Young Mothers Face New Problems

ORANGE — There are many reasons 17-year-old Elizabeth would never leave her baby daughter with her parents, but the main one is that her mother and stepfather are crack addicts.

They will smoke the rent money, the food money and the money for clothes. If they aren’t high, Elizabeth said, they may remember to send her brothers and sisters to school.

“At my mother’s house, the adults are the kids and the kids are the adults,” she said.

Elizabeth ran away to her boyfriend’s home last year when she was pregnant, and since then it has been her goal to keep her 7-month-old daughter far away from her parents.

But because she receives welfare and food stamps, the county will soon decide whether she must move back home.

Under a new federal law, states cannot give a teenage parent welfare unless the teenager lives with a parent, guardian or other adult relative. In California, social workers just this month begin determining where teenage welfare mothers should live. If they find that a girl’s family is abusive or the parents will not take her back, they will help her make other living arrangements--with another relative, for example. Otherwise, she must live at home.

About 430 teenage mothers in Orange County receive welfare, and most live at home, as do the majority of teenage mothers nationally, said Gail Dratch, director of the county program supervising teenagers on welfare. In the end, fewer than 100 girls in the county will be affected by the requirement that they move home, and 6,500 will be affected nationwide, the federal government estimates.

Officials predict that 60% of teenage welfare mothers who live on their own will be exempt because of abuse issues and that welfare will be taken away from 30% of the girls who refuse to return home. Because of the small number, the immediate savings to welfare programs is expected to be meager--about $12 million nationally, according to a UC Berkeley study prepared for the U.S. General Accounting Office last year.

The study cites research estimating that teenage motherhood costs taxpayers almost $16 billion annually in welfare and food stamps, increased medical care expenses, foster care, lost tax revenue and increased incarceration expenses.

Other teenage pregnancy experts have argued that the figure is dramatically inflated. Even if most teenagers on welfare waited until they were older to have babies, they would still be poor and uneducated, and their children would require the same social services, they say.

The Clinton administration also contends that the change will prevent pregnancies among teenagers. “With greater nurturing and support, the administration hopes teen parents will have greater likelihood of completing school and breaking out of a cycle of poverty, thus incurring a smaller cost on public funds,” the report said.

But the rule that they move home is designed to do more than save money.

“They have to understand that they just can’t go out and have children and expect the government to pay for them,” said Assemblyman Jim Morrissey (R-Anaheim). “Welfare reform is about personal responsibility.

To teenage mothers in Orange County, however, the reasoning behind the new law is wrong. They said they would still be at home if they felt safe and happy there.

“I got taken away from my mother when I was a month old, and they gave me to my godmother while my mom went to prison,” Elizabeth said. She lived with her godmother until the age of 12, when the Juvenile Court returned her and four brothers and sisters to her mother. Soon, her mother was using drugs again, she said.

Although her mother still has the legal right to bring her home, “They can come and they can pick me up, but I’ll just [leave again],” Elizabeth said.

At the Florence Crittenton Services home for pregnant and parenting teenagers in Fullerton, four girls--white, African American and Latina--all said they wish they had waited to have children, but that welfare reform won’t stop other teenagers from getting pregnant like they did. They tell a variation of the same story--childhoods filled with parental addictions, violence and being unwanted. The girls are wards of the court, and social workers verified their stories.

The idea of a nurturing home is foreign to them.

“My mother was an alcoholic my entire life. All I ever heard was that I’m no good, that I’m stupid,” said 16-year-old Omeka, who is pregnant. “They have to understand that everyone doesn’t have the same advantages. Everyone doesn’t come from a nice, happy family.”

The social workers are not sure what to do with girls who will not return to their homes.

“There are child abuse and child welfare issues in all these cases, and it’s not difficult to envision situations in which the teen parent and her baby have no means of support because they refuse to comply with this order,” said Orange County Social Services Agency Director Larry Leaman.

“Do we just walk away from them and let the mother and the baby live on the street?”

Christina, the 17-year-old mother of a baby girl, was incredulous at the idea that she needed parental supervision. “How can they tell me I can’t raise a child when I pretty much raised my brother from the time he was 2?” she asked.

Tessie, 16 and the mother of a toddler, voiced the strongest reason the girls do not want to live with their parents. They do not want to raise their children the way they were brought up.

“All my mom ever did was hit, and now I’m trying to teach her that’s not the only way to discipline a child,” Tessie said. “But that’s all she knows.”