source Teen mother left baby home alone
Published: Nov. 10, 2008 at 12:00 PM
GRESHAM, Ore., Nov. 10 (UPI) -- A 19-year-old woman left her infant daughter home alone for hours so she could go out drinking with her friends, police in Gresham, Ore., allege.
Gresham police have accused Gloria C. Moore of leaving her 10-month-old child alone at home in a playpen for six hours in her apartment last week, The (Portland) Oregonian said Monday.
Police said they were alerted to the infant's situation after friends of Moore began arguing with the teenage mother after they returned home early Friday morning.
The unidentified friends said they thought the child had been left with a babysitter but they found the abandoned child alone after Moore allowed them into her home, police allege.
http://nathanr.ca/stupidity/teen-mother-left-baby-home-alone/
MARCH 20, 2009 8:19AM
She tried to flush baby down the toilet; then it gets weird
The story of The Baby in the Wonderbread Bag begins like so many stories of teen pregnancy, with a young girl who has successfully concealed her pregnancy from family and friends. In this case, the 16 year old girl also had a history of mental illness. She appeared in the emergency room complaining of intermittent abdominal pain. Because she looked well, she was advised to wait while patients who were seriously ill were seen before her.
No one paid her much attention until she went to the Ladies Room and blood was seen to flow from beneath the door. When Security broke down the door, the doctors found that the girl had given birth to a premature baby. She had stuffed the baby in a Wonderbread bag, and, at the moment Security had broken in, she was attempting to flush the baby down the toilet.
They rescued the baby from the toilet bowl and pulled him out of the plastic bag. The neonatologist rushed down from the neonatal intensive care unit and resuscitated the baby. He appeared to be about 7 weeks premature, and smaller than expected for this stage of pregnancy. Nonetheless he was healthy and vigorous, despite his brief time in the toilet, and was swept off to the NICU for further care.
That’s when the story gets weird.
Several days later, in my capacity as a chief resident in obstetrics, I was called to the weekly Social Service meeting to provide my input in difficult cases. When I arrived, I found that the Social Service staff calmly discussing whether the Wonderbread Baby should go home with his mother, as if it were perfectly reasonable that she had tried to flush her baby down the toilet. That shocked me.
[A]sked for my input, and they got much more “input” than they had bargained for. I had been on call and awake for most of the previous night. Therefore, I exhibited somewhat less restraint than I might have otherwise.
“My input? MY INPUT?” I replied, my voice rising in volume, “Have you people lost your minds?”
“This teenager put her baby in a plastic bag and tried to flush him down the toilet!” I continued, “Is it really that hard to figure out that she should not be allowed to take this baby home?”
http://open.salon.com/blog/amytuteurmd/2009/03/20/she_tried_to_flush_baby_down_the_toilet_the_it_gets_weird?97665
Trial begins for teen mother accused of killing tot
Lucero » Defense says her boyfriend committed crime
By Pamela Manson
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 04/14/2009 07:32:29 AM MDT
Teenage mother Adrianna Lucero was trying to protect her boyfriend from deportation when she told authorities that she was holding her toddler when the boy had a seizure and fainted, her lawyer insisted Monday.
But after the boy was pronounced dead, the West Valley City mother told the truth, defense attorney Jeremy Delicino said in his opening statement at Lucero's trial on one count each of first-degree murder and second-degree child abuse.
"The person responsible for this offense is not Adrianna Lucero, it's her boyfriend," he said.
Deputy Salt Lake County Attorney Rob Parrish, though, said the evidence shows the West Valley City mother is the one who inflicted the fatal spinal cord injury on Aug. 24 that killed Alejandro Lucero.
The 17-year-old was under stress last summer, attempting to take care of Alejandro and her baby twins and arguing with boyfriend Sergio Martinez about his other children in Mexico, Parrish said.
That stress resulted in abuse and ultimately death for Alejandro, who was a month shy of turning 2 years old, he contended. He said Lucero then told conflicting stories about what happened to the boy.
"A young child lost his life because his caregiver lost control," Parrish told the 3rd District Court jury hearing the case.
