lernerj's Full Review: Joanna Lipper - Growing Up Fast: Text and Photogra...
Teen pregnancy seems to rise and fall in the public consciousness over time. Sometimes, everyone’s talking about it and how much of a problem it is for our country, and other times, no one much seems to notice as teenage girls and boys continue having babies. What’s clear is that rates of teen pregnancy in the United States are considerably higher than they are in most of Western Europe, and that girls who live in poverty and who have been abused as children are much more likely to become pregnant as teenagers. Despite these facts, which indicate that teen pregnancy is a social problem caused by our cultural values, our failure to prevent familial abuse, and our refusal to end poverty, most people who think of teen pregnancy blame teen mothers (and occasionally, teen fathers) for their pregnancies and any ensuing problems they experience.
Joanna Lipper’s journalistic book Growing Up Fast tries to change how we view teen mothers. The book grew out of a documentary film project she did, invited by prominent psychologist Carol Gilligan, with pregnant teens in economically depressed Pittsfield, Massachusetts. After producing her award-winning short film documenting these young women’s lives, she continued spending time with them, interviewing them and their families, and observing their lives, with the goal of putting their stories into a book to help raise awareness of the causes and consequences of teen pregnancy.
The book begins and ends with context-setting overview, reviewing Pittsfield’s history (particularly the challenges it has faced economically since General Electric closed its factories in the area) and examining trends in teen pregnancy and the ways it has been dealt with in Pittsfield and across the U.S. But the bulk of the book is the stories of the girls, their families, their boyfriends, and their children. Each chapter focuses on one girl, telling us about her childhood, her adolescence, how she got pregnant, her relationship with the baby’s father, and what her life is like now that her child (or in some cases, children) are born. These stories reveal clear, and tragic, patterns—childhood physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; drug-addicted and otherwise neglectful parents; series of unsuccessful foster care placements; lack of hope for the future; significantly older boyfriends; violence in their dating relationships. Each chapter is illustrated with several photos of the girls, their children, and sometimes the fathers, and the contrast between the happy, smiling family portraits and the worn-down looks on the girls’ faces as they care for their children in the candid shots is perhaps the most telling image of their lives.
I found Growing Up Fast to be, for the most part, a compelling and valuable read. Lipper does an excellent job creating a clear narrative for each girl’s story, and her account of each girl’s life is convincing. She doesn’t sugar-coat the girls’ bad choices—and the girls themselves don’t, either. But she also doesn’t flinch from detailing all the forces arrayed against these girls from the time they were very young.
As I read, I did wish that Lipper had included more of her own analysis throughout the book. Although Lipper’s voice is clear in the conclusion, the chapters with the girls’ stories are rarely analytical. The book would have been even more compelling had Lipper marshaled broader evidence and statistics throughout to put the girls’ stories in context. The context and framing Lipper does provide is useful, particularly in her account if the economic history of Pittsfield and in her description of several innovative and successful teen pregnancy-prevention programs.
It is clear from Lipper’s methodological note that she wanted the girls’ stories and voices to be heard, and she achieves that, but the impact of those voices might have been increased if she had framed them further.
In short, Growing Up Fast is an interesting and important read for anyone concerned about teen pregnancy or about children in general, as well as anyone concerned about broader social issues like poverty and economically depressed communities. For a deeper scholarly account on these issues, there are better places to look (such as, on teen pregnancy, Kristin Luker’s Dubious Conceptions), but for a fairly easy, engaging, and instructive read, I recommend Growing Up Fast.
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