Just another baby book: The First Part Last

Well, I got my cheap and easy YA lit. read in for the week: The First Part Last by Angela Johnson. The book is a Michael Printz Award winner, but I can't say that I was overly impressed. I felt like it was just another book with a teen raising a child before he was ready.



The book is interesting in that it jumps forward and backward in time and it's a one-day read. It's only 130 ish pages- which are a quick read. The main character, Bobby is a 16 year old inner-city New Yorker who gets his 16 year old girlfriend, Nia, pregnant.


I did find it interesting that the main characters talks about all the ways that his parents had talked to him about sex and preventing STDs and pregnancy and yet the teen still ends up a young parent. Bobby talks about the difficulty of raising the child with minimal parental support (despite them being really strong parent for him they're really pushing him to take responsiblity). Bobby also talks about his love for both the baby and his girlfriend (and there's a big twist as to how he ends up the sole provider for the child).


I'm not sure what the author is trying to convey about teen pregnancy. I think she may be pushing for teens to own up- but I'm not sure that this is always the best choice for the baby & thus the community. It seemed to me that Bobby just naturally knew how to care for his baby and there was very little discussion about learning how to discipline, care for the baby, and learn how not to snap on the child. Instead, it seemed that the book reinforced what so many of my students express: Every thing will just work itself out, teens don't really need guidance, babies are how you get attention, and babies are how you solve relationship problems. While the author did demonstrate the young father's desire to goof off and needing to sacrifice these feelings in order to be responsible, I couldn't help but feel that the book wasn't giving young people the needed guidance: which could have more effectively been spreadsheets of the costs, time demands, legal responsibilites, and experiences sacrificed in order to truly be a good and effective teen parent.


Maybe I'm just too jaded from seeing teen pregnancy with multiple students, but the story was myopic and didn't really have a conflict. The conflict should have been "is Bobby going to keep the baby, even though he's not ready for it?" But it wasn't, because we knew from the first page that he would end up with the baby. Instead the conflict for me was: "why in the heck is the author just showing the excitement a new baby brings? This contradicts what we want teens to learn. "


What teens need to be given are examples of characters who are tempted to make the wrong decisions but instead, find creative ways to make positive decisions. We've got plenty of negative role models, but it seems young adults have the hardest time recognizing the positive role models. Instead, YA readers get sexed up, drugged up, vampired out, when they should be getting the strength needed to tell their parents and teachers the truth or ask for adult guidance with tricky situations; they really need the strength and guidance as to how to indentify abusive relationships and knowing when just fooling around really means getting oneself into situations with long-term consequences. At the same time it seems that parents and teachers need the positive role models as well, to know how to help guide their young adults to wise decision making, while realizing that young adults (like anyone) love attention, so we'd better be giving them attention and support for their positive deeds and courageous acts- not just attention when they OD, get pregnant or crave human blood. It makes me think that we need a few more parents and teachers like those in the movie Easy A (great examples of easy-going but concerned, supportive parents & an English Teacher). I know it's just a movie, but check it out and you'll know what I mean.