Damned if you do: culture, identity, privilege, and teenage childbearing in the United States
Section snippets
The consequences of Teen Childbearing
The concept of teenage childbearing as a social problem is relatively new, dating back roughly to the 1970s (see Nathanson, 1991; Luker, 1996 for historical and political analyses of the emergence of this social construction). Although studies in the 1970s and 1980s documented an association between teenage childbearing and poor outcomes for teen mothers (occasionally fathers), their offspring, and society at large, from a methodological stand point the conclusion that teenage childbearing
Fertility-timing norms and distributions
One way to understand population differences in fertility timing distributions is to consider them as reflecting collectively patterned “fertility timing norms”, which are adaptive cultural or population practices. Fertility-timing norms are critical mechanisms through which the basic cultural imperatives toward economic and reproductive success are pursued; at their best, fertility-timing norms are well calibrated to support and draw support from local family economies and caretaking systems.
White elders, black teens: In loco parentis or la vida loca?
But what motivates dominant group elders to condemn or try to change the fertility timing norms of African American residents of high-poverty urban areas? Clearly, the notion that the ages seen as appropriate for childbearing can vary across generations and cultural groups is not beyond our grasp. Many of our grandmothers became mothers as teenagers. Why is the broader public so disapproving of current African American teen mothers?
As noted, the most common justifications are open to question
Social inequality, social control, and social identity: The costs to African Americans
A key reason, then, that dominant group elders are unable to view early fertility timing norms in high poverty, African American communities with equanimity may be the following: cultural variation in family ideals is a relatively straightforward and tolerable concept when the varying cultures are politically, economically, and socially distinct from one another. Accepting cultural relativity in deeply cherished, fundamental family ideals becomes more difficult, complicated, and threatening,
Conclusion
The well-being of children and families, and, by extension, the vitality of communities and their economic and reproductive success, is likely to be enhanced when the adults charged with the primary care of children have reliable social resources outside themselves. The illusion that US parents in socio-economically advantaged nuclear families raise their children independently is an artifact of the availability of a range of social resources that supplant the need to depend on relatives,
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges financial support for this work from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation through an Investigator in Health Policy Research Award. I am also indebted to Robert A. Levine for his instruction, to Sherman James, Jay Pearson, John Bound and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, to Cindy Colen for research assistance, and to N.E. Barr for editorial assistance. The views expressed are my own.
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