Helping teen parents
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Joy Spontak, coordinator of the teen parent program at the Washington County Youth Service Bureau/Boys and Girls Club, poses in her Montpelier office on Wednesday. Jeb Wallace-Brodeur/Times Argus |
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By Mel Huff Times Argus Staff - Published: December 4, 2008
MONTPELIER – A teenage girl with sandy hair made her way past a desk at the Washington County Youth Service Bureau on a recent winter afternoon, carrying a baby girl in a pink plastic carrier. Joy Spontak chatted with the mother and smiled at the sandy-haired baby. "Oh, look at you! Hi, gorgeous!" she said to the baby. The baby beamed.
Spontak, an artist and art teacher who has lived in Vermont since 1971, coordinates the bureau's Teen Parent Program.
Spontak came to the Youth Services Bureau seven years ago, in response to a newspaper ad. She had recently been divorced, and "it was a time in life when I was looking for something else," she says.
Working with pregnant teenagers and their babies meant coming full circle, a return to the beginning of her professional life. Forty years ago, Spontak filled the same role in a maternity shelter at the Bureau of Child Welfare in New York City.
"I have two daughters who are in their thirties who are not having babies, and I decided that this gives me an opportunity to hold brand new babies," she says. "Anybody who has ever held a brand new baby knows it's an awe-some and very special experience."
The Teen Parent Program serves women up to age 22 and usually includes about 20 women at any one time. The youngest Vermont mother Spontak has worked with was 14.
"The saddest thing that's happened in the past year is that we've had a lot more homeless, pregnant teens – homeless and pregnant with no family to help them, hardly friends to help them," Spontak says. She calls the services her program provides – food, clothing, shelter and access to health care – "basic to human survival and having a dignified life."
Spontak also tries to bring normalcy into the young women's lives. She helps them find summer clothes or a bathing suit or a winter jacket. At Thanksgiving, she makes sure they all have turkeys. When she discovered that most of her clients hadn't seen a dentist in years, she started Bright Smiles, a program that connects the women to dentists.
"I have clients who don't have a winter jacket!" she exclaims. There are plenty of resources in the community, but the young women often don't know about them or don't have the means of reaching them, she says. "They may have the apartment, but then they may not have enough money to pay for the heat. Or they may not have the car to drive themselves to get a winter jacket."
Pregnant teenagers have "very severe problems," and the economic crisis is making them worse, Spontak says. "When you're poor, it's devastating. I have clients who have virtually nothing (in their homes). They have emergencies because they run out of money to pay things like electric bills. … These aren't people who are doing terrible things with their money. They just don't have any."
Spontak, who has a master's degree in art therapy, finds it helpful to imagine herself in a client's situation. It's not hard to do. Following her divorce in 1998, and after paying on a mortgage for 23 years, she found herself homeless.
"I had no idea this could happen to me," she says. "I did a lot of inner work to make sure I stayed loving. It was important to me to become more of the person I wanted to be."
As someone who lives with the awareness that people helped her when she needed it, Spontak encourages her clients to ask for help in difficult times in hopes of moving beyond their present difficulties and constructing stable lives for their children and themselves. Many of the young women have done that, Spontak says. They have become good mothers, gotten jobs and finished school. Some have even gone to community college.
"It's heartbreaking many times, but I don't get heartbroken because I always feel I can do something," Spontak says. She credits the Youth Service Bureau and the support it provides her.
When Spontak has a mother who needs housing, she turns to the bureau's transitional living coordinator. If she has a pregnant runaway, she asks the emergency shelter coordinator for help. She frequently shares clients with the bureau's counselors.
"This is the most supportive environment I've ever worked in," she says. "From the director on down, everyone cares in the same way about human beings. The focus is always on the best needs of the clients and how we can meet that need."
Also, for several years, Spontak has met monthly with her counterparts at other agencies – such as Central Vermont Medical Center and the Vermont Department of Health – that provide services to many of the same clients. She and her colleagues have developed a network of information and resources, and they help each other out.
"We're able to, as a community, be the family that some of these young women don't have. We fill that need," she says.
"I love coming to work. I don't feel bogged down by sadness," Spontak declares. "I'm in my 60s. I've learned what's important in life."