Teenage Sexuality
Speaker: Gayle Nathanson (click here for biography) and Three Teenage Moms, Followed by a Panel of Drs. Brindis & Reid, Blanca Ovalle and Gayle Nathanson
Soap Summit 1

Transcript of Proceedings
October 22, 1994

SONNY FOX: Sitting up at the table here are three young people with whom we want to chat and then you can also chat with them. They were brought together and then brought down here by Gayle Nathanson who is Executive Director and Founder of the Southern California Youth and Family Center in Inglewood, California. She administers comprehensive community based service and addresses adolescent pregnancy and it's prevention, child care, child abuse prevention, high risk youth and AIDS prevention education. Gayle was very kind and set up for me some focus groups with teenagers. The three young women you see up here are the three that we thought would be the most interesting to talk with. The thing that all have in common is that they are all teenagers and that they are all mothers and one of them soon will be a mother for a second time. Gayle will you talk about your work and introduce the three young people to us and then we'll go on from there.

GAYLE NATHANSON: Thank you, Sonny. We're very pleased to be here today. Youth and Family Center, does work with about 8,000 teenagers a year. About 500 of them are pregnant or are parenting mens. And our agency was actually created in 1979 as the first demonstration model for California and the Western region of the United States as a way to deal with pregnant and parenting teens and because of its success, it was replicated throughout California in what they call the "Adolescent Family Life Projects". You're going to be hearing more and more about that because the governor has extended that program, the concept of that program into a program called "Cal Learn." And "Cal Learn" is looking at a way to help young ADIC recipients, young welfare mothers, stay in school, get their high school diplomas and become economically self-sufficient. So "Cal Learn", I think, will be increasingly in the media. We're hoping to see that implemented here in Los Angeles County in January.

The first person sitting on my left is Cassandra Johnson. And we asked them to write a paragraph about themselves. Would you like me to read that, Cassandra or do you want to? (Cassandra declines)

Cassandra says that she is fifteen. She goes to Inglewood high school. She's in the 10th grade and her hobbies...she loves playing with her 10-month-old baby boy, she loves to shop, she loves to talk on the telephone, and, you'll be glad to hear this, she loves to watch television. Cassandra has goals in life. And her goals are to finish high school, to go to college. She's going to be very busy, because Cassandra is going to be a doctor and she's going to be a cosmetologist on the weekends.

And next to Cassandra is Vivian. Vivian Ventura. Vivian is a student at Inglewood adult school. And in December of this year, Vivian will be a high school graduate, an accomplishment of which she's very proud. We're all very proud of her. Vivian is 18 years old, she's married, and she has a 9 l/2-month-old baby girl who's name is Christina. Vivian says the two most important goals in her life are to become a good parent and to become a psychiatrist. And that's Vivian...but, let's stop a moment. Vivian's been up since 5:30 this morning. Vivian, I put you on the spot. Tell us what you've done since 5:30 this morning.

VIVIAN: I got up at 5:30 this morning to make lunch for my husband because he had to go to work. And I began to get ready to come here. I got my baby ready, I drove her down to Torrance with my mother because she can take care of her. Then I went to school, had to be there at nine. And I got dismissed early so I could come here.

GAYLE: Thanks, Vivian. With that kind of energy and fortitude, Vivian's going to become whatever it is she chooses to be. Next to Vivian is Nakia Brown. Nakia is 18 years-old, she has a 2 1/2 year-old son by the name of Jayton. And she attends Inglewood High School where she is also a senior. Nakia also has dreams and Nakia's dream is to own a pet shop and grooming business. So those are the young ladies that we're sharing with you today. And I guess what I want to share with you is we've spent a morning, a very interesting and exciting morning, and we've been hearing lots about the media and soaps and we've been hearing, also, lots about teenage pregnancy. And hearing about how it is that young women get pregnant. And one of the questions that people ask in the things that puzzle them is, "Can you tell us, how is it that today that young people do get pregnant? Is it about not knowing about contraception? Is it that you want to get pregnant? Can you help us understand for either you and for the young people that you know who are also mothers, what it is about that, that kids get pregnant today? Who wants to tackle that one?

CASSANDRA: Okay, basically it's a lot of reasons why teens get pregnant. The reason why I got pregnant was I, it was by accident. I wasn't on birth control. We didn't use a condom, so it was by accident. A lot of teens, they might know about the contraceptive, but they don't think it will happen to them. Or, they do it to probably show their boyfriend that they really love him and they really want to be with him. Or they do it to get attention, because maybe they don't get their attention at home so they feel if they have a baby it will be cute among their friends and among other people. And they say "Oh, wow, she's pregnant. She's going to have a baby." And the big belly and all that kind of stuff and eating all through the night. They probably think that's cute. There's a lot more reasons why teens get pregnant.

