The New Black: Teen Dads

Social policymakers have started to go all gooey about teenage fathers, but there is more to it than funding a bit of help to get their lives straightened out. Teen fatherhood is about improving outcomes for babies and preventing future unplanned early pregnancies, writes Harald Breiding-Buss

Teen dads are the new black

Our Minister of Social Development, Paula Bennett, has a heart for teen parents – and that includes teen dads. Within a national budget that aims to change the way social services are funded, $20m over four years has been set aside specifically for teen parents, and within this about $750,000 is ring fenced for teen dads – probably the first-ever father-specific amount written into a government budget.

Father & Child started looking into what kind of people teenage fathers are about ten years ago, and our own research gave us some surprising results. Amongst other things, we came across a number of dads under 20 who had sole care of their child – a group that even today is treated as non-existent as we commonly associate teen parenthood with young solo mothers.

One such young solo father found himself unable to even get an IRD number for his son, because he was not registered as the father on his son’s birth certificate, and therefore had no legal status as a parent. Missing dads on birth certificates is epidemic for babies born to teen mothers: a whopping 20% of those babies have fathers that are, at least officially, unknown. Other countries, such as the UK, have legislated in recent years to require authorities to ask about the father for every birth, and only allow to leave his name and details blank in exceptional circumstances.
Less than 10% of births are to mothers under 20. While that proportion is high by international standards, it is very low historically. Having your first baby in your late 20s or even 30s is a fairly new phenomenon, and as birth ages increased people started to look down on young parents. It doesn’t help public perception that, unlike back in the days of our grandparents, almost none of those young parents are in a stable relationship with each other.

Over half the babies born to a teen mother have a father over 20, and for about a third the father is also a teenager. That makes about 2,500 teen fathers we know about, and of those about one in five have babies born to a mum who is over 20. Getting involved with older women is not so uncommon for young men, and several of the teen dads we worked with at Father & Child had partners (or ex-partners) in their late twenties or even thirties.

Statistics aside, the public perception of teen dads is not good. They may have become sexy with the political establishment, but in the public eye they generally fail to be good dads, and not the least part of this is that they don’t have a proper job.

The stereotype is that the main ‘issue’ consists of young men these days not wanting to take responsibility, i.e. get married (or something like that), settle down with a job and so on – everything we still associate with a good, responsible father.

However, there is little sign that young mums are in any hurry to take on the young men as permanent partners and create a household with them. Even the most responsible young man needs the cooperation of the mother to be a good dad by whatever standard. However there is no-one telling a young mother that her baby needs a father. There are good options now for a teen mum to continue her education while having fulltime on-site childcare and pursue a career if she wants, but no assistance whatsoever for a young dad to become established. As young mums get help with parenting, career and social issues, there is no niche left for a young dad. And so the key to better dads for those babies lies with mum.

It doesn’t help that a teen mum is most likely the child of a solo mother herself and has not experienced a healthy relationship with her own father. In fact some large international studies show that it is that lack of a father especially during early childhood which put a young woman most at risk of an early pregnancy, ahead of any other social factors. Her own ideas of what a father should be or do may be modelled on Hollywood men more than real ones, and as such is pretty impossible to live up to.

There is no doubt that more father involvement would be good for those babies. Research into the benefits of father involvement has piled up over the last 20 or so years. The common thread is that for a child to reap the benefits of father involvement there has to be a close relationship, and the father has to be responsive, playful and caring. The father’s prowess as an income earner is less important, and the benefits of having a father all but disappear if that father is never at home and never gets close to his children.

A father is also not easily replaced by a step-father. New Zealand research shows that children view the parenting efforts of a step-parent completely different to those of a natural parent. When the tough decisions have to be made, children naturally assume that their biological parents still care about them and have their interests at heart. The same thing from a step-parent is viewed as coercion and power play. While step-parents are often great and much needed role models, this relationship is of a different nature to that between biological parents and their children, regardless of who provides more ‘stability’. For better or worse, a father or mother are not replaceable.

That more attention is put on teenage fathers has to be a good thing, but what we really need is a paradigm shift. We need to instil young parents with a sense of teamwork; that raising this baby is a job they do together, whether they live together or not.

