Teenage Sexuality
Speaker: Eloise Anderson (click here for biography)
Soap Summit 1

Transcript of Proceedings
October 22, 1994

SONNY FOX: We have now explored the macro, if you will, the global context of population issues. Now we're going to move into a much more intimate look at some of those facets of the issues as they occur in this country.

When word got out we were going to be doing the "Soap Summit" a number of people called. Some people who called really made a lot of sense. One of them was a group of people out of Sacramento who worked for the Social Services Division of the State of California, which turns out to be the largest non-federal agency working with families with dependent children. The budget for that, I found out, in the state of California alone is 13 billion dollars. That the number of clients that are dealt with by this agency are 2,300,000 individuals in the state of California, and that the person who runs this vast operation of 4,500 employees, is a very remarkable lady named Eloise Anderson. Her bio is in your folder, so I won't go on beyond that. So Eloise Anderson, will you come forward?

ELOISE ANDERSON: I talk to a lot of groups, but they usually have guns pointing at me. (laughter) As I was thinking about this, there's three issues that I and my staff are trying to find solution to that have real relevance to what you're doing. One is how to decrease the number of children in child welfare system. We have 97,000 children in California out of home. Two, how to decrease the number of children in juvenile delinquency system. We think we got something like 20 to 25,000 children in our delinquency system in California. Three, how to decrease the number of families who need AFDC, and the length of time that they need financial assistance.

What we know, in terms of our population in California is that we get women on AFDC in two ways. One, they come in as teen moms, and second, they usually come in through divorce or separation. But most of them were teen moms when they had their first child. So 54% of our case load at any given time, the mother on AFDC, was a teen mom. So you see what kind of impact it has on us here in California. I really do believe that early child bearing is related to all of the above issues that I've talked about. We begin to look at who's creating that teen violence, and we begin to ask the question, and I ask this question a lot, "How old was the mother at the birth of the first child," we've got about 70% rate now that the mom was a teen mom at the birth of the first child.

When we look at government-run schools, most people call them public schools, I call them government-run schools, they spend most of their time trying to control children. And if you look at the children who are hyperactive, hypertense, running out of control, you usually find the common denominator with those children, is that they were born to mothers who were teen moms when they had their first child. There are a large number of our children who go hungry and homeless every day. As we're beginning to look at this homeless and hungry population, what we are finding is more and more of those mothers, we're at about 56 to 57 percent of our homeless families, the mom was a teen mom when she had her first child.

In our child-removal system, that we call our Foster Care System, what we find is the alarming rate of numbers of children who are removed from home who are neglected and abused, that the number of moms had two things occurring to them. One, who had early-childhood sexual abuse, early abuse, and the moms had their first child when they were a teenage mom. So for us it's not just a part of dependency, every point of our system is affected by teen moms. What we need to do, what we believe we need to do is to re-educate. First we really believe we need to re-educate the populace.

We really need to talk about the negative outcomes of teen parenting. Most of the people in our society, who are my age and above, are used to having early marriage. And one of the reasons why we're used to having early marriage is a whole lot of the population came out of rural communities of America, had early marriages and really don't see anything wrong with having children at an early age. But life is not the same for them. So we've got to do a re-educating of the population, especially the older population around negative outcomes for negative women having children.

Two, we need to educate parents on how to communicate with children regarding sexual activity. What I'm always seeing in my arena is that we don't...the populace and the political realities con-stantly saying, "We don't want you to educate the kids." Well I have both mixed feelings about that. But if we're not going to educate the kids, then we definitely have to educate their parents, and we're not doing that either. So educating parents about their own sexual issues is clearly important. I want to share a story with you. I'm a story teller, a little bit, and I do things more through story telling than I do through statistics to get you to understand.