SONNY FOX: Stay with the circumstances under which you became pregnant. Was it with an older man?

CASSANDRA: He was only four years older than I am. Three and a half years older...he was older so it was like...he was used to it and I wasn't...I was kind of pressured and then I wasn't. And it was like, I wanted to find out for myself, so I just did it.

SONNY FOX: Were your friends also sexually active at that age?

CASSANDRA: Most of them, yes.

SONNY FOX: Did you feel sort of left out by that?

CASSANDRA: Sometimes, I mean when you're around talking about it with your friends and you're the only quiet one and they look at you and go, "Ah, ha, well she hasn't had any" then you kind of feel like, well, I might as well go ahead one day.

GAYLE: Cassandra, did you know where to go to get contraceptives and to go to a family planning clinic or anything like that? Did you think about doing that?

CASSANDRA: No, I know you can go to hospitals, or, you know, clinics and things like that to get condoms, but I didn't know about the Youth and Family Center and, you know, other places that they have, I didn't know...

GAYLE: So you didn't know actually where you could, where exactly to go to get it?

SONNY FOX: And when you found out you were pregnant, why did you choose to have the baby?

CASSANDRA: Because basically, because I had a lot of support, and that makes the difference. I had support from his father, from my mother and from my family and they told me that, you know, go ahead and, you know, so, I was like, okay.

SONNY FOX: Are they still there for you?

CASSANDRA: Yes, and even my father is even helping now.

SONNY FOX: Vivian?

VIVIAN: What was the question again?

SONNY FOX: What are the circumstances that led you to become pregnant?

VIVIAN: Well, basically, pretty much, you know there's a lot of different things that push us some-times. And I guess sometimes its your peers. I guess in my case it was I wanted to have something that was mine. Something that I could say "She loves me for me." You know, I had had some other boyfriends in the past that because I didn't sleep with them, they didn't love me. So in a way I kinda felt like I wasn't loved. My daughter wasn't planned. She wasn't planned because, like Cassandra said, sometimes you think that you don't use contraceptives because you don't think it would happen to you. And I think a lot of us believe that as teenagers. And that's what I thought. And I definitely thought, "That's not going to happen to me." And it did. And when it did I decided to have my child because she was a part of me and I don't believe in abortion. And also I think it has a lot to do when your parents, not because they don't want to be there for you but because of the fact that they have to work a lot because they're single parents, or just because they need to be financially there for you. They don't have the time to be there for you as they want to. I come from a single parent home, just my Mother, and she had to work very hard for her three kids. And sometimes she, even though she wanted to be there for me she couldn't be there for me. So that sometimes, you know, kinda leads to if somebody says, "Oh, I love you. I'll give you the moon, the stars, and all this". And I guess you just believe it. And you say well, whatever, it's going to happen sooner or later. I guess that's basically what ran through my head.

SONNY FOX: Is the man you married the man who made the child with you?

VIVIAN: Yes.

SONNY FOX: And is he supporting you?

VIVIAN: Yes.

SONNY FOX: And is it a good relationship?

VIVIAN: Yes, it is.

SONNY FOX: And is he helping to take care of the baby?

VIVIAN: Yes.

SONNY FOX: How many did you think you wanted before you started having babies?

VIVIAN: Well, l always had like this kind of fantasy. I said "Oh, I'm going to marry a rich guy. He's going to have a big palace." I think I always wanted five or six. But now that I've experienced having one, I might stay there. I really might.

SONNY FOX: Okay, will you move the mike over to Nakia, and Nakia would you like to tell us about the circumstances under which you became pregnant?

NAKIA: The first one?

SONNY FOX: Yeah, we'll get to the second one later.

NAKIA: My first, my son that I had now, I had him under a date rape situation. The guy...I was fourteen, I think I had just turned fifteen, and he was 22 and I went out on a date with him. I thought I was going out on a date with him but he took me to his house and he just didn't stop when I said "No" and I got pregnant. And I had some problems at home and, like she said, you kind of feel like you just want something that's yours and I had felt like that before. It kinda seemed like it would be fun to have a baby so I just went ahead and I had my son. 'Cause I talked to my Mom and I knew that she would be understanding about me having his so I decided to keep my son. That's my situation.