Josh’s Story

Josh (17), like most parents, soon learned that babies have a schedule all of their own. Kaizah was born by Caesarean on February 2 this year.

“We were confident of our preparations,” says Josh, but they had some issues with their midwife. “She saw me as just a teenage kid.” She told him it wasn’t necessary for him to attend the midwife appointments, but he went anyway.

“We were both scared, but happy,” Josh says of he and partner Latoya (19). “The scan was awesome… seeing his face in 3D and smiling” made Josh feel like crying.

When Latoya went in for the Caesarean Josh was understandably “really worried.” When Kaizah came out Josh was “able to stand up and see…then I saw the blood and sat down again; it brought a tear to my eye.”

“It’s been up and down,” says Teena, Josh’s mother. But Josh has been quite excited about milestones throughout the pregnancy. He reads and sings to Kaizah at night.

“You can’t do it by yourself,” Josh says. “Don’t push help away. Take it.”

With regard to he and Latoya being teenage parents, Josh says it has been difficult. His friends have not been too supportive, but they have their own lives. “I don’t go out as much.”

“We’ll get there,” he says of his relationship with Latoya. “We need to be patient.”

“I have something to work towards, and for,” Josh says. “I have a kid now.”

Deputy Prime Minister Bill English told an audience of 50 ‘Key Thinkers’ at a forum in Wellington yesterday that he wants people involved in social community initiatives to ‘run down our doors’ with new ideas. He and Social Welfare minister Paula Bennett said that the government is committed to social services that strengthen communities and empower community champions. Bennett promised the audience a lively debate through the remainder of the year on social policy approaches.
The forum was organised by the Families Commission, and tried to gather the thinking of the 50 invited people in six working groups. Disappointingly, there was almost no talk about better involvement of males as a key factor in positive outcomes for children, perhaps because only one fathers ‘champion’ was invited (Father&Child’s Harald Breiding-Buss).
Bennett appeared vaguely disappointed with what she overheard from discussions at the workgroup tables, saying that perhaps the thinking could have gone further.
More details about the forum can be found here: http://www.nzfamilies.org.nz/50-key-thinkers/main

The government has positioned the Families Commission as a ‘centre of excellence for knowledge about families and whanau’. Providing ‘advice on effective, accessible, and appropriately targeted services’ is one of the Commissions key future roles.
The Commission is inviting 50 ‘key thinkers’ from outside government to a forum in May to develop a ‘knowledge base’ about family service delivery.
The Families Commission is best known for its controversial campaigns on male-initiated family violence (the ‘White Ribbon’ and ‘It’s Not OK’ campaigns), which have been rejected by some of New Zealand’s top family researchers. The Commission’s key role in the past has been to fund family-related research, and in 2009 it commissioned a large study on male views on fatherhood.
It campaigned for the introduction of paid parental leave for fathers in late 2009 to a frosty response from the government.

The Ministry of Social Development has produced a new resource called ‘Supporting Teen Fathers’ aimed at those working with young dads. It was developed in consultation with local researchers and practitioners, including Father & Child. The resource covers conceptualisation of a service through to delivery and evaluation. Order from MSD, ph (04) 916 3300, or contact Father & Child.

Dan Brown, a young father being supported by the Father & Child Trust, was interviewed on TV3 about the new “In Your Hands” DVD produced by Great Fathers.

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A Father & Child survey of 124 dads attending the Waitakere City Toddler Day Out this year, found that a majority felt their needs as a dad are well catered for in Waitakere City.

However, only half said that they’d had face-to-face contact with a Well Child Health provider, such as Plunket. Home-based Well Child Health services are available to all babies and their parents.

More than three quarters of dads felt Waitakere supported early parenting and families well, but only 57% thought new dads were well supported. Even fewer thought the city did well for separated or solo dads.

Fathers with an only child under one felt especially frustrated with a lack of inclusion, and rated support for families much higher than support for dads. They were clearly appreciative of what is being done to keep baby healthy and put families on track, but about half of these dads appeared to have been effectively kept out of the loop by the agencies involved.

