When I last happened to be in the family way I was a resident of Manchester M14, an area with a high incidence of teen pregnancy, to the extent that every time I went for an anti-natal appointment I was asked to confirm that I was over 16 although I was actually double of that number. M14 is however not that unusual. Figures out this week demonstrate that the UK can still top the charts for something in these economically tough times. The domain where Britain stubbornly can still lay claim to be the fairest of them all is teenage pregnancy – a dubious distinction. The reasons are multiple, as should the solutions be.
The news that Alfie Patten had become a dad at the age of 13 having impregnated the baby’s mum when she was 14 and he 12 was not a historical youngest age for parenthood. The story was most noteworthy though for the accompanying Sun cover-photo of Alfie’s own cherubic features. To paraphrase a line from Little Riding Hood “But daddy, what a baby face you have”. I’m uncertain how the next bit should go. “All the better for claiming tax credits for you with” seems wrong somehow.
Here was a couple that when interviewed in footage now swirling around YouTube were understandably asked how they would cope financially. Their answer was “what’s financially?” That cliché which applies to all of us, that nothing prepares you for parenthood, is magnified several fold with teens who have not had the chance to complete their own growing up process.
How this pair got into this mess and its results probably qualify for being that much bandied around phrase a, “fable for our times”. We have also heard the same epithet applied to Fred the Shred and his mind-boggling £17million pension and to Jade Goody in the past week. The Alfie-babyfather story promises more juicy titbits to come. Apparently the boy’s own dad, who is estranged from his mum, has been boasting about making millions from selling the story with his son being the equivalent of Jack and the beanstalk’s hen who laid golden eggs –not bad going for one who was only dimly aware of the word “financial”. Future photographic rights will be subject to a bidding war where newspapers will be invited Three Little Pigs style to huff and puff and blow the house down, leaving Mr Patten senior presumably to buy a new one on the proceeds of such ill-gotten gains. Yet there are vultures circling in an attempt to close in on Alfie’s patch. There are apparently several suitors claiming to be the daddy. As this is no fairytale romance the contested identity of the father will be decided not by fitting a foot into a glass slipper as it was in Cinderella’s story but by paternity testing. The next instalment of this sorry soap opera will continue when the results of the DNA examination are made public.
The influential German sociologist Ulrich Beck has written in his much cited (non-fiction) book Risk Society that the family unit (along with other markers like religion) becomes less important as people undergo a disembedding from established structures in a ‘de-traditionalisation’ of society. The theory has validity only up to a point though. On page 91 he declares ‘as a result of shifts in the standard of living, subcultural class identities have dissipated, class distinctions based on status have lost their traditional support, processes for the diversification and individualisation of lifestyles have been set in motion.’ Yet this vision of a less hidebound society and choices on every street corner rings rather hollow for young people who have little or no sex education, limited horizons and no culture of stable families or employment – both sets of the new parents’ parents are no longer together. I don’t know if the benefits culture had a hand in this story but it has done in other thoroughly modern fables –like the Karen/Shannon Mathews tale.
In Autumn 2003 when I was expecting in Manchester I was unexpectedly contacted by a case-study interviewee of a former research project I had worked on five years after the event. I had known the lad in his penultimate year of school when I was researching educational attendance and attainment at Manchester University. After the project was concluded I’d not given him much thought until he googled me and emailed. I suggested we meet for lunch. When we did it turned out he was living on his own in a flat and looking for work. All this and my condition should have been good news but as he saw my clearly visible bump his face dropped. “But I always thought you were such a sensible girl”, he remarked in disappointment. The idea of being my age, married and wanting a child seemed beyond comprehension. I don’t want to come over as a David Cameron in preaching the sanctity of the institution of marriage and advocating that everyone is in a hetero-sexual nuclear family with 2.4 kids and dog because I am sensible enough to realise any “one size fits all” is not aligned with contemporary reality. Nevertheless the whole circumstances in which many kids are born today seems too reminiscent of some incident on daytime telly’s Jeremy Kyle programme – not the best start for any new life.
Anyway it’s done now. Let’s just hope that all the dramatis personae of these twenty-first century fairytales now live happily ever after.