According to investigators, Lucero said she was at Martinez's home in Kearns watching a movie when she took Alejandro out of the room to get a Jell-O cup and he began
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twitching and collapsed. She later said that Martinez -- who is the father of the twins but not Alejandro's father -- was the one who took the boy out of the room before he fainted.
An autopsy concluded Alejandro suffered a fatal injury to his spinal cord after his back was apparently bent in an abnormal way.
Delicino said common sense says Martinez was strong enough to break a child's back, but Lucero, who weighed a little more than 100 pounds, was not.
Parrish, though, said Martinez was never alone with Alejandro the day of his death and had never been a caregiver for the child.
Lucero, of West Valley City, is being tried as an adult. The child-abuse charge stems from an injury that Alejandro allegedly suffered a week before his death.
The couple's twins were taken into foster care after Alejandro's death.
pmanson@sltrib.com
http://www.sltrib.com/justice/ci_12135341
Teenage Mom Arrested, Baby Hospitalized
April 9, 2009
KALAMAZOO - A teenage mother is behind bars in Kalamazoo after police found her 11 month old baby with significant head injuries.
Investigators say the child, Heaven Diamond, is in fair condition at Bronson Hospital with two skull fractures, one on each side of her head. The child's brain is also bleeding.
At this point, doctors have removed a part of her skull to stop her brain from hemorrhaging.
18 year old Shakela Bulter is being held on $100,000 bond. She's also not allowed to have contact with children under the age of 16. She'll be back in court April 21st.
We'll have more on this story tonight on FOX 17 News at Ten.
http://www.wxmi.com/pages/news_landing_page/?Teenage-Mother-Arrested-for-Child-Abuse=1&blockID=262725&feedID=2516
ABSTRACT
Abstract –
Abuse risk potential and parenting attitudes of 66 adolescent mothers were examined during the perinatal period using self-report instruments. Approximately one-half of the sample was considered to be at significant risk. Specific risk factors included distress, rigidity in parenting attitudes, and inappropriate expectations of children. Younger adolescents were at greater risk of abuse, advocated the use of physical punishment more strongly, and reported greater unhappiness than older adolescents. Teens reporting limited social support were also at greater risk for abuse. Low acceptance of the pregnancy was related to abuse potential for parenting, but not pregnant adolescents. A history of maltreatment was related to self-reported problems with family members but not to overall risk implications for the prevention of abuse among adolescent mothers are discussed.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119266037/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
WASHINGTON, June 13, 1996 -- Adolescent parenthood has devastating effects on families, increasing poverty and significantly increasing the likelihood that the children of these young parents will face a life of poor health, physical abuse, neglect, prison and early childbearing, according to a groundbreaking study released today by the Robin Hood Foundation.
"Kids Having Kids" is the most comprehensive report done on the costs and consequences of teenage childbearing to parents, children and society. According to the study, adolescent childbearing costs U.S. taxpayers $6.9 billion per year, and the cost to the nation in lost productivity rises to as much as $29 billion annually.
Working in teams on eight coordinated studies, a collection of some of the nation's leading scholars focused their research on the roughly 175,000 American girls who bear their first baby at the age of 17 or younger and compared the associated economic and social costs to those mothers who delay childbirth until the age of 20 or 21, which is still two to three years younger than the national average.
"Adolescent childbearing is not only a significant personal tragedy, it should be regarded as a national calamity in that it commits young parents to a life of hardship, increases the likelihood that their children will suffer the same fate and has staggering economic and social costs for our nation as a whole," said David Saltzman, executive director of Robin Hood Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to fighting poverty in New York City and primary source of funding for the "Kids Having Kids" report.
"Early parenting wreaks havoc socially -- from the completion of education of the mother and father to their higher poverty rates, said Rebecca Maynard, "Kids Having Kids" editor and professor of education and social policy, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. "But the devastation to the lives of their children is prevalent and wide ranging."
