Creamer: A mom at 13, with help she now excels

The summer before her freshman year at Del Campo High School, Amber Vaden got pregnant. She was 13.

"I thought I'd have to drop out of school," she says now.

Instead, at 16, she just graduated with honors from Sierra Nueva, the San Juan Unified School District continuation school for pregnant and parenting teens, and she received her medical assistant certification.

She also won four scholarships, including one she'll receive at Planned Parenthood's Teen Success Program luncheon this week, and she begins classes at American River College in the fall. She wants to become a registered nurse.

Amber is the mother of a 2-year-old son named Keith. For now, she lives in her mother's Carmichael apartment and works at a nearby McDonald's.

But she has plans and a future, in part because of Teen Success, the education and support group for teen moms that she attended faithfully for more than two years.

Her biggest goal? Not to become a statistic.

"I just want to prove everybody wrong," she says.

Frankly, that's a tall order. One in five California teen moms below the age of 17 will give birth to another child within two years. And with the birth of each child, teens' options quickly dwindle.

As Deborah Ortiz of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte says, teen pregnancy is the biggest reason girls don't finish high school as well as the top indication of whether they'll end up living in poverty.

And children born to teen moms face enormous behavioral, academic and economic obstacles. They're more likely to become teen parents themselves. And boys born to teen moms are more likely to end up incarcerated one day.

All in all, a fairly grim outlook – one that's in no way offset by the blockbuster success of "Juno" or the sensationalized D-list celebrity news of Jamie Lynn Spears' recent pregnancy.

The traction of the so-called "Gloucester pregnancy pact" – the 17 Massachusetts teens who allegedly decided to get pregnant at the same time, a widely discounted hoax well on its way to becoming an urban legend – underscores our alarm over teen pregnancy, which has been on the increase in recent years.

Yet for the 72 participants in Sacramento's six Teen Success groups, a much brighter set of statistics holds true. Last fall, for example, all maintained their family size, almost all remained enrolled in or graduated from high school.

They want a better life for their sons and daughters.

"I was one of those daughters," says Ortiz, the former state senator. "My mother got pregnant at 16 and married my father. She was clear. 'I want your life to be different.'

"She had five children by the age of 22. She wasn't liberal or progressive, but she was clear about my future ability to support myself and my quality of life if I didn't go to college.

"It was a frank conversation and an economic conversation."

Yet it was a conversation that Lora Queen didn't have with her daughter, Amber Vaden.

"My reaction to her pregnancy was, 'Oh, my God, you've screwed up your life,' " says Queen, 39, who works as a caregiver.

But a school counselor told Amber her life is what she makes it. At 13, it's not over. It's just beginning. As it turns out, it was Amber's former boyfriend, now 20, who left school.

"My whole life changed, and he's still doing what he always did," she says.

Not her. She's got other plans. That's what she told the audience at her graduation.

"I talked about how we had to face hardships," Amber says. "No matter what, we got dirty looks and smart remarks, but here we are, graduating."

"She said, 'For all you haters, look at me now,' " her mother remembers. "I had to pull that dagger out of my chest. But she made the best of her circumstances."

And she had help.

About the writer:

• Anita Creamer's column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in Scene. Reach her at (916) 321-1136 or acreamer@sacbee.com. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/creamer.