About twenty years ago I was a social worker, actually it's probably more like thirty years now, I was a social worker in a little small community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I did a lot of work with moms. And I was having moms who were trying to get off AFDC, and I was really trying to get them to understand things, and I had families who had large families. And I had different people come in and I had a doctor, or a gynecologist come in and talk about pregnancy. What you do, planned parenthood and all that kind of stuff. I had one of the women just scream, just went nuts in the room. So I calmed her down. I said, "What's wrong?" She said, "I've been doing it all wrong." I said, "What do you mean I've been doing it all wrong?" She said, "I thought that I was having sex at the right time, not to have children, and I could never understand what I was doing wrong." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "My mom told me about the birds and the bees." She's from Mississippi. It clicked. I new exactly what she was talking about. Remember, the human animal is probably the only animal, that is not fertile during it's menstrual period. Think about that. So I had a woman sitting here who'd grown up on a farm, who only knew about animals and when they got pregnant, and so what she had done, was she thought, was not to have sex during her menstrual cycle. Think about that. But I wanted to share with you how we need to really educate people.

We need to educate people about the stages of human development. One of the things that I have watched with teen moms dealing with their babies is that they really know nothing about infants. They have very little knowledge about infants, and they have even less knowledge about toddlers, so one of the things that I think that you could do is begin to have us talk about the infant stimulus that needs to go on with babies. How we need to talk to babies, how we need to hold babies. What we need to do with babies. What's the relationship with mom and child. How to be around babies, and what we need to do with toddlers. And if you go to any store and watch a young mom and her tod-dler you know real well that she really does not know what her toddler is capable of doing, and she over expectates on this child. So I think we can do some things in here.

The next one is the stages of human development. I am really sure that most people in our society, when I look at the parents that we're dealing with have no clue of how sexual the human animal is. And we do all kinds of things to deny, and we really need to talk about that so parents can talk to their children about that. This is a critical piece to me. We need to teach, and I've seen this on television a lot, the difference between love and lust. We have got these totally confused in this country, and the next thing I think we need to teach is the difference between sex and affection, because as I watch our children a lot, what I see them looking for is affection, but they go after it in sex. And we say to them, "Well you make love," when actually that's not what's going on at all, and so if we give words to things that really are not what they are. So we really need to watch how we say things to our children, and what we call sex, and what is affection.

The third thing children need to see is affection without sex. Especially our boys. Now, I'm real interested in this because I think many boys do not grow up in homes where they see men who are affectionate with their mothers. What they see are men who are sexually with their mothers. Those are very different issues. So as men grow up, they don't really know how to be affectionate with women. They only know how to be sexual with women. Boys need to have that. In girls I've seen exactly the same thing. They think that a relationship with a man is sexual, not affectionate. Girls do not get touched in honest, affectionate ways by men, because many of them have no fathers in their home. So when you have a teenager who's really kind of acting out, and teenage girls act out just as much as teenage boys sexually, with men in the house who are not her biological father, you start to have real problems, especially in households where the difference between the mom's age and the oldest daughter's age is very small, and the men that are coming into the household, the difference between the age is very small. And when you see the difference where men go down in terms of their sexual relationships, you begin to have real problems in those households around the issues of sex and affection, and the needs of the children. So we need to send very different messages to our kids around this whole thing of what is sex and affection, especially for boys. We need to remove the sex conquest from the acts of being a man. We need to tell boys that there is some other way that you are a man. That just being sexual is a human thing, not a man thing. And I don't know how you go about doing that, but we've got to figure out how to do that.

We also need to educate our men and our girls on how to date. I think we've lost the notion of what dating is all about. So we need to have some education about what do you do when you go on a date, besides sit in the back of the car and have sex. We've got to give some different kind of behavior to our...and they've got to see it, because they're not seeing this anyplace, so they've got to see, "What do you do on a date?" on television. It's got to stop being drinking and drunk. It's got to stop being in the back of the car, and it's got to stop being, "I've got to get this woman so I be good in front of my friends."

