When Children Want Children

"Pulitzer Prize-winning author and formerWashington Postreporter Leon Dash spent a year living in one of the poorest ghettos in Washington, D.C., and a total of seventeen months conducting interviews examining the causes and effects of the ever-lowering age of teenage parents among poor black youths. Dash had expected to find inadequate sex education and lack of birth control to be the root cause of the growing trend toward early motherhood, but his conversations with the mothers themselves revealed the truth to be more complex.A riveting account of the human stories behind the statistics,When Children Want Childrenallows readers to hear the voices of young adults struggling with poverty and parenthood and gets to the heart of teenage parents' cultural values and motivations. "

Leon Dash is Swanlund Endowed Chair and professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.