It seems that although family service providers may be more aware of fathers and their important contribution to child development, they still do not make enough effort to meet with them and engage them.

There were some signs that this had improved over recent years. A father with a child under one was almost twice as likely to report having had face-to-face contact with a Well Child Health provider than a father with a child aged three or over.

The survey highlighted the importance of that face-to-face contact. Fathers who had such contact with some of the leading agencies generally felt much better supported than their peers who had not, and seem to have generally better access to information.

Dads who engaged with Playcentres stood out as being significantly happier with their support as a dad, and 73% of them said they feel encouraged to participate in their child’s early education.

Perhaps surprisingly, separated fathers felt better supported than those living with the mother of the child. Only 30% thought they were not supported as new dads, 10% felt families are not supported, 11% thought there are not enough fun events for dads and kids and only 9% thought there is not enough information about early parenting – the lowest rates for any group analysed.

Of the partnered fathers, 44% felt unsupported as new dads, 21% felt families are not supported, 33% would like more fun events and 26% could do with more early parenting information.

Survey conducted by Father and Child Trust at Violence Free Waitakere’s Toddler Day Out, in collaboration with Geoff Bridgeman and with support from Glen Jones.

Full report here (pdf)

Recent research shows that dads need to be more included in family services says Families Commissioner Gregory Fortuin. (more…)

A new study by Nelson researchers David Mitchell and Philip Chapman on experiences of separated non-resident fathers found that research participants were either unaware of existing services or considered them unfriendly towards men.
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Who’s Looking After The Family?

Our family is what most of us put at the top of what’s important to us. And government has a big impact on families: schools, health care, financial assistance while parents are on a lower income due to children and so on.

But the larger political parties seem to want to steer well clear of the subject of families. Harald Breiding-Buss investigated what parents can expect from them.

Have you made up your mind yet who to vote for? Perhaps you’re more sure about who not to vote for, following the great democratic tradition of the ‘protest vote’.

Given that the mainstream media rarely go into any depth about policy initiatives or law changes you’re not likely to find out what the major political parties are really up to from the 6 o’clock news.

Family is an area traditionally neglected in election campaigns, although signs are that people – at least those with children – do find it rather important.

In the 2002 election, for example, United Future came out of nowhere to take 10% of the vote and a significant chunk of seats in the House after party leader Peter Dunne steered a TV discussion onto family issues and successfully portrayed his party as the ‘family party’.

In the process they demolished a big enough majority to govern alone, which pollsters had forecast for Labour, and forced concessions such as the formation of the Families Commission.

The Families Commission turned out to be a dud but the message was clear nontheless: people will vote even for an obscure minor party for policies that hit close to home and support families.

Researching Family Policies for this article, it was interesting to see that the two main parties, at least, do not particularly push theirs. You won’t find them on their web sites, for one.

Asking National and Labour about them got a mixed response: National completely ignored the request, while Labour did reply but evaded specific questions about such things as single fathers or the mother-focus of health and social services – although they did say that they believe in creating equal parenting opportunities for men and women.

With Labour, at least, there is a track record, although it is not Labour’s alone. Over the last almost nine years government has heavily focused on the economical side of families – and the education and support of mothers, and mothers only.

One of its most high-profile initiatives, Working For Families, is not actually theirs – Labour only renamed the ‘In Work Tax Credit’ that dates back to the National/NZ First government of Jenny Shipley.

This government has substantially increased the payments, however, and shifted the income levels upwards from which these payments are being reduced. The result was that being in paid employment now pays much better for families than the benefit, but headway is slow between $40,000-$50,000 where you hit high abatement rates.

‘Working For Families’ is not disputed between National and Labour, and just as well: as one hard-working but low-income father told me, it’s ‘the difference between a life and an existence’.

Other financial assistance includes money for new babies and paid maternity leave, and primary health care for children and teenagers has become much more affordable or even free.

The maternity leave legislation was a low point in Labour’s track record of family initiatives, as it ignored both polls and almost unanimous expert advice that called for a separate non-transferable leave entitlement for fathers. Other countries at the time were introducing such legislation.

