January 28, 1998
Young dads find help in rescuing their kids from fatherless void
By Garret Leiva
Herald staff writer
Jim wants the best for his 6-month-old son. He wants to give all the things he went without while growing up - like a father.
At 18 years old, the Traverse City resident knows firsthand the struggles of being a young father. He also realizes that he needs help to be a good father.
"I wonder if I'm raising my child with the right values and making the right decisions," said Jim, which is not his real name because he asked to remain anonymous. "I don't want to make the same mistakes my parents made."
Making mistakes is sometimes easy. After all, where is a young dad to turn?
Social programs traditionally have not addressed the hopes and fears of young fathers like Jim. But the Doula Teen Parent Program is attempting to fill that void through a recently formed fathers mentoring group.
Doula is a volunteer-driven program that for the last two decades has provided support for young parents. Program Director Scruffie Crockett said that specially trained Doulas provide positive parenting techniques, help locate housing, and even offer rides for doctor appointments and grocery shopping.
A program of the Northwest Michigan Child Guidance Center, an affiliate of both the United Way and Great Lakes Community Mental Health, Doula has traditionally worked with teen mothers. The fathers mentoring group grew out of the rising number of young dads who expressed a desire to be a part of their children's lives, Crockett said.
"So many of them don't want their child to go through the same absence they had to deal with," Crockett said.
But finding help has proven difficult. Historically there has been a small percentage of service programs geared directly toward fathers, said Mike Pavlov, a social worker with the Family Independence Agency, who as a graduate student intern started the fathers mentoring project.
"It is a nationwide problem that we don't seem to know what to do with young dads," Pavlov said.
Just getting the program off the ground has proved challenging. Finding volunteers has been difficult, Crockett said, because few people have expressed an interest in being paired with a young dad for the three-year contract period. The lack of a male Doula member on an entire female staff is another major hurdle the organization would liked to clear, Crockett said.
"The young men and women in our program need that positive male role model," said Crockett, whose program services 100 families annually, mostly young mothers. "The program needs to be able to validate the fears and joys of parenting from the male perspective."
Mike Parsons hopes to provide that perspective. A father of five children, one by legal guardianship, the Buckley resident wants to share his vast wealth of knowledge.
"I hope to share with them that being a father is more than just being the bread winner or someone who bounces a child on his knee on a Sunday afternoon. It requires you to be an active participant in the nurturing, caring and education of a child," said Parsons, who has volunteered as a Doula dad before and may do so again.
As one of only three male volunteers for the program, Parsons finds that part of the difficulty in recruiting men is the male machismo that still prevails in our society. Telling a guy to get his act together, Parsons noted, is still easier than putting a hand on his shoulder to see if he needs help.
For the 18-year-old Jim, who is raising his son with his fianc‚e, mentors like Parsons could provide the right direction on the path of fatherhood - a path he is trying to follow for the sake of his young boy.
"It is important for my child to have a father figure, something I never had," Jim said. "I don't want him to go through that same experience."