When boys become parents
In the fall of 1958 I was born into this world as a ten pound baby boy to two recently married teens. Perhaps carrying forward the spirit of their times my parents and I have never really talked about the circumstances regarding their pregnancy, dropping out of school, getting married and starting a young family in rural southwestern Michigan. Times have changed. The majority of pregnant teens in the late 1950s married their partners. That is not the case today. Thousands of boys still become parents but instead of marriage most of these young men become nonresidential fathers who must negotiate child support and child visitation. Contrary to popular belief, these young men are often emotionally and physically involved in relationships with their partner and child. But without support and guidance from adults, these relationships often deteriorate in the first year of the child’s life.
Denver Post columnist, Tina Greigo, recently attended one of our fatherhood programs for young dads and wrote about it in her January 30th column – Learning to be the fathers they didn’t have. She revisited the issue of young dads in today’s column in which she writes,
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