A few of the hundreds of findings about children born to teenage mothers:
* Reproducing the Cycle of Poverty -- The girls born to adolescent moms are up to 83 percent more likely to become teenage moms themselves, thus reproducing the cycle of poverty and disadvantage for yet another generation.
* Trouble in School -- They are 50 percent more likely to repeat a grads and perform significantly worse on cognitive development tests. They are also far more likely to drop out of high school than are the children born to women from the same socioeconomic background who wait until the age of 20 or 21 to have children.
* More Childhood Health Problems -- They are more likely to be born prematurely and 52 percent more likely to be born low birth weight than if their mothers had waited four years to bear them.
* Increased Child Abuse and Neglect -- They are twice es likely to be abused or neglected.
* Behind Bars -- The teen sons of adolescent mothers are up to 2.7 times more likely to land in prison than their counterparts in the comparison group. By extension, adolescent childbearing in and of itself costs taxpayers roughly $1 billion each year to build and maintain prisons for the sons of young mothers.
* Foster Children -- Of the estimated 472,000 foster children in the United States, over 23,000 are the children of adolescent mothers, which in turn results in a taxpayer burden of approximately $900 million.
The study also examines the consequences of early parenting on teen mothers and the fathers:
* 70 percent of the mothers drop out of school.
* They are twice as likely to be dependent on welfare.
A unique component of the study is its examination of the costs and consequences of teen pregnancy on society:
* Teen childbearing costs U.S. taxpayers almost $7 billion every year.
* The cost to society in lost national productivity and avoidable expenditure of social service resources is as much as $29 billion each year.
"We hope the disturbing findings of this report will send a wake-up call to America about the need to find workable solutions to the devastating issue of teenage parenthood," said Paul Tudor Jones II, founder and chairman of the Robin Hood Foundation. "Without our help, the children of teenage mothers will themselves become teenage mothers, thus perpetuating the cycle of abuse, neglect, hardship and poverty."
The Robin Hood Foundation was created as a public charity in 1988 to find, fund and provide management help to the best and most innovative programs serving poor people in New York City. Since than, the foundation has provided more than $35 million in money, volunteer resources and materials goods to these programs.
CONTACT: Julie Harkavy, 202-739-0215, or Stephanie Bartolomeo, 212-484-7236, both for the Robin Hood Foundation.
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http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content/news/teen_pregnancy.html
NIH Funded Study
July 2008
Grant Results
SUMMARY
From June 2000 to November 2003, researchers at the University of Notre Dame, in collaboration with the University of Alabama-Birmingham, the University of Kansas and Georgetown University, conducted two pilot studies
Key Findings
The pilot studies yielded preliminary data indicating that:
* Compared to adult mothers, teens are significantly less likely to practice essential parenting behaviors, such as protecting, comforting and mentoring, on a daily basis.
* Teen mothers reported high levels of social support from family, but three-quarters of them wished that their babies' fathers would spend more time with their babies.
Key Results
THE PROBLEM
Although researchers do not concur on a common definition of parental neglect of children, they agree that it is a significant, but understudied, threat to the normal development of young children, particularly those born to teenage mothers. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, child neglect constitutes over half of the more than 2 million cases of child maltreatment reported each year. Teen mothers are at particular risk of neglecting their children.
In a 13-year study funded by the NIH, less than 30 percent of the children of adolescent mothers showed normal development at age three, and even fewer showed average achievement in the second grade. The study, led by John Borkowski, Ph.D., Andrew J. McKenna Family chair and professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame (project director of the grant reported here), also found that approximately 60 percent of mothers believed that they should physically punish their infants in order to correct "discipline problems," a parenting style that had adverse consequences for the child's physical and emotional development as early as three years of age.
The study also revealed that less than 10 percent of the mothers found themselves in stable relationships or in meaningful jobs five years after the birth of their first child; the majority had another infant within three years; and teenage mothers never breast-fed their infants and rarely used consistent sleeping arrangements. According to Borkowski, "their children typically experienced irregular, chaotic living patterns with respect to location, types of contacts and daily activities."
