Project Helps Teens Adopt Good Parenting Skills

Group Nurtures Youths and Gives Them Focus

Stephanie Gudger needed to get away. As a single, unemployed mother of an infant son, her worries seemed to weigh her down.

When Gudger, then 20, joined a five-day New York camping trip organized by a group that helps pregnant teenagers and teen mothers, she returned home to the District with the focus and energy to get her life in order.

Now an assistant for Healthy Babies Project, the group that helped sponsor the trip last year, she encourages other young mothers to participate in the Teen Parent Empowerment Program.

"When we went last year with my group, that experience was phenomenal," Gudger said. "Everything that was going on here at home, I couldn't think about that. This was a place we could be at peace."

A few weeks ago, 15 parents and their children boarded a chartered bus for a six-hour trip to the campsite in the foothills between the Catskill and Pocono mountains.

"It has been tremendous for us to take our girls to camp," said Michele Minor, director of youth services at Healthy Babies. "We had to figure out ways to get them to see that life was bigger than the four blocks they lived on."

The Healthy Babies Project, a nonprofit community-based organization founded in 1990 to provide health-care services to underserved pregnant women, joined with YoungLives DC, a nonprofit Christian organization designed to assist teen mothers, two years ago.

YoungLives is an affiliate of Young Life, a nondenominational Christian ministry with more than 20 campsites throughout the United States, Canada and the Dominican Republic.

At the Lake Champion campsite in Glen Spey, N.Y., which accommodates more than 500 people, teen parents from throughout the country get to enjoy 370 acres of boating, tubing, rope courses and mountain biking while child-care providers watch their children.

Teen Parent Empowerment Program members held several fundraisers to cover their expenses, about $350 per person. The activities presented a challenge for Oluwatoyin Pyne, 19, who was seven months pregnant and unable to partake in many of them.

"I kind of went out there blindly thinking it was one thing, but I experienced a whole new thing," said Pyne, of the District. "I just couldn't participate in a lot of things. All I could really do is get in the pool and talk."

Pyne said parents from the District were able to establish new relationships with camp attendees from other areas of the country.

"I'm glad a lot of D.C. girls didn't stick together in their comfort zone," she said. "They got to know a lot of people. They walked away with a lot of new friends."

Some parents said they walked away with a new lease on life after attending the camp. Still, some issues weren't that easily resolved.

Although she has toned down her aggressive attitude and stopped smoking marijuana since joining the program, Dakota Crews, 18, of the District said she has a ways to go to become the woman she envisions herself. With a vague idea of what it meant or how to be a good parent, she didn't want to rely on the poor examples from her past and wanted to do better. That's why she joined the Healthy Babies Project.

Two months ago, she made her way to the Healthy Babies offices in Northeast a day after giving birth to her daughter, Eternity, and has shown up daily to take parenting and nutrition classes. Now she has gotten some tools to accomplish her goals and credits the time spent at the camp with giving her a renewed focus.

"I'm trying to move forward with me and my daughter," she said. "All the stuff I learned there, it's something I needed to learn a long time ago when I was growing up. But I did not learn that then."