Podcast Transcript: Michael Carrera

An expert on teen pregnancy prevention for over 40 years, Dr. Michael A. Carrera talks about the specific challenges and rewards of getting youth to care about their futures.

Time: 5:09 | Size: 4.7 MB

NCFY:  Welcome to Voices from the Field, a podcast series from the Family and Youth Services Bureau.  Dr. Michael Carrera has been taking an "above the waist" approach to teen pregnancy prevention for more than twenty years at New York's Children's Aid Society.  His evidence-based, seven-pronged program goes beyond sexuality education to include career exploration, medical and dental care and other ingredients he feels are essential to healthy youth development.  Carrera shared with us three important things for youth workers to keep in mind when working to prevent teen pregnancy. 

DR. CARRERA:  We don't prevent teen pregnancy.  The young people do.  So that when young people feel and believe that good things are going to happen in their lives, they reduce risks on their own.  So the youth worker needs to know that they have to try to help create a climate where young people believe in themselves.  And yes, there's material that we want them to understand.  That is the outcome of that that they start to believe that they're capable and that they're going to be able to have a life that's different than their peers or their parents or other family or cultural situations.  And that they can go beyond that.  Something else that is essential is that we're generally in communities where there's great suffering, where the young people are very disadvantaged in numerous ways, where the communities and families are on under resourced and so on.  There are no quick fixes here.  This is the long fix.  Youth workers need to understand that it's days and weeks and months and years of engagement with the same young people.  A third point that, you know, we make that young people tend to thrive, tend to understand their gifts and their talents in environments of gentleness and generosity and forgiveness, not in harsh environments.  We believe in firmth, which is a melding of being firm and warm simultaneously, that you can set structure and you can have rules, engagement.  All of our staff need to engage young people.  So that when the young people look at them, they see their worth in the eyes of the staff.

NCFY: Carrera works very closely with organizations that replicate his program.  We asked him about the challenges of replicating evidence based models, including working with diverse populations. 

DR. CARRERA:  In order for this to work, there needs to be sustainable funding.  You're talking about a huge commitment of a lot of money and a lot of time.  Then the other challenges have to do with here we are with a seven component model and we're going to be now moving into some agency or some institution with these seven components intact.  It's not that you have something called Job Careers and you were going to use that.  It doesn't matter if you've had that.  We're using this.  Because this is part of the evidence based package.  Replications are undemocratic.  That's why they're called replications.  We try to be wise in our staffing.  So that in New York, where we're working in Washington Heights let's say, where the overwhelming population is Dominican... we will make every effort to hire staff who have a Dominican or at least a Latino background.  So that they can relate in terms of culture in a way that someone who's from a different group would take time in order to adjust.

NCFY: While preventing teen pregnancy is a complex effort, Carrera believes it presents enormous opportunities for improving the lives of young people. 

DR. CARRERA:  That's the thing that I try to convey to the staff about this opportunity to work with boys and girls for long periods of time, to try to help them understand themselves.  So that they take advantage of every talent and every gift that they have.  And that if they do choose parenthood, it's at a time when they've finished school and they have a dollar in their pocket and they can be on their own.  For me, the work is about engaging young people.  I mean, after all, they're going to be the living message going forward to a time we're not going to see. 

NCFY: Learn more about the Carrera model at stopteenpregnancy.childrensaidsociety.org.  Learn more about teen pregnancy prevention on the National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth Website, ncfy.acf.hhs.gov.  (END OF TRANSCRIPT)