SONNY FOX: Did you ever consider any alternatives...abortion, adoption?

NAKIA: No, I would never give my child up for adoption. I would have an abortion before I would put my child up for adoption.

Q: Why?

NAKIA: I couldn't have a child...I couldn't carry a child for nine months and hear it cry or see it, period, and then give it away and wonder what happened to that child. I would just rather not have it at all and know that it's not treated bad or wrongly. So I couldn't do that.

SONNY FOX: So you had this first child and there was no man involved with you at that time?

NAKIA: Well, he was involved. My Mom talked to him and he said he would be there and he's still around, he still calls, but I think he kinda has a problem and I don't even, I don't even associate with him. I don't let my son see him anymore. I did try to work things out with him as far as arranging time for them to spend together and things like that, but he has a little problem and I didn't feel like it was worth it. I just felt like I would take care of my son myself.

SONNY FOX: He's not contributing anything to the child's support?

NAKIA: He said he would, but to me it's not even worth it, what I had to go through.

SONNY FOX: Okay, now you're pregnant again? Want to tell me about that?

NAKIA: Okay, the guy that I'm pregnant by now, I've been with since I was one month pregnant with my son. And when I met the guy, my boyfriend, he knew. I told him I was pregnant and we've been together for three years. And, I don't really know why I got pregnant. It was just something that happened. I know it doesn't really make sense since I already had a child so I know that it could happen. I kinda feel like, one kid, it wasn't really hard to raise my son to me. And I felt like I could handle another child. And I kind of wanted to have my kids early, instead of later in life. I wanted to hurry...

SONNY FOX: Do you have any plans to be married to this man?

NAKIA: Yes, I do. First we're moving in together next month and I think we want to give it a trial basis. I don't know how, and I am skeptical of how I think it would be different, of us living together and I wanted to sec how that would work out first.

SONNY FOX: Who's excited up there about getting a driver's license? One of you was.

NAKIA: Oh, me.

SONNY FOX: Yeah, Nakia was very excited. She had a baby, was having another child, and got very excited because she was at last, finally, at the age where she could get her driver's license. I thought that was sort of an interesting inversion of chronology.

Q: Do any of you feel like you gave up your childhood? Sometimes? Or is the baby substituting for that?

SONNY FOX: Anybody think they went from childhood to adulthood and lost a lot of years in between?

NAKIA OR CASSANDRA: No, I still have my teen life. Where ever I go, I take my baby with me. If I want to go to a party, he either stays with my mom or he's over at his father's house. But everything I've been doing before I got pregnant, I'm still doing it now.

SONNY FOX: Vivian?

VIVIAN: I feel like I did because, like she says, I go out I take my daughter with me. But in my opinion it's not the same, because, like for example, I'm here with you guys, but in my mind I'm worried about my baby. I know she's with my mother, but I miss her and there's always that little thing in my heart called responsibility that I know that she needs to be with me and I want to be with her. So I kind of do think that I skipped from being a little girl to being an adult. I do feel that.

NAKIA OR CASSANDRA: I don't feel like that. I feel like, I did a lot of things when I was four-teen years old. I had a lot of fun, and I still do the same things, or do everything that I want to do since I've had my son. I still go to parties. When you're an adult and you have a kid and you still go out, you just get a babysitter. And I do the same thing. When I want to go out with my friends, or just go out, I find a babysitter. But most of the time, 90% of the time, I am with my son. I don't go out every night. I don't go out every Friday night. But I don't even want to. I kind of like spending time with my son. Or the things that I do, I can take my son with me. I'm not a party person. I could take him with me over to my friend's house or where ever I go, so I don't really feel like I miss anything.

SONNY FOX: Any other questions of our panel?

Q: When I was a teenager, which was 30 some odd years ago, my parents put the fear of God in us that if we had sex once, we would get pregnant. And we worried about it and it generally was the reason that we weren't having sex in high school. I wonder what...why, can you explain why you feel it won't happen, it would happen to somebody else, it won't to you. Where there is a difference between...why I was so afraid that it would instantly happen and you think "Well, it won't happen to me, it will happen to somebody else"?

ONE OF THE TEENAGE MOMS: I think we don't even worry about it. I think we don't even let the thought enter our mind.

SONNY FOX: Did your parents ever tell you anything about it?

ONE OF THE TEENAGE MOMS: I thought my Mom wasn't going to accept me being pregnant. I didn't think she was going to accept it well at first. Because she did scare me. She did tell me that if "You ever got pregnant you couldn't live here and I was going to kick you out and you're going to have to make it on your own." So I thought I was in for hard times. But it still, if you don't think about it, then, you can't stop it and you don't let the thought enter your mind.

