The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [58]
Another stereotype of adolescent mothers envisions them as invariably incapable of rearing healthy children. This one too has been conclusively refuted. Researchers document that teenagers having recently cared for younger siblings are sometimes more realistic in their expectations about parenthood than older parents, and more devoted to parenting as a primary endeavor. They tend to have more help than most of the public realizes because as a rule they live with parents or other relatives. At the height of the teen motherhood scare fewer than 22,000 teen moms throughout the entire United States lived without supervision, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office.14
Evidence of adolescent mothers’ own competence turns up in a variety of studies but usually goes unnoticed. An ironic case in point is a famous set of experiments conducted by the psychologist René Spitz in the 1940s. Spitz compared two groups of babies, the first housed in a nursery where their mothers cared for them, the other in a foundling home where they were cared for by nurses. The babies tended by their mothers flourished, while those cared for by strangers cried and screamed excessively, became depressed, and lost weight. Within two years more than a third of the second group died, and much has been made of their sad fate by those who advocate the importance of early bonding between mothers and their children. Largely neglected in the debates over Spitz’s studies is the fact that the nursery where he observed mothers taking care of their babies was a penal institution for delinquent girls. The mothers of the children who developed normally in Spitz’s experiments were adolescent moms.15
Over the longer haul and out in the real world children of teenage mothers do appear to fare poorly compared with other children, thereby providing politicians and reporters with the oft-cited finding that 70 percent of men in prison were born to teenage mothers. The implication, however, that their mothers’ age when they were born was the single or most important variable that caused them to end up in jail is iffy at best. When the children of teenage mothers are compared to the children of older mothers from similar socioeconomic circumstances there is little difference between the two groups in outcomes such as criminality, substance abuse, or dropping out of school. The age at which a woman gives birth appears to be far less consequential for how her child turns out than are factors such as her level of income and education, and whether she suffered physical and emotional abuse in her own youth.16
Bearers of Illegitimate Children
In addition to all the contemporary evidence contradicting their position, those who would blame teen moms for the nation’s social ills confront an awkward historical reality. The teenage birth rate reached its highest level in the 1950s, not the current era. Indeed, between 1991 and 1996 the rate declined by nearly 12 percent.17
Demonizers of today’s young mothers either ignore such facts, or when they cannot, direct the audience’s attention away from them. Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago and contributing editor of The New Republic, began a book review in that magazine with the words “I was a teenage mother.” Considering that she would go on to condemn the book under consideration (Kristin Luker’s Dubious Conceptions) for being too accepting