The Times has a great profile about a group of girls in rural Tennessee, all former high school basketball players. What happens to the girls after high school?
“Our job here is to keep them out of custody and give them the education,” said the Carroll Academy director Randy Hatch, who grew up in Huntingdon. “Then we turn them loose into the world. No different than Huntingdon High School, where the locals go. We’re putting them out into the world. What’s for them to do? What is out there?”
All three girls applied multiple times to the various fast-food restaurants in their towns. Each pondered more education at one of the region’s technical schools. But the lack of jobs, and the cost of cars and gas to navigate the stretched-out landscape, made even the first steps into the real world daunting, if not unmanageable.
So they waited, frozen in time and place.
“For someone who’s 18, you’ve got one of two choices, that I see,” Hatch said. “You’re either going to go to college, if you can get in, or you’re going to join the military. If you can find a job, it’s going to be by the hour. You’re not going to find something that’s going to help you raise a family. Those jobs are just not here.”
Apt. 11d 
Wait–let’s put this together with a previous post on the McDonald’s budget.
1. McDonald’s doesn’t pay enough.
2. More people want McDonald’s jobs than can get them.
Maybe this means that McDonald’s isn’t such a terrible employer, compared to all of the other options.
I was just googling for info about McDonald’s and as I suspected, McDonald’s does offer free and discounted meals to employees, plus a bunch of other goodies.
http://voices.yahoo.com/ten-reasons-work-mcdonalds-471689.html
It’s really important that there be a bottom rung to the employment ladder, which is what McDonald’s represents, along with free job training. If there is no bottom rung, a lot of people will never be able to get to the more desirable rungs of the ladder.
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The costs of cars and gas is a big problem in rural or even urban jobs. How can someone on minimum wage afford these things, especially when the job is twenty miles from home? When the car breaks down? When you don’t have one to begin with?
McDonald’s is the bottom rung on our kid’s local employment ladder because she has lots of skills and opportunity, plus there’s a restaurant not a ten minute walk from our front door. McDonald’s isn’t a bottom rung on the employment ladder for these kids: it’s several rungs up the ladder for poor kids in rural or small-town environments without a lot of support or skills who have to navigate the problem of transportation on top of everything else.
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I don’t understand the mentality that says, “There’s no job good enough to support a family, so I’ll have a baby,” but that seems to be the approach now spreading among the white rural poor. Too bad for the babies, who will never be able to compete with our children.
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You forgot to add “papist.”
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“There’s no job good enough to support a family, so I’ll have a baby,”
Babies are adorable, especially if you have nothing else in your life.
Hope, as opposed to the hopelessness of the McDonald’s budget. Babies are biologically designed to provide hope and love to the parent (presuming the parent wanted them). The McD budget, budget on the other hand, promises nothing good for the future and significant deprivation now combined with really hard work and no joy. Having a baby means you can’t do the McDonald’s life anymore. I’m not surprised that given the two options, girls might chose the baby instead and start the cycle again.
With a baby, the baby itself provides the joy; any alternative would have to have some hope of job eventually.
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I think it’s difficult to imagine a life where the range of options is “A-B’ when you’ve grown up with options “A-F”. Even for me, with a working class, blue collar childhood (far, far ahead of these girls) it was a stretch to dream bigger dreams.
Luckily I had peers who were all going on to university and eventually graduate school.
You leave those small towns and get an education and you give up your friends and family and lifestyle. That probably sounds dramatic but there is a huge divide between the two worlds. We’re not talking small college town to big city, we’re talking towns and hamlets where finishing high school would be a big leap.
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“You leave those small towns and get an education and you give up your friends and family and lifestyle.”
Right. I got an education and a swell husband and a lovely family of my own, and the price was living 2,000+ miles from pretty much every one of my relatives that I didn’t give birth to.
“…we’re talking towns and hamlets where finishing high school would be a big leap.”
I wouldn’t go that far–that’s more life on the reservation, as an illegal alien or living in severe dysfunction. High school has so many comforts, even for the non-academic for the more or less functional that people generally stick around: there are sports, band, student government, homecoming, prom, senior trip, graduation, etc. The high school is a major cultural institution in a small town. (I was just looking around the internet for stats on my old small town high school, and the on-time graduation rate is around 81%. I think that’s probably open to debate (given the number of illegal aliens in the area and how much mobility there is, it can’t possibly be that high), but it suggests that graduating is a pretty normal thing to do.)
