Young Roots Oregon: Helping Young Families Build Foundations
This article features news and updates from Young Roots Oregon, a recipient of an LBLHEA Policy and Systems Change Grant.
Young Roots Oregon is a grassroots, culturally specific non-profit organization that serves the community of Albany, Oregon and surrounding areas to creatively help young families build healthy foundations. Young Roots Oregon offers pregnant and parenting young people equitable opportunities for growth through a collaborative approach of resource partnerships and innovative services.
The pregnant and parenting adolescents in our community face vast disparities, with research showing that less than half of teen mothers graduate from high school, less than 2% of teen mothers earn a degree in secondary education by the time they are 30. About 30% of teen parents either have been or are homeless, and over half of teen mothers experience intimate partner violence and sexual abuse. Adolescent parenting, therefore, is an issue on which multiple systemic disparities converge, creating a cycle of poverty for young families, especially youth already experiencing one or more social risk factors.
Lack of educational equity is a key factor in the generational cycles of poverty that traps adolescent parents. Parenting students face tremendous barriers to completing their education, including lack of accessible and affordable childcare. Like much of Oregon, Linn County is a childcare desert. A childcare desert refers to a county in which fewer than 33% of children have access to a regulated child care spot. InLinn County, only 6% of 0–2-year-olds have such access, and of those slots, only 3% are publicly funded, meaning that 97% are an out-of-pocket expense for the family. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the cost for childcare in Oregon is more than the cost for college tuition, with an average price tag of over $13,000 per year for an infant, a price tag few adolescents working on a high school diploma would be able to pay. Further, while many working parents are able to rely on family for childcare, adolescent parents are more likely to have experienced abuse or neglect and are nearly twice as likely to be in the foster care system than their peers, and are therefore less likely to have a safe, stable home environment in which to leave their children.
Not only do external circumstances affect an adolescent parent’s ability to attend school, but the school system itself creates additional barriers. For example, students are withdrawn from school after 10 consecutive absences. It is certainly not out of the ordinary for labor, delivery, recovery, and caring for a newborn to require more than 10 absences, leading to unenrollment. While the parent may re-enroll, this creates an additional burden on the student parent and lessens the likelihood that they will continue in their education.
In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, then, parents are unlikely to be successful in areas of education, career advancement, financial literacy, and parenting success when the primary focus is meeting their basic needs and survival - putting food on the table and a roof over the heads of their children, surviving abusive relationships, facing traumas and adverse childhood experiences, often without guidance or support, that made them more likely to become a teen parent in the first place. Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan describe the all-consuming nature of scarcity: “Security captures the mind. When we experience scarcity of any kind, we also become absorbed by it. Scarcity changes how we think. It imposes itself on our minds.” Addressing only the academic needs of teen parents is never enough if basic needs are not met in tandem allowing the parent to turn their attention from surviving to thriving.
Further, many young parents, both during their pregnancy and after childbirth, experience extreme social isolation, cut-off from their peers, disconnected from the social supports of their communities, and often lacking a safe and nurturing family environment. Teen mothers experience postpartum depression and related postpartum mood disorders at nearly double the rate of all mothers, and yet have limited access to healthcare and the necessary social support to navigate such a difficult experience, leaving them to sink deeper into impoverishment, isolation, and abusive relationships, and dragging them farther and farther from the hope of achievement and success.
As a result of these barriers, the children of teen parents begin life with dismal prospects. According to the National Library of Medicine, “It is clear that being a child of a teenage mother often entails numerous risks: low birth weight, complications of the mother's pregnancy and delivery, and health problems associated with poor perinatal outcomes; greater risk of perinatal death; lower IQ and academic achievement later on, including a greater risk of repeating a grade; greater risk of socio-emotional problems; a greater risk of having a fatal accident before age one; and finally, a greater probability of starting one's own family at an early age.” Children of teen parents are more likely to experience multiple adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and teen parents are more likely to experience the involvement of child welfare, and more than twice as likely to lose their children to the foster care system (CDC), further entrenching their children in generational cycles of poverty as those children are more likely to become teen parents themselves, live in poverty, experience homelessness, or end up in prison in their lifetimes.
Young Roots Oregon’s multi-generational approach is based on research indicating that investing in families holistically improves outcomes for both parents and children. Young Roots Oregon utilizes human-centered design to create equitable access to education, economic opportunity, and health and wellness care, with mentoring and peer support and parenting and life skill educational opportunities encompassing topics that give a diverse framework for healthy development instructed by community agencies who are experts in the focus topic. All services and programs are culturally and linguistically specific, supporting Spanish and English speakers in all areas.
Community partners who have delivered educational support during the 2022-2023 year include financial literacy with DevNW, housing stability with Community Services Consortium, rape and domestic violence support with the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence, child abuse prevention with ABC House, pregnancy and childbirth education with Linn County Maternal Child Health Services, and parenting education with Parenting Success Network. With financial partnership from the Greater Albany Public School District, we are able to provide parents with incentive stipends of $15.00 per hour to participate in our educational opportunities outlined and other services. We teach parents that their time and growth are valuable.
The YRO Family Hub is opening August 2023 with KidCo Head Start, Early Head Start class and support services. In this space, the Samaritan Health Birthing Coordinator will lead a support group, Hope for Mothers, (biweekly), and Esperanza Para Las Madres, (weekly following the school calendar year).Partner agencies are invited to meet with young families in the Family Hub, utilizing meeting rooms and the on-site childcare, removing barriers for adolescent barriers to access the community’s resources. The Community Health Centers of Linn and Benton Counties along with partners will host a monthly health clinic. Additionally, this space features a commercial kitchen in which we will teach nutrition and cooking skills.
The next step for Young Roots in seeking educational equity for young families is a parenting education program accredited through the Greater Albany Public Schools. This program will host credit recovery educational support service to retain and re-engage secondary education student parents. Onsite childcare is provided.