If there is one thing Jennifer Benjamin knows about teen pregnancy, it is that there is no single cause and no single solution.
Benjamin has worked for years to help prevent teenagers from becoming pregnant and to help them cope with the consequences if they do.
She was director of Project Teen for several years and before that worked with the Kansas Health Foundation. She’s talked not only with teens, but with the adults in their lives — parents, teachers, counselors and businessmen, too. She has worked with SOS and now she volunteers at Family Life Services and Shiloh Home of Hope, a faith-based home where young women 18 and over can stay both while they are pregnant and for several months after giving birth.
“While I love prevention work, you can’t be with them 24/7,” Benjamin said of teens. “One night can change everything.”
Teen pregnancy is something she said has been around forever and, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, she does not expect it to go away.
“I always say, teen pregnancy is not a problem, it’s a consequence of many problems,” she said.
Often the problems come from perceptions of self-worth or from traumatizing experiences, like abuse, that have long-term effects on young lives, she said.
It’s not just families that affect the children in them, it is the friends, neighbors, caregivers, teachers and even strangers. Those experiences shape their opinions of themselves and often go unrevealed.
Instead, the experiences can pollute a child’s mind and give her harmful behaviors that can result in a variety of problems, including unplanned pregnancies.
Benjamin learned early what teachers thought of her future. She was still in elementary school, in a bathroom stall, when two teachers came in, talking about Benjamin and one of her classmates.
“I heard them in the bathroom talking about which of us was going to get pregnant first,” Benjamin said.
Overhearing the teachers gossiping about her and her friend hurt, and only served to reinforce her own opinion of herself — that she had no real value.
Benjamin became pregnant when she was 14, near the end of her eighth-grade year. She remembers well her mother’s first inkling of what had happened.
“I passed out at church, and my mom asked, ‘Are you pregnant?’” Benjamin said. “My heart just dropped and it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have no idea what I’m going to do.’”
But she did not confirm her mother’s suspicions. She said nothing until the situation could no longer be overlooked and she and her sister, who was four years older, went to their parents for a talk.
“I made her come in there with me, and I had my boyfriend with me. I think they probably knew,” Benjamin said. “... There was no hiding it any more.”
Her parents reacted typically, she said, first with anger and disappointment, then with loving support.
“They were mad. My dad, oh, he was just devastated. He was so hurt. Even as an adult I remember that,” Benjamin said. “... He was sitting in the living room, crying.”
They discussed the possibility of her parents rearing the child as their own or Benjamin offering the child up for adoption, which really was not an option she wanted to consider.
“I don’t think anybody ever wants to do that,” she said. “It was almost like my dad was saying to me, ‘I would wonder every time I saw a child, is that child my grandson?’”
The young parents-to-be and their families decided the teens would keep the baby — separately, but sharing custody and responsibilities, because Benjamin did not want to get married.
“So I started high school pregnant. I was a freshman,” she said.
Though she initially felt that other students were looking at her and talking about her, she made it through those early days of her freshman year with the help of school nurse Ileen Meyer. Benjamin went to Meyer’s office the first day of school.
“I was in her office a lot,” she said. “She was a very big support system at school. I had a lot of ‘looks.’ It was hard, but it wasn’t extremely difficult.”
Within months, Benjamin found she was helping Meyer, too.
“By the end of that year, there were a lot of girls in my class pregnant,” she said.
Benjamin used her experiences to talk with the girls who came to Meyer.
By then, she had given birth to a son and was taking care of him, as well as going to school and working a part-time job to help pay daycare costs for her son.
“My mom didn’t do anything — and I say that in the nicest way,” Benjamin said. “What she did for me was she made me take care of my child.”
If he cried at night or needed his diaper changed or if he simply wanted to be cuddled, it was Benjamin who took care of him. Her parents sometimes babysat while she worked after school, but it was she who was the baby’s primary caregiver.
“My boyfriend and I had to pay for (daycare),” she said. “We bought diapers and everything.”
When times were tight, though, the grandparents made sure the baby did not do without what he needed.
“Going to school was hard in that sense, after I had him,” she said.
Benjamin persevered, though, and completed high school, with technical college classes included, and went on to Emporia State University, using Pell grants to help finance her education. She continued her pattern of studying, working and taking care of her child and along the way, she met her future husband, Eric Benjamin.
She hadn’t believed she would be smart enough to finish college — her expectation was that her grades would be bad and she would drop out — until Eric Benjamin introduced her to his mother, who was in charge of Project Challenge at ESU.
“Leading up to that, I was a failure in my own eyes,” she said. “For a lot of people, it is easier to fail than to succeed.”
Project Challenge provided the incentives, including tutoring, she needed to complete a degree in sociology, with emphasis in criminal justice.
“I don’t think that was all on my own because if it was up to me, I would have quit,” Benjamin said.
Because success wasn’t something she associated with herself, she said, she was “almost terrified” that she would succeed — or that she would come so close to succeeding but fall short.
But she did graduate and go into a profession that positions her to help others who find themselves coping with similar issues.
She credits her faith in God for bringing her through the hard times, and is delighted over the son she had at such an early age.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Benjamin said of her pregnancy. “It may seem like the end of the world at the moment, but ultimately ... he is more a joy and a blessing to me than I ever imagined.
“I’ll look at my son and he’ll say, ‘I’m so glad you kept me.’”
The baby and the girl grew up together, she said, and they are friends. It’s a situation that complements the mother-son relationship.
“Every single card I get, he says ‘I love you bigger than the sky.’”