When Kids Have Kids
When her mother and siblings moved to Alabama, Tiesha, 12, stayed in Boston, winning honors at her parochial junior high school and attending boarding school on scholarship. But when Tiesha got pregnant at 16, the school told her she had to leave. With nowhere to turn, Tiesha felt hopeless. A few days after her son, Ju’Quon, was born, she and her baby enrolled in the Young Parents Program (YPP) at Children’s Hospital Boston, and things began to change.

Young Parents Program points the way
Launched in 1980, the Young Parents Program treats more than 350 children and their parents a year. A medical provider, nurse and social worker provide health care, counseling, education and advocacy for each mother and baby in the program, helping them find temporary shelter, transportation, food, daycare, and other vital services.

“YPP took care of us,” Tiesha says. “The doctors, nurses and social workers guided me through Ju’Quon’s chronic asthma and ear infections and my own health issues.  Their counseling was so important--I felt free to talk things through, ask for advice or just cry. By pointing me in the right direction, they opened my mind to resources and possibilities. As a teen parent you want responsibility, but you need adult help, too.”

Extraordinary Help, Extraordinary Achievement
Today, Tiesha is the executive assistant to the headmaster of a Boston charter school, where 5-year-old Ju’Quon is a buouyant, soccer-playing kindergartner.  Every night, he watches his mom settle in with homework. Having completed college, Tiesha is enrolled in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Now 23, she’s studying for a Masters degree in administrative planning and social policy so she can work with teen parents. “Everyone thinks I’m an exception, I’ve beaten the odds,” she says. “But I had extraordinary help. If everyone had help, achievement like mine could be the norm.”

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