Can Latinas Stave Off Teen Pregnancy By Learning To Bake Pies?

Susan Mariotti comes from a Latino family. By the time she was 21, she had two children and was helping support her family. She’s since taken the lessons she’s learned from her experiences in an attempt to help young Latinas in the Houston area learn skills and, as her priest puts it, “how to behave” in the hopes that they will not go down a similar path. But does learning how to ice cupcakes keep someone from… icing… your cupcake? 

Mariotti organized the “Young Ladies Club” to teach seven girls from her local Catholic church how to bake, set a table, host a dinner party, pose for photographs and, because you need something to keep you busy while your pie cools, how to identify constellations through a telescope.

We’re not convinced having good manners or conforming to gender roles keeps young Latinas from becoming pregnant. Sweet, kind, polite, girly girls also get pregnant. “Good girls” become teen mothers. And we’re not sure learning to do tasks often associated with wives and mothers can keep that from happening.

What we think Mariotti is doing right, however, is helping these girls find something to do that they can undertake from start to finish and be proud of. Learning to cook and comport oneself in society (regardless of whether the society in which these girls find themselves will ever allow them to actually use these skills) is beneficial to anyone and can often lead to self-respect and pride in one’s abilities.

But what about, oh, job skills? Or sex ed? Or advice on how to deal with pressure from friends, from family, at school, from boyfriends, etc? 

Says Susan:

You have to act like a lady at all times. Respect your parents and respect yourself.

But… ladies have sex with their boyfriend. Ladies feel pressure from friends. Ladies feel lost and confused, too. Ladies get pregnant when they don’t plan on it. It’s not only the wild girls, off drinking having sex with people they don’t know and not having any idea how to bake a pie, that find themselves throwing away their youth because they’ve become a parent.

We’re just not sure this is enough. We’re not sure this provides girls with tools they can use (like… a condom) besides just something to make them fit a caricature of what a good girl should be.

Hispanic girls learn to look beyond marriage at early age [Texarkana Gazette]