Because of the same irregularity in adolescent mothers' lives, the use of new technologies, such as cell phones, offers many advantages for collecting data from them. Cell phones permit natural, frequent and non-intrusive contact because they are not time- or place-dependent. They are incentives for study participation because adolescents find them fun to use. Before such methodologies can be applied, however, researchers needed to test their feasibility with samples of a target population of adolescent mothers.
Methodology
All participants had infants between four and eight months old. In both studies, the research team recruited mothers through child development centers, public schools and well-child clinics in four cities (South Bend, Ind.; Birmingham, Ala.; Kansas City, Kan.; and Washington).
In both pilot studies, the researchers used a parent child activities interview to obtain detailed parenting information. This 20-minute semi-structured interview collected quantitative and qualitative data on the daily routines of mother and child in the previous 24 hours, including time in alternative care, time with father, bed and bath time and outings.
The interviews focused on eight "daily essentials" of good parenting identified by Sharon Landesman Ramey and Craig Ramey (published in their book Right from Birth: Building Your Child's Foundation for Life — Birth to 18 Months, 1999). The eight essentials include:
1. encouraging exploration
2. mentoring/rehearsing
3. celebrating developmental advances
4. comforting
5. protecting from inappropriate teasing or harsh punishment
6. stimulating language development
7. guiding towards appropriate behavior
8. recognizing and reacting to a child's cues.
FINDINGS
* Mothers' responses to the parent child activity interviews provided some critical indicators for defining early neglect. Possible indicators of early low-level neglect include mothers' descriptions of routines that show a severely limited amount of responsivity and monitoring of their child, routines that appear to have none or very few of the parenting essentials, as well as the appearance of specific salient events that might reveal patterns of negligence on the part of the mother. Although not in themselves full-blown neglect, inappropriate parenting patterns or events, when occurring in combinations over time, may predict later developmental delays in the child and more serious neglect.
* Compared to adult mothers, teen mothers are significantly less likely to practice the daily essentials of parenting. Teenage mothers were significantly less likely to mentor and rehearse, celebrate advances, protect, comfort and communicate verbally with their child than were adult mothers. Although the two groups did not differ significantly in the consistency of their feeding, sleeping and bedtime routines, adult mothers otherwise provided a more consistent daily routine. Teen mothers spent more time watching television with their child and less time in child-centered activities than adult mothers, who tended to go on twice as many outings with their child during a 24-hour period. The percentage of adult mothers who reported that their infant did something to bother them dropped from 10 percent to 6 percent between infants' fourth and eighth months; in contrast, teen reports of annoyance increased over the same period from 6 percent to 22 percent. This indicates that adolescents become increasingly irritated over time with their children's behaviors, suggesting possible linkages with later neglectful and/or abusive parenting.
* Teenage mothers reported high levels of social support. In the second pilot study, 91 percent of the 65 teen mothers had someone to help them take care of their babies. Some 68 percent of the biological fathers were involved in the care of their babies; nonetheless, 75 percent of the mothers wished that the baby's father would spend more time with the baby.
http://www.rwjf.org/reports/grr/037224.htm
Predicting maltreatment of children of teenage mothers
Article Abstract:
Teenage mothers who live apart from other adult relatives may be more likely to abuse their children. Motherhood during adolescence is considered particularly stressful, therefore increasing the risk of maltreatment and child abuse. Researchers developed a model of linking risk factors in teenage mothers to the probability of eventual child abuse or neglect. Forty-five teenaged mothers between the ages of 15 and 19 years old were observed for two years after the birth of their infants. Four detailed questionnaires measured the maternal level of depression, potential for child abuse, available family support, and demographic aspects. Fifteen mothers maltreated their children, including instances of abandonment, severe physical discipline, and general neglect. Living apart from family and relatives was the strongest predictor of child abuse. Furthermore, five out of six mothers living in shelters or group homes were abusive. The abusive mothers were probably living in sheltered residences because they were victims of child abuse themselves.
http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Health/Predicting-maltreatment-of-children-of-teenage-mothers-The-accuracy-of-a-lead-questionnaire-in-predi.html