VIVIAN: Can I say something? Also, to respond to her question she says that "Why do you think it's going to happen to somebody else?" I think, like what happened to me, I think that probably I wanted, I wanted to make myself believe that it wasn't going to happen to me and that's why I guess I kind of, sort of, I just put it aside and I made myself believe it's not going to happen to me, you know what I'm saying, so I kind of just left it aside and just not thought about it.

GAYLE: It's also a very different world when we were teenagers and I guess it brings us full circle back to the issue what the role the media plays too in defining sexuality and teenage pregnancy. Did you have any thoughts how television, and I know you all watched soaps at one point in your lives, did that ever, did what you saw about sex on television play a part in making it look attractive one of your decisions to become sexually active?

ONE OF THE TEENAGE MOMS: To me it made it look like it was a good thing.

CASSANDRA: Like it was fun or something.

GAYLE: How so?

CASSANDRA: Like it was fun, because, soaps, I mean, it's like every other scene is a sex scene, or is about to be a sex scene and they cut it off, so then you sit there and you go okay, well tomorrow at this time we're going to watch it to see what's going to happen, and then they cut if off again, and you just, you're watching it for like a whole month before you finally see it, so then it's like okay, well, okay they did it like that and they were laughing and playing and so, you know, you kind of say well if maybe I go out and do it like that then, you know, it will be the same.

Q: I was curious about if they had watched soap operas, but they just answered it. Are there any story lines that you found to be particularly unrealistic that relate to pregnancy, and are there any story lines that you really could related to on the shows that you watched?

CASSANDRA OR NAKIA: There was one soap opera, it was a while back, I can't remember which soap opera it was but I watched it like every other day. It was a scene about a young lady, she got raped, it was at a party or something, I can't remember everything that happened, but she was raped and then they had a trial one day and the person that was helping her, she started falling in love with him. Then the person, the people who raped her, somehow ended up in a hospital and then it's a hospital scene, then it's back in the trial and it's like, "What's going on?" It's confusing, it didn't seem like it was real.

Q: When you said the sexuality all the time on the shows was appealing, was it the sexual behavior of the grownups, the older characters, or the teenage characters?

NAKIA OR CASSANDRA: It was basically grownups, you really didn't see teens having sex. I mean that you saw them maybe a peck or a kiss on the cheek or a hug or something like that, but I never really saw a sex scene where it was like a whole bunch of teens just having sex, like back to back, but now you do, you see it a lot.

Q: The girl on the end, you said when you got your first pregnancy, it was date rape. You were fourteen? And he was four years older than you?

NAKIA: No, he was six years older.

Q: How did your mother !et you out of the house with him? How did you get out of the house with him?

NAKIA: I lived with my grandmother and I told her that I was going to the movies. I told her the truth. She trusted me and I trust myself and if everything would have gone as planned then nothing would have gone wrong. I don't know if I told her how old that he was. I don't...she let me go out on the date. My mom, I used to live with my mom. She would have asked more questions. She would have asked to meet him, she would have asked how old he was, would have talked to him. I don't even know if she would have let me go out with him because of how old he was, but my grandmother is not like that. She's, you know...that's why I said I wanted to have my kids younger. Because when you're a lot older sometimes you can't relate and you don't know the right things to do. Like my grandmother, she doesn't really even know.

Q: This is a question for any of you. Do a lot of your friends have babies and did...and if so, did seeing your friends living with children, did it make you want to have a child more or less?

CASSANDRA OR NAKIA: Well, it's like half and half. Some of my friends have babies and some don't. My friends who do have kids, it's harder for the, it's like I'm the only one who has the easy route, where the father is still involved and, you know, my family's involved and then it's like they're struggling and it's kind of hard for me to say, well, I have a child and she has a child but you know, I see her struggling and I can't help her because I have my child and it's easier for me than for any of my friends.

NAKIA OR CASSANDRA: Well, a lot of my friends now have kids but when I was going to have my son, a lot of my friends didn't have kids, a lot of them were having sex, I knew that a lot of teenagers were getting pregnant, but the people who were around me nobody had kids when I had kids. So, they didn't influence me to get pregnant. But now looking at your friends with babies, it does make you want to have a baby, because...simply because you look at their baby and it looks so cute and they look so happy and you seem so happy with their baby that it does make you kinda want to have a baby.

Q: If you had a fourteen-year-old sister and she came to you and said she was pregnant, she just found out she was pregnant, what would you tell her to do?

