By Eric Hoover

Nicole Lynn Lewis was living on stale Pop-Tarts in a Motel 6 when she learned that she had been accepted by the College of William & Mary. “It was as if someone had just opened a door to a high-powered rocket ship,” she recalls, “and asked me to step inside.” But Lewis wouldn’t make the journey alone: At the time she was eight months pregnant with her first child, Nerissa.

Like many parents who attend college while raising children, she had to navigate a system that wasn’t built with her needs in mind. At orientation, Lewis, who is Black, felt out place walking around the predominantly white campus in her Walmart flip-flops: “My feet didn’t belong. … I was different, and my situation left little room for error.”

Lewis describes her experiences in her new book, Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Motherhood, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families. The vivid memoir explores big questions about systemic racism, generational poverty, and how higher education often marginalizes young parents instead of nurturing them.

At William & Mary, Lewis managed to stretch her federal Pell Grant and other loans to cover her expenses. She secured campus housing, found affordable child care, and managed to keep her unreliable car running. Each task was an exhausting exercise in suspense. Could she find a way to cover all her needs and earn a degree? Was one granola bar enough fuel for an entire day? On the campus she encountered welcoming people, like the financial-aid officer who helped her solve problems; but there were also unwelcoming ones, such as the disinterested adviser who blew her off.

After graduating in 2003, Lewis earned a master’s degree in public policy. She later founded Generation Hope, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., that helps teen parents get to and through college while raising children. In Pregnant Girl she weaves the experiences of many students her organization has served into her own story. Society, she writes, often sets young parents up to fail: “We tell young people that their lives are over when they discover their pregnancies and scratch our heads when they don’t succeed.”

Recently, Lewis spoke with The Chronicle about the stigma of teenage pregnancy, the disconnection many student parents experience, and why colleges must do more to help them succeed.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You describe the shame that young women often feel when they become pregnant, as well as the stigma that many young mothers endure. What should college officials know about how that can affect a student parent’s experience?

There’s this constant questioning of whether you belong on a college campus. I remember thinking, “Am I crazy to think that I can do this, that I should be sitting in these classrooms next to these other students?” That has power. Sometimes I would think, “Yes, I am crazy.”

For so long, this population has been invisible. When I was at William & Mary, the administration had no idea that there was a student on their campus who was parenting. Unfortunately, 20 years later, that’s still the case at most institutions.

It all goes back to what we’ve been taught about who belongs on a college campus, who’s deserving of being there. Those messages are ingrained in us as we go through school. They’re influenced by what we see in the media. We know that higher education wasn’t designed for parenting students, or for other marginalized students, whether they’re working students in their 30s or first-generation students.

It’s important for us to challenge those messages about who belongs. If we don’t, we’ll keep narrowly focusing on a small population of students, and we’ll continue to build our policies, supports, and systems around that small population.

You examine the challenges of being a young parent through the lens of systemic racism. Why is that connection so important?

I often say that student-parent work is racial-justice work. It’s absolutely intertwined. If we want to see student parents thrive, we have to examine the ways that we’re perpetuating racial oppression within higher ed.

At William & Mary, I knew that, as a Black student, I was a rarity. There was an assumption that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had friends who were told that they were only there because of affirmative action. My husband was told he was only there because he could play football.

It’s vitally important that we try to understand what our marginalized students are up against, the path they have taken just to get on to a college campus, and the ways that we are not meeting their needs.

There’s an especially gripping moment in your book when you recall how deferential your father was when he got pulled over by a white police officer in the South. That moment you witnessed made an impression on you. “Particularly for Black and Brown youth,” you write, “institutions we often think of as dependable and trustworthy … can be unreliable or unpredictable, requiring young people to watch their footing.” How does that insight inform your work with student parents?

You have to build trust. So many of our students are struggling with trusting people, with trusting institutions, with trusting systems, because of experiences like that — experiences that have made them feel unsafe. At Generation Hope, we’re really intentional about building trust with our students, and that takes time.

In college, many student parents don’t even want to disclose that they have a child because they don’t trust that that information will be valued and treated with care. They might fear that some punitive action could come from that because often it does.

We often think, “Oh, it’s college — you go, you get connected to the culture, you go to the football games.” For parenting students and many students on the fringes, it’s not that way at all.

What are some small but meaningful ways colleges can create trust that leads to a feeling of connection on campus?

My first question to any institution is: Do you consider student parents an asset or a liability? Many institutions are not thinking of this population as true assets, or really wanting them to be connected in the community. If we start to think of student parents as these incredible students who enrich our campus, who have leadership qualities and the ability to juggle multiple responsibilities, we have an opportunity to really learn from them. If colleges do value them, what are they doing to communicate that?

One important thing is to start tracking the status of your parenting students. You don’t want to be flying blind there. Another important aspect is building community. Are you providing student parents with an opportunity to connect with each other and support one another in what can be a really tough journey?

Sometimes I’ll ask colleges what they’re doing for student parents, and they’ll say, “Oh, we have a child-care center.” But is your child-care center mostly serving students, or serving faculty and staff? It’s important to look at the different ways that you serve student parents, from your aid office to your dining hall to the way that your frontline staff interact with them. This is not just about checking a box.

This line in your book struck me: “We often push for daydreams, ignoring the basic needs of young mothers and fathers that need to be addressed first.”

We have to recognize the significant challenges happening with young parents — from housing insecurity to food insecurity to childhood trauma — that can make it difficult for them to see higher education as a viable option. Many times we’re talking about these long-term goals, and they’re worried about, “How am I going to keep a roof over my head and keep food on my table?”

So our supports have to encompass more than just telling them, “You, too, can graduate from college one day.” We have to acknowledge that young parents have basic needs that have to be met in order for them to really pursue the dream.

