The new ads are located at bus shelters in targeted areas and read “Have a baby too young and it’ll control your life.” (Photo by Maria Corpus)
Marquise Ward, 15, a student at Lancaster School, remembers when he found out his then 14-year-old uncle was going to be a father.
“My mom had to talk to me,” Ward said. “She said he was too young.”
When Ward saw a new ad that reads “Have a baby too young and it’ll control your life,” the message resonated with him.
The new public awareness campaign, sponsored by United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County in partnership with Serve Marketing, shows teen parents as a hand puppet, a jack-in-the-box and a pull toy.
“The ad is basically telling [teens] a baby is not for you right now,” Euniqua Clements, 18, said after looking at the ads. “Wait until you finish and get everything you actually need, before you settle down and have a baby.”
One of three new ads posted around Greater Milwaukee. (Courtesy of United Way of Greater Milwaukee & Waukesha County)
It’s the exact message United Way hopes teens take from the ads posted throughout the city’s bus shelters. The nonprofit heads the Milwaukee Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative, which aims to reduce the teen birth rate with help from leaders in academics, healthcare, faith and other organizations.
“Being a parent is hard in the best of circumstances,” said Nicole Angresano, United Way of Greater Milwaukee vice president. “What we want young people to hear is that being a parent is a gift. It’s awesome … but it’s so much more rewarding when you’re at a point in your life when you have more options, more choices.”
The campaign sends a different message to two university professors who head a project called Hear Our Stories, which works to change and reshape what people think about teen parenting.
Aline Gubrium, a Milwaukee native who is now associate professor of public health and a medical anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts, and her colleague Elizabeth Krause, a professor of anthropology, take exception to the ad campaign.
“We see calling out teen parents as bad examples to other teens, as [is done] in this campaign, as harmful and cruel,” Gubrium said. “Teen parents have important stories to share and rather than stigmatizing and silencing the voices of young parents, our project gives young mothers the opportunities to share their stories.”
Krause said she realizes the campaign is not intentionally cruel, but said its visuals bully teen parents. “Depicting a man as an animal is just bad taste,” said Krause, referring to the ad showing a teen parent as a pull toy. “It’s not a campaign that has dignity.”
Angresano said the ads aren’t meant to shame people.
“The intention really is to keep a very important conversation going and that conversation’s theme is ‘wait until you’re older to become a parent,’” she said.
Rysean Pettis, 14, a student at West Side Academy II, noted the young faces in the ads and said he can’t imagine being a parent.
“I’d have to go to school and take care of the baby at the same time,” Pettis said. “I’d have to get a job.”
Gary Mueller, founder and executive creative director of Serve Marketing, said the campaign’s provocative visuals are key to making teens such as Pettis turn their heads and think twice about having unprotected sex.
“One of the things we like to do is really embed lasting images about how difficult it is [to have a baby] and how much your life will be changed,” Mueller said.
The ads, however, also touch on the issue of sexual violence and statutory rape. United Way’s 2006 report, “If Truth Be Told,” revealed men over the age of 20 fathered 71 percent of babies born to teen girls in Wisconsin.
“This is not [always] a matter of two 16-year-olds getting hot and heavy on prom night,” Angresano said. “In many of these cases, adult men are preying on teenage and even younger girls.”
In 2013, the initiative surpassed its goal of reducing teen pregnancy by 46 percent. Since its inception in 2006, births to teens between the ages of 15 and 17 have been reduced by 56 percent.
The initiative’s success has become a national model, according to Mueller.
“We get calls from all over the country because we’ve created a model of how to attack a problem that’s really big and difficult to address,” Mueller said.
Currently in its ninth year, the initiative will continue to decrease the birth rate among teens in Milwaukee, according to Angresano.
“Instead of saying ‘we fixed the problem, let’s move on,’” Angresano said, “[let’s] set a new ridiculous goal, which is to cut the rate in half again by 2020.”
