local initiatives, revealing the evidence of this transformation. In the 1970s and 1980s, political leaders from both parties used teen pregnancy to strengthen their attacks on racialized impoverished communities. With a new welfare policy in 1996 that rhetoric moved toward blaming teen pregnancy—seemingly in a race- and class-neutral way—on the teens who engaged in sex prematurely and irresponsibly. Daniel effectively illustrates that the construction of teen pregnancy as an individual's problem has been a key component in a neoliberal agenda that frees the government from the responsibility of addressing systemic problems of poverty, lack of access to education, ongoing structural racism, and more.
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front cover of When Children Want Children
When Children Want Children
THE URBAN CRISIS OF TEENAGE CHILDBEARING
Leon Dash
University of Illinois Press, 2003
 
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former Washington Post reporter Leon Dash spent a year living in one of the poorest ghettos in Washington, D.C., and a total of seventeen months conducting interviews examining the causes and effects of the ever-lowering age of teenage parents among poor black youths.
Dash had expected to find inadequate sex education and lack of birth control to be the root cause of the growing trend toward early motherhood, but his conversations with the mothers themselves revealed the truth to be more complex.
A riveting account of the human stories behind the statistics, When Children Want Children allows readers to hear the voices of young adults struggling with poverty and parenthood and gets to the heart of teenage parents’ cultural values and motivations.
 
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