More than 25 teen parents from San Benito County completed the Youth Alliance’s teen parenting program this year. More than 60 people, including the two case managers Liz Morales and Saul Gonzalez, showed up to celebrate.
The main focus of the program is to offer resources to parents ages 14 to 21 who have children up to 5 years old so that they can finish high school.
“We get a lot of referrals from the high school,” Morales said. “This year a lot were self-referred walk ins or friends referred them to participate.”
The program is open to both teen mothers and fathers, and couples are encouraged to participate together, though one parent has to be enrolled in high school. Morales and Gonzalez work one on one with the parents as case mangers. They refer them to other resources in the community and meet with them once a week to see how things are going. The teens can also attend a weekly support group where they can share the challenges they are going through and get advice from peers.
The peer support group takes place at San Andreas High School, where some of the students attend school. This year, they had a childcare provider who watched the children who were younger than a year old and an art teacher who had activities for the children 1 to 5 years old.
“We do activities as a couple and then separate,” Morales said. “We have different topics dedicated to fatherhood and motherhood.”
The support groups include education for the teen parents, such as family planning to prevent future pregnancies during the teenage years, the effects of tobacco and the importance of prenatal care, among other topics.
Morales said they offer incentive for the teen parents to come to the group meeting each week. Morales is a professional photographer in addition to her work with the Youth Alliance, so she’ll offer them a free photograph.
The teen parents face many challenges. Some of them were born when their own parents were teens, Morales said, so they don’t have strong role models. Others were raised by single parents, many without fathers active in their lives.
“I find a lot of the teen parents (mothers) are dating older men,” Morales said. “They struggle economically. It’s hard to find a job if you don’t have a GED or diploma. We can help them with the process of continuing with higher education.”
The program offers referrals to other agencies such as Community Solutions and the county’s behavioral health department if the students are in an abusive relationship. They also help the teens with getting resources from the Women, Infants and Children program as well as job training through the One-Stop Career Center.
Morales said the program has been going for four years. She recruits parents at the beginning of the year in September, but teens can join the program anytime during its 32-week course that ends in May. She had students who graduated from the program in past years come back to talk to this year’s crop of parents.
“Really it’s a family and its really hard to describe it,” Morales said, of the camaraderie in the group. “We cry in our groups. We get mad. We have all these different emotional roller coasters.”
Like a family, they do some fun activities as well. Morales said they plan quarterly trips with the teens and their children to places such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Children’s Discovery Museum. But she said they also do barbecues at local parks to show the teens they don’t have to go far or spend a lot of money to have a good experience with their children.
“At the last support group the students were kind of shocked that it was the end of the 32 weeks,” Morales said. “But that said ‘Its okay. We know it doesn’t end here. We still have each other and this summer to connect.’”