NAKIA OR CASSANDRA: I would tell her, I would ask her does she think she was ready to give up her teenage life, was she ready to take care of the baby and still try to go to school and do everything and if she was ready and she still thought a baby was worth it, then I would tell her to have the baby. But if she was very young acting and she wasn't really ready to stop going out all the time and stop going out with a lot of guys and things like that, I guess I would tell her to have an abortion.

SONNY FOX: And at this point I will also say thank you to our...to Cassandra, Vivian, Nakia and especially to Gayle for organizing this. Thank you very much ladies. Good luck in your lives.

Now, I wonder if I could have Claire, and Gayle and Blanca up here, come up here, and we'll open up a discussion on this whole question of teenage sexuality and teenage situations that have been brought before us in the last few hours. Anybody want to talk to any of the people up here for ques-tions that occurred while they were up doing their original presentations, yes?

Q: I'm going to direct this mainly to you, Gayle, but I think it's pertinent for any of you. I was fascinated, and I wanted to ask the three young women, but it seemed like it might almost be too rough a question, they don't, either they are dealing with their lives, thanks to the help they are getting, or they don't seem to have progressed. They don't seem sorry or sad...

GAYLE: I think, perhaps the regrets didn't come across but in many ways it's a projection, when we think of the loss, the magnitude of the loss, when you hear about their childhoods, the difficulty and the hardship of being a parent on the continuum...they didn't lose the kind of childhood that we fantasize that they lost. If anything that we can talk to you about is how hard their lives are. We have so many children who are the walking wounded, who are suffering massively, who are not pregnant. And that is a very frightening thing to me. So when we talk about this transition of losing childhood and going into adulthood, these children are not leaving behind the kinds of childhood that we would fantasize they were leaving behind.

BLANCA: And it looks like they're in a bad situation and they're dealing with hard times, not just financially, it's astronomical what they go through. But they practically almost left a hell hole. The hardship, poverty, abuse, neglect...It's almost like they psych themselves out, there's like a new weapon, the code of the honor, the code of the school yard, a kind of this is how we do it now the warrior kid of the '80s, '90s, we had babies and this is going to take care of things.

DR. REID: The other point is that there is, if not societal support for having babies in their peer group, which is probably one of the guiding factors, at least a lack of the what you referred to 30 years ago. A woman who got pregnant at that time would have been the recipient of societal shame and she would have been isolated in a home until she delivered, the baby would have been given up for adoption. There's much more support for pregnancies and deliveries among their peers and in their society.

Q: I have two questions. One of them is there any behavior pattern about positive parenting or bad parenting...is there a pattern that turns into once the baby is no longer this cute little doll, but that's abuse or neglect or whatever...

GAYLE: You're talking risk factors for abuse and neglect versus good parenting on the part of teenagers. I can tell you most of the young people we work with love their babies very much and want to become good parents. It is very difficult at 13 and 14 years old to begin to even fathom what it is to be a good parent.

CLAIRE: What we find also is while the kids may go through this honeymoon period, when the kids start reaching the ages of two and three, when the kids are really becoming much more independent and not the sweet kind of cuddly thing, is when we see much more of an increase in the amount of abuse and more problems with child protective services. But I think you are right. Kids haven't been parented themselves, they feel they can reinvent themselves as mothers. And the fact that they haven't had the modeling, haven't had the positive parenting in their lives, makes them very vulnerable. And they have, again, that magical thinking that, "My Mom made a mistake, I'm not going to be like my Mom, I will do a better job." And when you ask them specifically what will you do, how will you operationalize that, they don't know how to answer you.

Q: Black adoptions...whether it's true or not one believes if you give the child up, then the child goes to the child welfare system and it doesn't get adopted, then it goes from foster home to foster home. So nobody in the black community with any sense at all is going to give their kid up for adoption. That's number one. The second thing that I thought was very interesting about all three of these women, whether we like how the involvement was, all three of these women's child's father was involved. That, I don't know if you paid attention, but each one of them had a different relationship with the child's father, but the child's father was involved.

DR. REID: The issue of adoption, also, in the middle class environment that I work at UCLA, it is also not seen, we either see abortions in most cases or children were kept by their families.

Q: Why is that?

DR. REID: I think what the young women expressed here probably reflects the feelings that I've run across that if a woman is going to carry a baby to term, she has bonded with that baby before and certainly during the delivery, and after birth it's very difficult to give up. I don't know that 30 years ago that that wasn't the case either, but again societal pressures I think were so strong to give up children for adoptions that...She said something very interesting, first she said you know carry the baby to term and about bonding, but also then to know all that time that it would go someplace and be beaten up and have a terrible life. Absolute assumption that it was going to be a terrible life.

