Even these days, when a 14-year-old girl gets pregnant, popular opinion says she's a loser or stupid, and she deserves whatever happens to her. She often ends up in juvenile detention, on the streets or living with someone who abuses her.
"We still live in a world where young moms are bad girls who made bad choices," says Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, president of the National Crittenton Foundation, which, with its 27 agencies, serves teenage and young women, most of whom are pregnant or parenting. But in the context of many of these girls' lives, she says, "becoming pregnant makes sense."
How is that possible? Some alarming data from a pilot study released recently at a briefing in Washington, D.C., shows that teenage and young mothers who are Crittenton clients have experienced up to seven times the levels of childhood trauma of a normal population. This goes a long way to explaining why they might become drug addicts, end up pregnant and/or drop out of school.
Of 253 young mothers, most of whom were 19 or under and some who were as young as 10, one out of two grew up in a home where they endured at least four types of severe and chronic childhood trauma, such as significant verbal abuse, emotional neglect, or living with a parent who was addicted to alcohol or other drugs or who was depressed or mentally ill. Line up any 10 of these teenage girls and young women, and four have been sexually or physically abused, have seen their mothers treated violently or have lost a parent through abandonment or divorce.
To understand why these numbers boggle the mind -- and why it's not surprising that these girls and young
women have a hard time making healthy choices -- you have to know a little about the CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study), and how trauma affects kids' brains.
The ACE Study -- a groundbreaking epidemiological study that links childhood trauma with adult onset of chronic disease, as well as life-altering social and emotional problems -- looked at the incidence of ten types of childhood trauma in 17,000 people in San Diego. Five types were the usual suspects -- sexual, verbal and physical abuse, and emotional and physical neglect. Five were family dysfunctions -- a parent who's mentally ill or an alcoholic or addicted to other drugs, loss of a parent through divorce or abandonment, a family member in jail, and witnessing a mother being battered.
These adverse experiences are severe and chronic, which are reflected in the questions. Here are three:
- Was your mother or stepmother often or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her? Or sometimes, often, or very often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, or hit with something hard? Or ever repeatedly hit over at least a few minutes or threatened with a gun or knife?
- Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? Or act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?
- Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?
Even in this group of mostly white, middle and upper-middle class, college-educated people with good jobs and great health care – they all belonged to Kaiser Permanente -- childhood trauma was surprisingly common. A whopping 70 percent of the 17,000 people in the ACE Study had experienced at least one type of trauma, resulting in an "ACE score" of one; 87 percent of those had more than one. You can think of the ACE score as a cholesterol score for childhood toxic stress. You get one point for each type of trauma. The higher your ACE score, the higher your risk for health, emotional and social problems. Things start getting serious around an ACE score of 4.
The effects of complex trauma -- an ACE score of 4 or more -- results in four times the risk of emphysema or chronic bronchitis; two times the risk of hepatitis; more than four times the likelihood of depression; 12 times the risk of suicide. Eighteen states have done their own ACE surveys and found similar results.
The Crittenton study was the first to look at a group of people who'd already ended up in the social service or criminal justice systems, or were having obvious problems coping. In this case, the group was 916 teenage girls and young women who are Crittenton clients, including 253 who are mothers. Of the mothers, 58.4% self-identified as youth of color or bi/multiracial, while 41.7% were white. To calculate their ACE score, they each filled out a 10-question survey.
Compared to the mostly white, middle-class San Diegans, not only were the trauma levels of these girls and young women 1.5 to 7 times higher...
…..but, more significant, a startling greater percentage had ACE scores of 4 or higher:
The stories of these girls and young women boil down to this: Their home lives are so destructive, so chaotic and so dangerous that they are too traumatized, too depressed, and too lost to be able or to know how to make healthy choices. Research on children's developing brains confirms this.
[For the rest of the story, go to: Survey finds teen, young mothers have alarmingly high ACE scores.]
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