Values Program for Teen Mothers Tries to Stop Cycle

NEW YORK — As she heads out the door, Elissa Aleman grabs a purple folder covered with doodles that spell out “I love Chucky” in plump red letters.

Chucky is not the latest high-school crush of this bright-eyed teen-ager, but the infant son whose arrival two years ago brought the responsibilities of adulthood crashing down on Aleman just weeks after her 16th birthday. The purple folder is packed not with social studies or math homework, but with sample resumes and handouts explaining the how-tos of being a grown-up.

It’s all part of a privately operated but largely government-funded program that tries to cram into a few months the socialization that children raised in stable families generally receive over many years.

Although she does not fully realize it, Aleman and the other residents of New York City’s Clinton Family Inn are at the center of a fundamental debate that is roiling official Washington and communities nationwide: Faced with an abundance of evidence that traditional welfare programs have fostered a culture of dependency that millions of poor people pass on to their children, is there anything government can do to break the cycle?

As the Senate wrestles this week with its final blueprint for reinventing the welfare system, much of the rhetoric will focus on what conservative Republicans call an “epidemic of illegitimacy” among teen-age girls. Of all single mothers who received welfare benefits from 1976 to 1992, 42% were teen-agers when their first child was born, according to the General Accounting Office. Moreover, they are the least likely group of welfare beneficiaries to leave the rolls.

Under a version of the Senate GOP’s welfare reform plan, mothers younger than 18 would be required to live at home with their legal guardians or in assisted-living arrangements supervised by state governments. They would no longer be eligible for cash assistance to help them make it on their own.

One such assisted-living arrangement is the group home where Aleman and Chucky live, a block from the Hudson River in Manhattan.

While politicians from both parties, including President Clinton, almost uniformly stress that teen-age mothers should stay with their parents, welfare case workers and analysts--as well as some young women like Aleman--warn that home is not always the best place to be.

As Aleman’s story shows, 18 years of bad examples are not easy to erase, particularly if she is required to stay in the environment that produced them: Aleman suffered physical abuse as a child and adolescent, dropped out of school in the ninth grade and moved in with a “crack head” at age 14--with her mother’s approval. Then the baby came.

Teaching Values

Yet it also is clear that the kind of round-the-clock assistance offered by residential facilities such as the Family Inn can give some of these young women the opportunity to right their lives, and the lives of their children. What remains uncertain is the willingness of lawmakers to make the upfront investment, and of communities to provide the private donations and volunteer assistance such facilities require.

“If you want them to have traditional values, you have to give them to them,” said Ralph Nunez, president of the nonprofit organization that runs the Family Inn and three similar facilities in New York that have helped thousands of young women in recent years. “You can’t save all of them. But these days, many of them are young enough and ready enough that you can really save a lot.”

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) is one lawmaker who says that the GOP plan should endorse such facilities, which are in short supply because they have not been a high policy or funding priority.

“I’ve visited dozens of them,” Santorum said. “They have the essential element of a successful poverty program: They challenge young mothers, motivate them and give them a mission and purpose. They teach traditional life skills and values such as work and taking care of children and feeding children.

“These are not fanatical right-wing values,” he continued. “These are basic values that are not being taught, in many cases, at home.”

Although Aleman arrived at the Family Inn with significant emotional scars, her counselors say she is responding eagerly to the socialization process at the facility.

“She came in when she was 17. She was like a sponge,” said Dena Johnson, Aleman’s primary counselor. “She has been soaking up everything.”

Aleman is determined to raise Chucky in a secure, loving environment where he will learn right from wrong and absorb values such as the importance of education, the dignity of work and the responsibilities of adulthood. But like many young women in her position, she has little personal experience to draw upon.

Her own childhood, she says, was devastated by a mother who beat her so brutally that the bruises drew the attention of school officials. She was placed with foster families three times before she was 10. In each case, her mother went to court and won her back.

“She was not a good example for me. She never teached me nothing. When I did something she did not like, she beat me up for it. It was not like I was her daughter,” said Aleman, who turned 18 earlier this summer. “She never sat me down and showed me how to read or do math or anything. I never had a mother to be there or sit down with me and be a friend or a mother. She always said she didn’t like me and that I was ugly.”

Life at home was so unbearable that Aleman moved in with her boyfriend and his parents. Her mother didn’t give her so much as a warning about birth control.

Under current welfare rules, thousands of girls across the country with troubled backgrounds find themselves in charge of households, which they operate on skimpy budgets financed primarily by government assistance. Left to their own devices, many repeat their parents’ mistakes.

Johnson, who has worked intimately with hundreds of young women like Aleman, said that without outside intervention, few of them can provide the kind of safe, happy homes they say they want for their children. “It’s like being a cardboard stand-up--they have no background to help them accomplish what they want to do,” she said.

At the Family Inn, Aleman has the structure, security and support that was lacking when she lived with her mother and when she tried to set up her own apartment with Chucky and his drug-addicted, unemployed father. She landed here after losing her apartment, moving in again with her mother and then being kicked out.

