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Charities’ challenge Program teaches mothers how to be moms By Michelle Martin When Ajai Daniels found out she had pre-eclampsia and would have to deliver her baby two months early, her first call wasn’t to the baby’s father or to her own mother. It was to Yvonne Lee-Wilson, her caseworker in the Parents Too Soon program at Catholic Charities’ Jadonal E. Ford Center for Adolescent Parenting in Roseland. “She prayed with me, and she calmed me down,” said Daniels, a 15-year-old sophomore at Tesla Alternative School. Two weeks before Mothers Day, Daniels brought month-old Doloriae to her weekly Parents Too Soon meeting, a day after the tiny infant was released from the University of Illinois Medical Center. There, Daniels and 17-year-old Keiana Harrell, mother of Akiyah Hall, 2, shared what the Catholic Charities program has meant to them, both as mothers and as teenagers. “They got me through my pregnancy,” said Daniels, who has been attending weekly for eight months. “They gave me a whole lot of support. I went through a lot of emotional problems.” An A student, Daniels said she is proud she kept her grades up—also a point of pride for Harrell, a junior at Carver Military Academy who recently took the ACT and plans to attend college. “Anyone can graduate from high school and work for McDonald’s,” said Harrell, who already worked for a year as a swing-shift manager at a White Castle. “I want to have my own business, and I need an education. I don’t want to work in fast food any more.” Harrell credits the Parents Too Soon program with teaching her about being a good mother: everything from budgeting to dealing with tantrums in the store. Like the other mothers in the program, she has been videotaped interacting with her daughter and been given feedback on developmentally appropriate parenting skills. When she graduates, she will get the videotape as a keepsake. As her mother discusses the program, Akiyah rummages through a toy box in the nursery, occasionally asking her mom to free a toy that’s tangled in others or to hold toys she wants to play with. Daniels, tired after her first night with her baby at home, cradled the sleeping baby in her arms and said she relies on the emotional support of not only the caseworkers, but the other mothers in the program. “The girls here, they’re not like the girls at school that might take something you told them and brag on it,” she said. Velma Brown-Walker, the center’s director, said the goal of Parents Too Soon is to help teen-age girls who are pregnant or new mothers recognize the challenges they face and find ways to overcome them. The Ounce of Prevention-funded program costs about $359,000 a year, mostly for staff, and it keeps the girls coming back with rewards—and the threat of being dropped from the program if a girl does not attend regularly. The simplicity of the rewards—a hot meal for the The group discussion of sexual abuse is part of Heart to Heart, developed by the Ounce of Prevention to help teens recognize the signs of sexual abuse and learn how to prevent it. But as the 10 or so girls talk about how they will protect their children—and how much they would want someone to tell them if their child had been abused—it becomes clear that more than half were abused as children, and several never told. That’s common, Brown-Walker said, because teenage pregnancy has a high correlation with child sexual abuse. The Heart to Heart program works because, by talking about protecting their children, the girls find a safe place to talk about what happened to them and about ways to break the cycle. That’s what Parents Too Soon and similar programs are all about, she said. “We need to teach these girls what it means to really love and be loved, to really have respect for themselves,” she said. “That’s what we’re all about.” But with a massive state budget deficit and rampant cuts to social programs, she fears for the future of her program and others like it. Already, in late April, the Chicago Board of Education announced its intention to close the Arts of Living School, which for 25 years has operated in conjunction with Catholic Charities and the Board of Health to provide education and services similar to those provided at Parents Too Soon all in one educational setting on the North Side. Brown-Walker, who oversees the Catholic Charities portion of Arts of Living, said that if the closure goes through, she will try to find another way to provide services to those girls. Meanwhile, the girls in Parents Too Soon will write letters to political leaders to explain what the programs mean, Wilson said. Despite such concerns, and the massive challenges they face, Haller and Daniels remain optimistic about their own futures, and that of their daughters. “I want to be her role model,” Haller said, holding Akiyah in her lap. “I don’t want anyone else to be. I want to communicate with her, something I didn’t have with my mother.”
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