Important points made by Aline Gubrium! I am curious to know why there were no teen parents interviewed on a piece about teenage pregnancy and teen parenthood? The only people who can speak on how this impacts teen parents or what it’s really like to be a teen parent are teen parents themselves. In a society where young people, especially young people of color, are often silenced and ignored, it feels both irresponsible and wrong to have an entire article written about a community that was not given an opportunity to voice their feedback or concerns.
I completely agree with Natasha. This “conversation”, as Ms. Angresano calls it, revolves around what it is like to be a young parent. Unfortunately, this key perspective is continuously left out of the discussion. The big picture can never be fully framed if the key demographic with the most experienced point of view is neglected from the conversation. Or even worse…used as a scare tactic.
When Ms. Angresano says “Instead of saying ‘we fixed the problem, let’s move on’…cut the rate in half again by 2020.”, I cringe and can’t help but think that this preventative approach disregards the voices that deserve the most attention. The unique and resilient perspective of a teen mother is not something that the “average” teen can relate to, but that does not discount their potential. Having a child does not negate your competence in this life, so why shouldn’t we give their voices amplification and support? If our goal is to continue the well being of our society, I hope we can start by re-humanizing young parents and strive for progress without resorting to campaigns that use shame and scare tactics to manipulate youth.
Overall this is a disappointing and partial report (painting the Milwaukee Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative as heroic) on what could have been a more understanding outlook on the complicated circumstances of teen pregnancy. The only enticing and original words in the article were from Professors Aline Gubrium and Elizabeth Krause… a shame this article did not highlight their refreshing and considerate perspective.
If you read closer there are younger perspectives involved in this piece. This article was not written terribly as you two suggest, as the content and context of the article discusses the initiative and campaign towards reducing teen pregnancy. While there should have been a teen parent perspective, United Way and their campaign towards this social issue was the main focus of this article, which is coherent and well-established as we can see from Rysean Pettis’ and Marquise Ward’s perspectives. The campaign also lends a hand to those who are not getting help as teen parents, in addition to this preventative campaign. United Way has been known For helping teens in any circumstance, regardless of any predispositions or current statuses.
Well then, Topher, you are overlooking the power of stigma.
True, this is a well-written piece and it is at least fair enough to have presented both sides of the issue but that is just about where the positives end. The stigma that it is, instead, proliferating can have far more damaging and lasting effects on the very demographic they are trying to help. It isn’t even simply what lessons teens can learn from young parents that is being lost, it is the very concept of what it means to mature as a young adult that is being standardized and force-fed teens of a multitude of cultures, backgrounds and personal trajectories.
It is far more debilitating to establish a timeline for young people to normalize to and measure themselves by, just to then fail at meeting all the checkpoints, unlocking all the achievements and collecting all of the hidden items as is usually the case in life. An ad campaign like this one sends a far more destructive subtle message that you are not SUPPOSED TO be ready to be a parent until WE (the ambiguous, faceless, virtual… and therefore kinda terrifying… WE) say you are. The problem with this line of thinking is that we are normalizing a wide variety of humans who all mature differently, can have different goals on different timelines by shaming them into having to overprocess the most important years of their lives: young adulthood.
In other words, there are sometimes better 17 year old parents than 27 year old ones and that is not something that is disputable even if the stats suggest that they are an exception to the rule. Instead of educating young people on what it means to be a parent and preparing them to MAKE that decision, we resort to scaring them into fumbling the whole thing while they are, on the other end of the unnervingly contradiction, being inundated by sexploitation and pop culture championing being as sexy and sex-crazed and sexful as you possibly can be!
That’s like telling your school age child they’re going to go blind or burn in hell for masturbating because you are too lazy and unimaginative an adult to actually have a meaningful conversation with them about the matter.
The same way that we preach establishing a firm foundation in early childhood for school age children, we also need to establish a firm foundation in early adulthood. However, unlike with children, we should not feel compelled to GIVE THEM a stylized one-size-fits-all road map that we ourselves may have bought into. Instead, we ought to give them the compass and let them blaze their own trails.
Don’t let these really weakly concocted, amateur ad campaigns fool you into thinking otherwise.