Whenever teen parenthood is filtered through the media, so often the national spotlight remains fixed on the moral and theoretical battles waged between liberals and conservatives. Each side comes to the table armed with competing agendas regarding sex education, contraception, abortion, family values, and the relationship between Church and State. In contrast, most pregnant and parenting teens remain sequestered on the fringes of society, represented as statistics, deprived of a forum to refute those who stereotype them; positioned helplessly as scapegoats; and powerless to contradict those who have written them off as ignorant, irresponsible youngsters with doomed futures.
Motivated by my desire to give teen parents a platform, I made a documentary film and subsequently spent four years researching and writing a book, Growing Up Fast. Accustomed to being neglected, criticized, marginalized, ignored and underestimated, the teen mothers I worked with craved recognition of their thoughts, validation of their feelings, and acknowledgement of their hard, often unappreciated work in their multiple roles as parents, students, and low-wage employees They wanted their views to be heard and taken into account; they wanted respect; and they wanted their presence and their children's needs to be taken seriously.
The first documentary film I ever made was about children and imagination. That experience left me fascinated by the ways in which kids alternate between functioning as sponges absorbing the adult world around them, and acting as mirrors, reflecting the adult world back uncompromisingly, with all of its conflicts and defects-yet also with a certain innocence, hopefulness, romanticism and idealism. As I worked with teen mothers, the sponge and mirror analogy came up in my mind as a framework for understanding why this particular population was so often the center of controversy and so frequently on the receiving end of scorn, resentment, and blame for so many of society's ills. While I recognized that many taxpayers resented shouldering the economic burden of teen parenthood and its related consequences, I also recognized that negative reactions to teen parents ran way beyond purely economic parameters into moral and emotional territory.
The body of a pregnant teenager is provocative precisely because its very shape and the implications of that shape-like a mirror-clearly reflect aspects of American life that many would prefer not to see. The pregnant body of a teenage girl silently spells out what society does not want to verbalize. Sexual abuse can be hidden. Domestic and dating violence can be hidden. Alcoholism, substance abuse and mental illness can be hidden. The identities of the children of the two million Americans who are incarcerated can be hidden. While all these insidious risk factors and forms of household dysfunction that are linked to teen parenthood can be hidden, denied or pushed out of immediate consciousness under most circumstances, at eight months, the body of a pregnant teenager articulates a powerful, highly visible, unequivocal reality that is difficult-if not impossible to ignore and this has incredible implications, economically and socially, that most people would rather not confront.
Toni Morrison addresses the complex dynamics of society's negative reaction to teen parenthood in her stunning first novel, The Bluest Eye. In the following passage, the narrator talks about Pecola, a young girl who became pregnant after being raped by her father:
"We tried to see her without looking at her, and never, never went near. Not because she was absurd, or repulsive, or because we were frightened, but because we had failed her."
In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton recalls the scandalous reception of her novel Summer which was set in Berkshire County and dealt frankly with teen pregnancy and surrounding issues:
"Summer was received with indignant denial by many reviewers and readers; not the least vociferous were the New Englanders who had for years sought the reflection of local life in the rose and lavender pages of their favorite authoresses -----and had forgotten to look into Hawthorne's."
These quotes say so much about why people often look the other way and dissociate from the issue of teen motherhood. Often it is not just a statement about the individual teenage girl who has chosen to become a mother; it can also be interpreted as a statement about the society that all of us play a role in creating and sustaining both directly and indirectly through the officials we elect to represent our interests.
David Shipler's acclaimed book The Working Poor is subtitled "Invisible in America" and those three words get to the very heart of why videotaping and photographing the subjects of my book was an essential part of my research. I photographed and videotaped all the main subjects of my book and used their real names because my book aims to unmask teen parents who are often obscured by statistics, lumped into categories, used as scapegoats and misunderstood. It's too easy to dismiss an abstract, impersonal number or a character that is a composite of several people with their identifying characteristics obscured-and who therefore, is not quite real.
The more real and concrete people are, the easier it is to identify with them and the harder it is to dismiss them. The human element can be quite powerful. By interspersing photographs throughout the text and by using real names, I was trying to break through boundaries of intolerance and ignorance to create an empathic connection that lessened the distance between reader and subject. I wanted the unifying force of human compassion to override the class lines along which American society is so sharply divided. Through the book and documentary, I wanted to bring these young parents out of the shadows to confront the adults who are shaping and influencing the world that their children and grandchildren will inherit.
For more information please visit www.growingupfast.com