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It still doesn’t make much sense to me. Weddings are adorable, just as much as babies, and raising a child on welfare doesn’t seem more budgetarily hopeful than raising one with a husband who works at Wal-Mart. Plus, although there aren’t too many poor white people in Manhattan, the black women single mothers I see on the subways with their children don’t seem to be suffused with joy.
So I guess this shows why I don’t live like that.
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1) Weddings cost more upfront. It’s free to conceive a child, but even a wedding license costs money.
2) Most poor women aren’t purposely setting out to be single mothers. They fall in love and fantasize about marriage and families just like everyone else. For a variety of reasons, however, the relationships don’t work out, usually after the baby is on the way or already born. All things being equal, these women would choose a husband over welfare, but all things aren’t equal. Men walk out, go to prison, or turn out to be violent or unreliable. The real issue the “crisis of masculinity” hitting poor and working class youths.
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3) Being married to a guy without a job, with drug/anger/alcohol issues isn’t a whole lot better than being a single mother. In fact, it’s a lot more of hassle. Another mouth to feed, twice as much laundry, and you have to get him beer.
4) No role models of women who delay children and pursue other goals.
I think one has to assume that these women are rational actors, as much as any of us. They make calculations based on the choices that they have in front of them. The only difference between us and them is that their choices are a lot shittier than any of our choices.
My question isn’t why they would choose babies over marriage, but why they would choose children over no children.
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“but why they would choose children over no children.”
I used to think this because I always saw children as hard work and saw the rest of my life being about me (and, it was; I pretty much got people to pay me to do exactly what I wanted to do for very many years).
When I had kids, though, I saw how much they are their own reward. It’s why almost no mother says that they regret having their child (and, why, presumably, so few mothers, even those in dire circumstances, are willing to give their children away).
What do these women have in their lives without children, that they can protect and they give up when they have a baby to weight against the baby love? When I was 18 I had a bright future, parental support, admission to an elite university, where people were going to pay me to think.
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“What do these women have in their lives without children, that they can protect and they give up when they have a baby to weight against the baby love?”
This reminds me of an anecdote I once read on the internet (so bear with my garbled version of it). A rich American businessman vacationing in Mexico talks to a Mexican fisherman. The rich American tells the Mexican fisherman that he should work harder and make money so that he can afford to retire…to fish in Mexico. It’s kind of the same deal here–the young mothers are not going to see the point of putting off what they can do now.
I also think that one appreciates the difference in financial position more with older children. With babies, all they need is me, diapers, and the occasional banana or bagel, really. The grad families that I know with babies and little kids seem to get on pretty well. (And the small town mothers we’re talking about might have the sort of family support that many of us would die for, in terms of grandmas and aunties and so forth, if their families aren’t too messed up to provide it.) But at some point, even if you’re going to homeschool, the stuff that you want for your bigger kids starts being much more expensive, and it starts being stuff that you can’t produce adequate versions of at home.
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Speaking of the expensiveness of older children, I just remembered that I know a graduate family with children exactly the same age as my two oldest. There’s a grandma and grandpa subsidy going that helps keep their kids in (inexpensive) private school The kids are also doing cello and piano and a very occasional summer camp.
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Although not about teen moms forgoing education for motherhood, these two essays in yesterday’s SNYT give a bit more insight into the cultural challenges of jumping economic classes.
I wonder as well if we who made the “right” choices
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Cut off midstream!
I wonder if choosing to get an education is similar to choosing to have a baby early in that it’s the same “under developed frontal lobe teenage decision making” – we just get the benefit of having peers and parents and community that values education more.
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I read the article. All three of the girls used drugs or alcohol, and had “partied” at some point. You could argue using is a choice, which leads to other choices, such as unemployed, unwed teen pregnancy. The fathers seem to be former fellow students, or guys they met at parties. We have no way of knowing how much of a “relationship” the couple had, pre-conception.
Did they choose to conceive, or did they not take conscious steps to prevent conception? A baby gives a girl status; she’s Neveah’s mother, not just Jenny’s daughter. A child also anchors you; he you gives a reason to stay put. In contrast, to prevent conception, these girls would have had to accept 1) they use, 2) they party, 3) they’re sexually active, and 1 + 2 + 3 = a baby, no job, no husband.
I don’t see it as a crisis of masculinity; it’s a crisis of (lack of) maturity, in which young women and young men are trapped.
There are most likely girls at these girls’ original high schools who have well-thought out plans to Get Out of Dodge as soon as possible. Using need-based scholarships to get a degree from a school in a city is probably the best way out. Once you’ve established ties in a city, you don’t need to curry favor from friends or family for transportation.
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^This^. The post reads as though this is about all rural youth and it is really about dysfunctional rural youth.
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