Paid parental leave was widely welcomed, but the restriction to mothers only was an anachronism.

This government has also pumped more money into social services for the less fortunate. However, because nothing has been done to improve the mother-focused infrastructure, such services have almost exclusively reached mothers only.

None of the parties, unfortunately, has any concrete plans on creating a whole-family service infrastructure.

Ironically, the once traditionally conservative National party probably faces more of an uphill battle on the family front. Policywise it’s all about money, but they can’t out-spend Labour on social issues.

The previous National government removed any tax advantages for families and removed mandatory penalty payments for shiftwork and work on weekends or public holidays. Weekly working hours for fathers with young children spiked as a result as it became harder to make ends meet, and so did parental breakup rates (which started a very moderate decline between 2001-2006).

With many that left the nasty impression that National is quite willing to sacrifice families on the altar of economic considerations, and prevented them from taking the moral highground ever since.

In the last three National years (1996-1999), however, direct financial assistance to families was ramped up, and the government tried to gauge New Zealanders’ beliefs about social and family values by issuing a feedback booklet to every household – almost like a ‘value census’.

At the time New Zealanders saw it as an attempt by a dying government to usurp their moral values and to distract from the socially divisive policies of previous years, but it may well have been a genuine attempt to form a national consensus on some basic questions of what New Zealand is really all about.

It’s a discussion worth having. Labour’s weakest point is that it refuses to define family from a child’s point of view. Even the UN International Convention on the Rights of the Child acknowledges that a child’s family is, in the first instance, mum and dad, and that these two have special roles and responsibilities ahead of anyone else.

In fact, signatories to the convention (including NZ) are obliged to do their best to assist these two in those responsibilities. In many countries family welfare is a constitutional right: France and Germany, for example. This does not distract from wider family and whanau, or step-parents – it just sets a priority.

Some minor parties have started to make noises on the fringes.

Both New Zealand First and United Future believe the Families Commission needs a ‘stricter’ definition of ‘family’. United Future, in fact, remains the party with the most comprehensive and detailed policy: fairer taxation for couples with children (income splitting), government-funded family centres, paternity leave, a presumption of shared custody after separation, flexible working hours – you name it, they’ve got it.

They call bonding of fathers with their newborn baby ‘imperative’ and as the only party acknowledge that family violence is not simply a men-hitting-women issue.

However, like the main parties United does not advertise their family policy on their web site and it seems to have become part of their ‘gender policy’.

NZ First, currently a government partner, also has a family policy, which reads a bit like a patchwork of individual hobbyhorses rather than a cohesive concept.

NZ First strongly pushes pre-school education, both through early childhood education (‘childcare’) centres and home-based services such as Parents As First Teachers (PAFT) and Home-Instructional Programme for Pre-Schoolers and Youngsters (HIPPY).

These two programmes are currently targeted at ‘high needs’ families and are wildly popular with those who manage to get in. NZ First wants to make them universally available. There is some mention of grandparents raising grandchildren, truancy, and intervention for ‘at risk’ families, but for the standard Kiwi family it is business-as-usual.

And then there’s the Greens. Far from sit-ins against rainforest logging they have made their name with what became known as the ‘no smacking law’ and is so unpopular that it nearly sparked the second-ever citizens-initiated referendum.

Their other big legislative success was also on an issue completely unrelated to the environmental issues they probably predominantly get voted in for: the Employment Relations Amendment Bill, which mandates that employers have to grant an employee flexible working hours on request, unless it would cause unreasonable economic disadvantages for the company.

While the Greens do not seem to have a specific family policy, their other policies and their track record suggest a traditionally socialist stance: better protection for minorities or disadvantaged groups (including children), more money and resources for the poor, equality between all, and the strong helping the weak.

In short this means they won’t let you down if you fall on hard times economically, but don’t expect them to put any particular special value on mothers and fathers.

Which leaves the question of how big a role family issues should play when you’re voting.

In our experience at Father & Child, family is a ‘big picture’ issue for men. Even the most socially liberal dudes seem to prefer a government that acknowledges the special role of mothers and fathers in children’s lives ahead of any other family constellation.

