Looking to the future
Digg This!So many young women who have a teen pregnancy find it daunting to think of completing their education. There seem to be many barriers – time, support, money, good child care, etc. But completing their education is the second most important thing they can do for themselves and their children. (The first most important issue is to obtain adequate health and medical care for mom and for baby.)This book supports, encourages and identifies young women who met the challenge and obtained higher education after experiencing a teen pregnancy. Education breaks the cycle of poverty; it enhances the potential for adequate income, health insurance, job security and a better life for her and for her child.
BEING a baby mama is no excuse for not finishing your education.Many women, though, use motherhood as an excuse to quit school. Only 40 percent of teen mothers who give birth before age 18 graduate from high school and less than 2 percent earn college degrees before age 30, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
That practically guarantees a life of poverty, not only for the mother but also for her children. It also perpetuates a cycle of hopelessness that may have led to her becoming an unwed mother in the first place. That’s why I’m giving a hearty shout-out to Sherrill W. Mosee’s new book, “Professor, May I Bring My Baby to Class? A Student Mother’s Guide to College” (FCS Books, 2009).
Page after page contains real-life examples of single mothers, many from Philadelphia, who juggled both motherhood and being full-time college students.
Rasheedah Phillips was only 14 and in the ninth grade when she gave birth to her daughter. She not only managed to get her undergraduate degree from Temple University, but also graduated from its law school.
And Talia Barrows, who is finishing up at Temple, has been able to attend school even though she has a 9-year-old and a 5-year-old who has cerebral palsy.
Moneek Pines-Elliott pushed on at Moore College of Art & Design even after giving birth to twins after her freshman year. She graduated in 2001 and now has her own child-care business.
It is inspiring stuff, which is precisely what author Mosee intended. Her own mother, who got pregnant at 16, had been accepted at Penn State but when it was time to enroll her family refused to let her go. Instead of furthering her education, her mother married briefly before having more children and never got the education she wanted.
“She would always say, ‘I wish I had the opportunity to go to school.’ She valued higher education,” said Mosee, who has a master’s in electrical engineering from Drexel University. “She wanted to major in business administration. She wound up being a secretary.”
When her stepdaughter got pregnant during her first year at Lincoln University, Mosee decided to do something to help encourage young mothers to complete their education. So, in 1998, she created a nonprofit called Family Care Solutions, which helps low-income single women pay for childcare so they can continue their education.
“It really does take one person in their lives to say, ‘You can still do this,’” Mosee told me yesterday.
What happens all too often is that young mothers get the kind of negative feedback that Mosee’s mother faced when she was told to get a job and forget about going to school.
“When we feed into that negativity, we are really pulling the dreams away from young people,” Mosee pointed out. “In my own family, because my grandmother didn’t allow my mother to go to college, she wound up having to help my mother care for us. Had she allowed her to pursue that higher education, I’m sure it would have been different.”
By Jenice Armstrong
Philadelphia Daily News