ELOISE: That community's contact with the foster care community, the foster care community, especially if they live in LA, LA's foster care community had big write ups in the paper about how children went into foster care in LA County, were sexually abused or killed. This is not fantasy for these kids. They see these kids moving out of neighborhoods, going to foster homes...

Q: The exposure of media!

ELOISE: Yeah, but, they also see it in their own neighborhoods.

Q: No, I mean they read it in the paper.

ELOISE: Or on television.

CLAIRE OR GAYLE: I think it's more an emotional issue, that subconsciously on some level, they're ignoring all the education and exposure to contraception and all that. How can you handle that? You can bring in condoms, and give them all the literature and teach them, but if they want this child for these reasons, then all that is really, whatever happens to them ....

BLANCA: Did you catch what they said? We don't think about, we don't let it in, we block them.

Q: That's right, they block it...

BLANCA: And the other thing that surprised me in that comment was the Latina here, was a very different assertive and aggressive Latina compared to your East LA Latina, your Southgate, your Downey, she's grown up and subculture to maybe that attitude and know how to handle herself and be a little more aggressive. So that's unique. Subconsciously they're looking almost for a way out too, they want a way out. And it's maybe unintentionally...

GAYLE: I want to answer that. I think that education is one of the best contraceptives that there is. I don't mean contraceptive education, per se. But investment, and we believe in you and there's going to be a different life for you and there's lots of things for you to be in life. So it's hope, and it's the window of opportunity we are talking about. How many windows have been shut for some of these kids when they do get pregnant? For many of them, there have been no windows, not even to shut or to keep open.

CLAIRE: So when you think about taking a risk, what's the risk of loss? If you don't have a sense of future, and you don't believe that there's anything really out there for you, then the whole concept of delaying gratification and of "being responsible" is a whole notion that has no applicability to that population. They don't know what you're talking about.

BLANCA: How do they miss what they never had? When I grew up, college was only for white rich people, I never thought that a Latina could go to college. When I had my baby and I was in a nurses aid training program, I saw a Latina being an instructor and they brought in an attorney and how to get child support and it was like, oh wow, and she's a Latina and she did that whole.., what country did she come from? She's a role model.

DR. REID: One of the other things, when you're speaking about role models, to break this cycle is, and I think some very successful parenting training courses, not only using preventive techniques such as the doll we've been talking about, but taking young people that have had children and help-ing them improve their parenting skills, giving them supportive role model that can teach them new parenting techniques that maybe are more effective and could change their future.

CLAIRE: We did a number of groups with our young women and our young men on the media and there's some information I would like to share with you about the results of that. We talked a lot about sex and sexuality and how that gets picked up in the mores of our children, but they really talked beyond that, they talked about really learning ethical behavior, on general morality and relationship building from the media, from the television programs that they watch. They talked about how, if there are no men in the household, there's no opportunity for a close relationship with a man in the single parent women household, that they're learning when they watch television how to relate. And they practice it, and they model it, and then they take it to school, or they take it to the relationship with the young man that they are interested in, etc. So you are teaching them how to relate in these programs. They talked about how they admire the most deceitful, conniving characters on television. Those are their heroes. And why, because those are the people on television who are successful. They get what they want. And they practice that too, because that's the way you do stuff. And they're colorful, and they're tough, and they're strong, and they're doing it. Okay?

Q: There are just as many are successful...

Q: Not by those means.

CLAIRE: I'm telling you what the kids said.

Q: I know. That's what they see. They're not seeing the difference.

BLANCA: Remember what she said; it looked like fun -- the seducing of the whole...

CLAIRE: They zeroed in on the colorful character. And that to them was the seductress, the deceitful, the conniver, the manipulator who was very busy getting her way.

Q: But isn't that a result necessarily of what their perceptions are from their own backgrounds, rather than, you know, picking up on the successful characters that are the nice people. That they wouldn't pick that up because...

CLAIRE: Are they as colorful? When I watch television the ones who seem really colorful to me too. I mean I wouldn't model myself..

Q: I think it's perception. I think it has to do with perception. It's what they're picking up as some-thing they identify with, you know, I'm not sure what that study proves, but what I'm saying is it could be more than just across the board, that's what all teenagers are looking for.

Q: Like a Rorschach test.

Q: Yeah, exactly.