Helping Teen Moms

The Detroit Free Press recently ran this story: "Detroiter Tyra Moore's nonprofit assists teen moms, just like her." It seems like a hopeful article. Tyra Moore, who was a teenage mom herself, is helping current teen moms. 

Teen mothers need all the help they can get. Ideally, some of that help would come from the young men who impregnated these young women, you know, the fathers. No mention is made of fathers in the article though. They are let off the hook and are free to create and abandon more children.

As she hopes for the day when teen pregnancy will become less taboo, Moore has a message to those who encounter teen moms: “As parents, family, friends and community, we all should come together and help young girls and teen moms -- and girls in general -- who may be going through a tough time. …We should all try to reach out, wrap our arms around them, talk to them and learn from them. Being a teen mom isn’t the perfect choice, but we shouldn’t put them down. We should help them, and encourage them.”

Not a "perfect choice?" Rather that worry about the taboo against teen pregnancy, worry should be directed toward the problems mothers and (especially) children will face in the next eighteen years. The children will have a much greater chance of living in poverty. The children will most likely do much worse in school both academically and behaviorally resulting in a poorer education and a serious lack of choices upon entering adulthood. Some of these mothers will go on to allow other men to impregnate them and run off, thereby making their lives and their children's lives even more difficult. They will suffer for lack of a father's attention and input. Their children will repeat the pattern.

It's hard enough raising a child with two parents, who are outnumbered immediately upon their first child's birth. It's even more difficult for one parent, who has to do the work of two parents. Tyra Moore is engaged in an admirable enterprise, but will she be there when these new children are toddlers and they need different kinds of help, or when the children are in middle school and new sets of issues arise? 

All of the pathologies resulting from fathers' abandonment will, of course, all be blamed on society, not on the mothers' (or the fathers' choices.) Anyone suggesting otherwise is labeled as an uncaring bigot.

Since society has become much more accepting of single motherhood, damn the consequences, maybe society is now partially to blame.