TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050189/05018900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.8 KB | 149 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN IDEAS, Page 12

Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention


Giving Teenagers a New View of Their Future By involving adults,
Michael Carrera helps young people believe in themselves

By Melissa Ludtke


    Here was a man out of place. A slender man dressed in a
stylish business suit, he sat by himself, night after night, in
the bustling entryway of the Dunlevy Milbank Center in the
middle of Harlem. His narrow face bore a trusting smile that
masked a dogged purpose. He was trying to teach a course on
human sexuality for neighborhood parents, and often nobody came.
But he kept showing up. Michael Carrera, professor and prophet,
understood that as a white man and an outsider he needed the
parents' support if he wanted to come to their community to help
their kids. "Involving parents is a show of respect," he
declares. "It says they are valuable, their kids are valuable,
their family is valuable." After a few months, families knew
Carrera wasn't going away and that he was there to help. A few
began to listen and, soon, their kids listened too.

    Carrera holds the Thomas Hunter Chair of Health Sciences at
Hunter College. But it is some 50 blocks uptown, in Harlem
neighborhoods, where nearly 1 out of every 4 babies is born to
a teenage mother, that Carrera's teaching is put to its sternest
test in the Family Life Education and Adolescent Sexuality
Program, which he created. Pregnancy-prevention courses, Carrera
argues, are generally too narrow in focus to succeed. His
approach is holistic, born of a simple premise: Give young
people a sense of their own promise, and they will not be as
likely to disrupt their lives with an early pregnancy.

    But this simple premise is difficult to execute. "To move
kids from fatalism to industriousness," says Carrera, "the
intervention needs to be complex and longstanding." After those
initial months of intense scrutiny and understandable suspicion,
Carrera managed to assemble 22 girls and boys, ranging in age
from 13 to 16, and a smaller group of parents for courses on
family life and sex education. "The kids are riddled with
mythology about these things. There is a real need to inform,"
he says. Before long, the youngsters were not only learning but
also receiving a range of support services from adults who were
willing to make a long-term commitment. "For too many of these
kids, adults have disappeared on them," says Carrera, who has
remained personally involved with each of the kids and their
families during the past five years.

    Physicians from a local hospital provide comprehensive
health care. Tutors recruited from the Junior League help with
homework, and employment counselors place the kids in summer
jobs. "Many employers have stereotypes of black urban youth,"
says Mary Kay Penn, who manages the Milbank program. "It is very
hard to persuade them to take these kids on, even when we pay
the salary." But last summer Penn placed 75 of the kids in jobs,
and Carrera added a silk-screening program so they could learn
to design and sell T shirts.

    Though contraception is available -- prescribed by a doctor
with parental consent -- Carrera knows that access to birth
control is not enough. "When kids are empowered with information
and stimulated by hope for the future, it has a contraceptive
effect," says Carrera. "Education. Employment. Their own bank
accounts. Good health. Family involvement. Self-esteem. These
are also contraceptives. It's the total fabric that is
important." Carrera also teaches them how to play sports, like
squash, that rely on individual discipline and control.
"Whenever you posit a single solution to a complex problem, you
are not as successful as you can be."

    Success in Carrera's program brings a substantial reward.
Under an agreement made with former Hunter College President
Donna Shalala, students who graduate from high school and
complete Carrera's program are guaranteed admission to Hunter.
So far, 15 participants, teens and parents, have enrolled;
Shavon Glover, a mother at 15, before she met Carrera, was the
first. "I always had college in the back of my mind, but I
didn't think I could do it," Glover says. "When I met Mike,
everything started lifting up."

    Since his initial success at the Milbank Center, Carrera
has expanded his program to include two other community centers
in Harlem, one of which is in a predominantly Hispanic
neighborhood. Carrera receives financial support from New York
City's Childrens Aid Society and devotes many hours each week
to fund raising from private as well as public sources. The cost
for each teenager is about $1,500 a year, and the paid staff
members are all indigenous to the community. "Most adolescent
pregnancy programs are headed by white female social workers,"
says Cary Dixon, a 48-year-old black man who teaches the
family-life course to boys at the Frederick Douglass housing
project.

    Dixon serves as a crucial role model, particularly for the
many boys who don't have fathers at home. "When I grew up,
families were there to teach kids that there are certain
boundaries," he recalls. "Now there is no discipline in their
lives. Kids' lives are like basketball played without lines."
He believes Carrera's approach holds promise. "By keeping these
kids on a clear education track, by having them understand the
importance of delaying pregnancy and by including parents, Mike
is doing what others aren't," he says.

    In all, about 225 kids and 75 parents are participating in
Carrera's three Harlem-based programs. Carrera's track record
is impressive. In four years only two girls have become pregnant
and, as far as the counselors can tell from their intimate
weekly individual discussions with the kids, only one boy has
fathered a child. "This is not a value-free program," he
explains. "We have a message that delaying sexual activity is
good. We are taking a stand." This year the Childrens Aid
Society is establishing the Stern National Training Center for
Family Life Education in Manhattan, where Carrera will teach his
techniques to others searching for ways to cope with adolescent
pregnancy in their community.

    "The message is that if you expect changes in kids, you
have to be in for the long haul," Carrera warns. "That is
necessary to overcome the myths and go up against the
stereotypes that surround these kids' lives." So far, Carrera
has managed against great odds to outlast all those who said it
can't be done. To do it, he had to learn how to overcome the
everyday frustrations that inevitably accompany adolescent
struggles. He calls his technique "patient endurance."

    But Carrera also is energized by memories of his own
youthful struggles and of adults who helped him find his way.
His beliefs in the power of family and of public service are
woven from the fibers of his childhood. Born a half-century ago
in the Bronx to immigrant parents, a house painter and a
patternmaker, he found his role models in an attentive and
extended Italian family. "I found there is strength in family,"
says Carrera, who was the first in his family to graduate from
college, and ultimately earned a doctorate from Columbia
University. Along the way he taught junior high students in the
Bronx, and there he discovered his calling. "It was clear to me
how poorly these kids were treated," he recalls. "I saw how
responsive they were to being around a caring adult, how that
would get them turned on to other things, such as learning."

    Now that he can, Carrera gratefully gives something back to
kids. "These kids don't often have someone saying they can do
things. Instead there always seem to be barriers put in their
way," he says. "So we're going to be the ones to say, `We're
glad you're here. You can do it.'"