A Good Environment

Now Aleman lives in a tidy studio apartment, attends alternative high school classes and workshops and is an intern at Chucky’s day care--all in the same building. The workshops focus on an array of social survival skills: everything from preventing pregnancy to eating right, to reading want ads and interviewing for jobs.

“The only people I have in the world to help me out are the people here. I have people here who care about me and what I do for myself and my baby,” Aleman said. “Even the security guards are always telling me: ‘Finish school.’

“Since I was young, I always had it in my mind that I was going to finish school and go to college. Now is my chance to do it with everything under one roof.”

Aleman is adamant that she will not follow in the footsteps of her mother, a high school dropout who had four children with four different fathers and has collected a welfare check every month since Aleman’s older sister was born. She knows firsthand the pain that kind of life can inflict on a child.

“I am getting off welfare,” Aleman said in a stubborn tone. “I’m so young. I don’t want to be a welfare mom like my mother.”

What motivates her, she said, is her passion to give Chucky what she never had.

“I want him to do good in school. I want to spend time with him and grow up with him,” Aleman said.

For her, providing a decent life for Chucky means staying as far away from her roots as she can.

“I’m not moving nowhere around Brooklyn, because I have my mother and other people there who get me into trouble,” she said. “I’m going to stay in Queens or Manhattan or the Bronx where I know nobody. My neighborhood is all drugs. You’re going to turn into a drug addict no matter what if you grow up there.”

Graffiti cover the metal screens over the storefronts on her mother’s street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where one-third of the 140,000 residents and more than half of the children are on welfare. Several of the shops were closed by the police because they were drug fronts. Others are poorly camouflaged, still-functioning illegal numbers businesses.

Drug dealers, Aleman said, work all the corners. Her stepbrother has spray-painted his nickname on the front of her mother’s house above a discount store.

“I’ll never miss that block,” Aleman said during a visit to her old neighborhood earlier this summer. “When I was in my mother’s house, I was doing a lot of bad things. I’m different now. I know anything [bad] I do will always hurt Chucky in the end.”

Her older sister sees the change.

“She’s acting more mature,” said Rosita Limardo, 19, who is pregnant and not married. “Now she’s serious about going to school. It’s good that she has this chance. It makes me want to get out of my mother’s house as well.”

Catalyst for Change

Residential facilities try to use the teen-agers’ maternal feelings as a catalyst for change.

“The young women, despite their circumstances, are still able to change their behavior and their circumstances,” said Demetra Nightengale, a welfare specialist at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “The maternal feelings are so strong. All of them have huge and high hopes for their kids. It’s a hook we can use in a positive way.”

Her first attempt at taking classes this spring and trying to earn a high school equivalency degree was unsuccessful.

“Since I had him,” she said, holding her nearly 2-year-old son in her lap, “he holds me back a lot.”

She speaks wistfully about grade school classmates who graduated from high school this year and are on their way to college. She tried a few times to return to school after Chucky was born, but he suffers from asthma and other health problems so she dropped out to care for him. Even at the Family Inn, she had to work on her assignments in her apartment because the day-care nursery would not take him when he was sick.

“It’s hard. I don’t have his father or my mother to help. I don’t have something to back me up. Being 16 or 17 or 18 and having to take care of a sick baby is very hard,” she said, pushing the stroller down 10th Avenue for an unexpected trip to the hospital. Earlier in the day, Chucky had begun vomiting in the nursery. She had to leave her first day of summer school early to take him to see a doctor.

“It happens all the time--I’m used to it,” she said, shrugging.

Aleman wishes she could stay in a supported-living environment until she earns her high school diploma and has a foundation on which to build a life for herself and Chucky. But the Family Inn, like most facilities, is set up for stays of less than a year.

She still wants to go to college and start a business, but realizes how much harder it will be because of Chucky. “I was 15 when I got pregnant. I was a baby having a baby,” Aleman said. “If I could go back to the age of 15, I wouldn’t have him. But I won’t tell him that until he grows up.”

Lessons Learned

She was four months’ pregnant when she realized it. The clinic would not give her an abortion without parental consent. By the time she got up the nerve to talk to her mother, it was too late to go through with the procedure.

The difficulties she has faced apparently were not vivid enough deterrents for either of her sisters. Limardo has already had four miscarriages. And her 15-year-old sister is due to have her first child by the end of summer.

“Teen-agers are hardheads. We want everything our own way,” she continued, explaining why she couldn’t talk her sisters or friends out of getting pregnant. “You’re a teen-ager. You want to grow up. By getting pregnant they think they’re more mature.”

Although Chucky is still in diapers, Aleman is already thinking about how to ensure that he won’t repeat her mistake.

“I’m going to teach him what is right and what is wrong. I’ll tell him that some teen-agers like to have babies, but I’ll teach him not to do it. I’ll tell him how hard it was for me, so he won’t do it to some girl.”