We've also got to educate men about marriage. What I think is very interesting, is about...there was a study done at two points, 1984, 1988. 72% of all men get married, which is very interesting. It's not we mostly think. I think we think men have babies and run away. They don't; they mostly get married. About 14% of them, maybe 24% of them get divorced, and the question is, "What is going on here?" My view is that we learned to be married from our parents. If our parents weren't married, didn't make it through, we have no role models about how to be married. So we need to see people being married.

Now married to me has a lot of conflicts in it. You struggle when two people get married, even if they are the same race, same religion, same culture, they come into the marriage in two different cultures. Your family's culture and this family's culture. And you've got to struggle through all those issues around, "How are we going to have our own culture in this family." And we have big arguments over money. We have big arguments over a whole bunch of things. But what people need to see is: How do families work those issues out? People need to know how to problem solve without fights in a family. I tell people all the time the most violent place in America is not on the streets, it's in the home. So children need to see these conflicts worked out in ways that they can begin to do that.

The other thing I think we need to figure out how to do is to get unmarried fathers to be fathers more than we have been. We need to say that in this society it is not just important to put your check on the table and go run, because we talk about child support all the time, but it's important for men to nurture their children in the way we expect women to nurture their children. So we begin to turn some of this around. What I think is very interesting is the difference between African American men on fathering rate and Asian American men on fathering rate. They're exactly the opposite ends of the poles. One in three of African American men ever have children out of wedlock. And we don't even have the data for Asian men because they marry late and have children late. So they are just the complete opposite. The other thing that I think is very interesting, is that only 25% of African American men have children by more than one woman, which is not the view we have. And less than 7% of European American men have children by more than one woman, so our view of this is real different than actual reality.

The other thing that I think is very interesting, is that only 25% of African American The other thing that I think is interesting in terms of when I look out at information, is that when I look at the other thing that I think you need to work on with us is: How do we teach parents to keep their children safe? Most mothers do not know how to keep their children safe. They do not even know what the clues of safety are, so what we've found in a couple of studies, when I was in Wisconsin that we did, was that 80% of drug-using moms were sexually abused before the age of 16. So drug abuse has a serious mental health issues tied to it. The other thing that I thought that was very interesting is that 40% of our boys in correction were sexually abused before the age of 16. So safety in families, safety of our children, especially sexual safety, is real critical for how they behave and act out. Boys tend to do very different things. Boys, when their sexually abused, tend to do a couple of things different than girls. Boys take their pain outwardly; Girls take their pain inwardly, by in large. So you'll see high pregnancy rates, high addictive rates, and girls doing inwardly destructive things. Boys tend to go out and shoot you, rape you and do all kinds of other things sexually.

The last thing that I think that I believe we need help with as a community from you, is that poor children need to be valued in this society. And the programs should address the emotional needs of these children. One, about the need for parental attention. If we're going to be two parents working outside the home, then we need some education around how do we provide attention to our children when we come home. Ten minutes a day is not enough. The need to see men, especially fathers, affectionate, is critical in family resolution resolve. We also need to show more poor people with dignity in programs. It is okay to be a domestic, but you need to show how domestic people live. You can't have all of your focus on, "Yes, I'm a domestic, but I'm in the house of some rich person." So some of your focus has to go, "Just how does a poor person live with low income jobs in the com-munity, in their homes, and how do they make that work?" Because what you say by always focus-ing on middle-class families, no matter what their color is, is that everybody needs to strive for that, no matter who they are. And those of you who have MacDonald's jobs, which are perfectly fine, are less than good. Your lives are not of value. And so we need to have images of people that really focus on, what does it mean to live in a house where you don't have a lot of money and you need to have women to maybe wear the same outfit 4 or 5 times on a show, because that's the way poor peo-ple live. And then we need to have on the shows, parents who actually talk to, and listen to their children. Thank you.

(Applause)

SONNY FOX: Thank you very much, Eloise, for coming down. We'll be getting back to Eloise later again, when we get into the discussion of this area.