Nearly three quarters of parent breakups are initiated by the woman, indicating that men tend to hold on to the idea of a ‘whole’ family for longer, and would probably support more effort going into avoiding such breakups.

Men have also started to make a bit more noise about the narrow focus on mothers when it comes to parenting and child health services.

Equal shared parenting, as an ideal, is supported by 92% of New Zealanders, according to a 1999 survey, and 65% support both parents equally looking after children on a day-to-day basis.

So far research has backed up the idea that investing in families will address most other social issues at the same time. It’s a ‘big picture’ issue alright, but I doubt that any of the major players in parliament have got it yet.

Next: Government Departments

5 Ways to Do a Better Job

If you are working with ‘families’ but don’t see any fathers, you’re doing something wrong.

Here’s how to fix it:

1. Enrol Both Parents in Your Service

Always ask for names and contact details of both parents and preferably have both parents there for the enrolment visit.

Enrolling both parents automatically sets an expectation that both parents will be involved in your service.

If parents do not live together, and you are completing enrolment with one parent only, make a phone call or write a letter to the other parent advising of the enrolment and of the times you are available for questions. As a legal guardian he is entitled to all the information you generate about his child anyway—so why not be proactive?

2. Make Appointments With Both Parents

Always coordinate appointments with both parents, unless they specifically tell you otherwise. Most of the time even a working dad will be able to make time during the day for you – don’t assume that this would pose a problem for him. Don’t hide behind the ‘primary caregiver’ idea—these arrangements change.

As more and more mums with little children work fulltime as well, you’ve got to be prepared to do the occasional weekend or evening visit or you’ll miss some of the families that need you most. But most parents will be able to make time for you weekdays.

If parents are separated make sure you maintain contact with the other parent who is not attending appointments, and/or schedule some appointments while the child is with the non-custodial parent.

3. Use Inclusive Language

If you say ‘parents’ make sure you mean it. Even better: use ‘mums and dads’ and ‘dads and mums’ instead of ‘parents’. The word ‘parent’ is so often used as another word for ‘mother’ that readers or listeners do not automatically assume anymore that you mean both men and women.

If your publications have a ‘fathers corner’, have a ‘mothers corner’ as well, where you can stick articles such as ‘how to look after your pelvic floor’, rather than putting them in the main body.

4. Talk to Both

Make eye contact with both and involve both in your service as you go. If you are doing home visits this makes for a much richer working environment and more honest discussions about parenting or child health issues, for example.

Unless you convince both parents, whatever you suggest will only be implemented half-heartedly, or not at all. And as much as you’d like to think that, for example, breastfeeding is a mother’s decision, she’ll be talking about it with her partner and his support, or lack of it, will have a bigger influence than your advice and information. If you don’t get him on board, he’ll undermine you, but good information influences fathers as strongly as mothers. So make sure he gets it from you and don’t assume the mother will ‘let him know’.!

If parents are separated, be aware that day-to-day care of a child often changes as children grow older. A single mother today may have much less influence over parenting that child in a few years time, so by continuing to talk to the father you are improving the child’s future more than you can guess from the present.

5. Treat Parents as Equals

This is the hardest challenge for professionals working with young families, as they almost always assume that the mother is the ‘primary caregiver’. However, in acting on that assumption a professional has a big role in creating the situation in the first place, even if parents want to share the role more equally.

In practice this means such things as talking about the same things with both. If you ask mum how she is coping, ask dad as well. If you are discussing getting a break from baby, discuss it with both and how they can work it out between them. If asking questions about the baby or child, address the question to him as much as to her. Don’t open a conversation with dad by asking about work – that puts him squarely into the ‘provider’ box and does nothing to improve his confidence as a parent. Think of mothers and fathers as people first, women and men second.

Consider also that New Zealand has high rates of single fatherhood (18 % of sole parents). This means that about one in 15 children you are working with will eventually end up in the care of their fathers, temporarily or for good (it’s a much higher proportion if you are working with disadvantaged families). This may be many years down the track, but do you want to take the risk that that father has learned nothing about parenting while you had the chance?

Next: Young Musicians