You write that educators and policymakers “erroneously build interventions that define young people by a single moment in their lives.” What should they know about what student parents might have experienced before the birth of their child?

We know that student parents are more likely to be students of color. And we know that the trajectory to college, or even to high-school graduation, is often precarious for students of color in this country. We know that trauma in childhood can cause significant barriers to young people feeling valued and young people being hopeful. So it’s important to recognize that these outcomes we all care about, whether it’s college completion or college access, begin with underlying issues that we often don’t really want to face.

Many people don’t really understand the challenges happening in the lives of young people in this country. They don’t see that teen pregnancy is a symptom of these challenges rather than the beginning of these challenges.

Some people might not be familiar with the concept of “time poverty.” What is it? And how can it become a greater challenge for student parents the closer they get to graduation?

Parenting students are time-stretched. They have about 50-percent less time to devote to their studies than their non-parenting peers do, and that can affect their academic performance. They’re often juggling a job and college, then at night they’re helping their child with their homework and tending to all these other responsibilities. And they’re often operating on very low energy. As you get closer to graduation, there are often classes that you have to take at a certain time.

We often think that once a student gets to senior year, they’re probably coasting to the graduation stage. But particularly for parenting students, it can be the exact opposite. That’s when those supports really need to ramp up. That’s why it’s really important for institutions to know the parenting status of their students.

Anyone reading your book might describe you as brave, determined, and resourceful. But as you explain, the story of your success wasn’t just about you. Other people helped, and those relationships mattered a lot.

Yes. The reality is that every college student needs a support system, whether they’re parenting, whether they’re first-gen, or whether they fit that traditional description of a college student.

My daughter, who was three months old when I started at William & Mary, is now in the final months of her own college experience. I can’t tell you how many times she called me to say, “I can’t register for this class, and I don’t know what to do.” Or sometimes she just needed to cry on someone’s shoulder.

Some students come in with that support system. Other students don’t have that, and we have to help them pull that together.

Generation Hope provides emotional and financial support to students. What can colleges learn from your organization’s approach?

Our model is to make sure we’re supporting the whole student. Sometimes that support is academic, sometimes it’s supporting their life needs. We’ve learned that it’s important to have champions for these students who can respond rapidly to their needs and connect them to resources, who can be cheerleaders and show up for them when they need extra encouragement.

We have a mental-health counselor on staff. We saw about a 30-percent increase in the number of sessions our students requested over the last year. And we also provide emergency funding. I know how impactful that is because when I was in college, there were times I couldn’t afford rent or child care, and I was on the edge.

OK, let’s talk about that infuriating moment during your freshman year at William & Mary when your theater professor told you that you would have to bring your daughter to class or else you would fail — even though your daughter had pneumonia. So you bundled her up and carried her across campus in the cold. Would that happen today? Is it still a prevalent notion that a student with a child is an inconvenience for the college?

It’s more prevalent than not. It goes back to my questions of whether an institution views student parents as an asset or a liability. As student parent, it could go either way for you. It could go really badly, like the experience I had in that class. Or you could have a situation where a professor is very understanding. But the fact is that you don’t know how it will go, so often you just don’t disclose that you have a child.

Right now, when students fall through the cracks, it’s often seen as more about the student and not about the ways an institution failed to meet that student’s needs. One of the reasons I wrote the book is that I want people to read it and say, “Wow, are we doing everything that we can to make sure students are successful? When they have a child-care issue, or something that comes up, are we making it more difficult for them? Or are we trying to find ways where they can get their work done and still be there for their families?”

What specific changes, in terms of campus policies and supports, strike you as meaningful?

It’s really important for institutions to know that every student-parent initiative or support doesn’t have to be a huge outlay of money. I remember a college president asking me, “Are we talking major, major investments here, like building a child-care center or building dorms for student parents?” I would love to see those things happening on a college campus, but I told her, “Look, one low-cost thing you could be doing is making sure your marketing materials and your website include pictures of parenting students at your institution.” It’s powerful to see that. Far too often, we don’t see that.

When one of our scholars at Generation Hope went in to meet with one of her professors during office hours, she saw that there were toys on his desk. When she asked him about it, he said, “Oh, I always keep those here in case anybody ever brings their kids in.”

For her, that was huge. She felt so seen and so valued. Just by seeing those toys on his desk, she knew that it was safe for her to tell the professor that she was parenting, and she knew that he might be understanding if something came up that kept her from getting to class.

What are some common ways that colleges fall short in supporting this population?

The biggest, most glaring one is data on student parents. Institutions are not tracking it. When I started Generation Hope, I thought I could just contact all the institutions in the D.C. region and ask them how many student parents they have. I quickly learned that I was never going to get that information.

Another thing that we hear about time and time again is the impact of those frontline staff. There are horror stories of those people not embracing the fact that the students they interact with have children.

Then there’s the class-registration process. It can be so hard as a parenting student to get a particular class that they need for graduation. Maybe they can’t take it a 7 p.m., but that’s the only time it’s being offered. Or all the classes were full by the time they register. So priority registration is something that we would love to see more colleges adopting for student who have kids.

Also, many colleges don’t allow kids on campus. We did a survey at Generation Hope asking student parents across the country if they even knew their institution’s policy on having children on campus. Many of them didn’t. That’s something they absolutely need to know.

You’re calling for a shift in mindset. And you’re inviting everyone on campus to join in.

I hope that people will think about the role that they can play in communicating a message to student parents: “Yes, you belong here.” There’s so much power in that. That’s what we have to do more of.

 

 

 

 

This was originally posted on The Chronicle of Higher Education.