A Christian Camp Where Everyone Has Their Own Stroller

FIVE YEARS AGO, Madelynn Meads was pregnant and stuck between worlds.

Her high school in Leander, Texas, was a new school, and it had never been known to have a teen mom. Her church, where she’d been active in the youth group, suddenly couldn’t find a place for her. She didn’t fit in with the youth group anymore, but the church wouldn’t include her in its ministries for moms either. She’d lost the privilege of a relatively carefree youth without gaining the respect and spiritual investment often offered to young adults and new moms. As a pregnant 16-year-old, Meads said it felt as if the consistent message was, “You’re not a real adult or a real mom.”

Meads, like other teen moms, had fallen into a hole in the social fabric. She didn’t have the support available to teenagers carrying the hopes and dreams of their parents, or to new moms carrying the hopes and dreams of the next generation. Instead, she became part of a statistic, one that schools, government, and nonprofits are working to shrink.

In public discourse, teen pregnancy, poverty, and other adversity often go hand in hand — high school dropout rates for teen moms hover around 50 percent, and few go on to complete higher education. But advocates say that has less to do with the additional responsibility of a baby and more to do with the phenomenon Meads experienced at her church. The moms are no longer the kinds of teens targeted for scholarships and other educational opportunities. Traditional school schedules don’t work with baby schedules, and they can’t meet the time demands of most extracurriculars. If they want the kind of jobs that can help them raise their children in financial security, they must make it through a gauntlet of challenges to get there.

School systems sometimes have specialized services for teen parents to help them finish high school, and staff say they also have to help the teens renegotiate their place in family systems and community. For some Christian ministries, these extra challenges are opportunities to show the teens that there’s a secure, unconditional place for them in God’s family, with all the support to go with it.

Meads found those supports with YoungLives, a branch of YoungLife, a global Christian youth ministry. A YoungLives mentor reached out and gave her a place to belong, to be fully mom and fully teenager, both fun-loving and abundantly capable of facing the huge responsibilities that lay ahead. Instead of struggling to belong, she said, the message changed to “Let’s still have fun and let’s love God.”

Meads recently graduated from Texas A&M University and is getting her teaching certificate. During summers, she volunteers with YoungLives to try to give other teen moms the experience that made such a difference for her.

Invited to be teens

OUTSIDE THE DINING hall at LoneHollow Ranch camp in Vanderpool, Texas, a flotilla of empty strollers sat waiting for their tiny passengers to return from lunch. It’s an unusual sight: The camp caters to teens who usually don’t come with baby gear. But this week they do.

During the first week of each summer, young moms are invited to an experience that in most ways feels just like summer camp, but with ample child care from teams of well-trained volunteers available to rock babies, do crafts with toddlers, change diapers, and oversee nap times. Inside the dining hall, the usual high-energy atmosphere of a YoungLife camp is modified to accommodate the needs of easily overstimulated toddlers, and there are almost as many high chairs as there are adult chairs.

“They’re not alone here,” said Mari Rubio, one of the volunteer mentors. Most of the campers are between 14 and 18 years old, but they do occasionally get younger and older campers. The children range from newborn to 4 years old. Some moms have more than one child.

Many teen-parent support groups focus on preventing subsequent pregnancies. YoungLives doesn’t explicitly set out to prevent subsequent pregnancies, said Karil Connor, vice president of YoungLives, but it does try to help teens cast a vision for their future. “We are determined to continue to show up and be a place of belonging,” Connor said, “because every adolescent is made in the image of God and is not defined by their pregnancies.” For Connor, a first pregnancy isn’t the end of her hope for teenagers; neither is a second. Whether they show up to LoneHollow Ranch with one, two, or three children in tow, Connor said, “Every person who steps off that bus is going to experience grace, love, and belonging.”

The teenagers are invited to be teens as much as they are moms. On the sunny hillside next to the nurseries, some played pick-up soccer matches. Others would later swim in the small lake on the property. Some did arts and crafts with their kids.

Fueling this uniquely programmed camp is the core belief of Rubio and her colleagues: that young moms can be both happy teens and good parents, with a bright future for them and their children. “Life doesn’t end when you’re a teen mom,” Rubio said.

Mentorship makes a difference in graduation rates, with many programs boasting graduation rates higher than the general population. Rubio’s mentee Daisy Montes knows why. Montes dropped out of high school briefly as she struggled to adjust to parenthood at age 16. But Rubio essentially pestered her back into school, said Montes, who went on to attend cosmetology school and, in addition to working with YoungLives, has several entrepreneurial endeavors in the works at any given time. She runs a salon out of the back of her dad’s house and offers low- or no-cost haircuts and styling to young people who wouldn’t usually be able to afford those services. She knows how it feels to be treated with dignity, to be welcomed and served even if you aren’t the typical “client.”

In many respects, YoungLife mirrors other conservative evangelical parachurch organizations; its staff members are required to sign a statement of faith, and the organization’s refusal to affirm LGBTQIA relationships has angered many former participants and limited the parents who feel welcome. Yet the organization’s approach to teen parents is somewhat unique among Christian groups of all traditions. Rather than trying to keep the space “pure” of kids whose lives don’t reflect a conservative standard, YoungLives highlights their place in the enthusiastic embrace of God and God’s people.

At the 200 weekly YoungLives club meetings around the United States, young parents are greeted with free diapers, home-cooked meals, activities to do with kids, as well as spiritual nurture through the kinds of songs and evangelical messages YoungLife is known for. The volunteer mentors are often former teen moms themselves, and staff members recruit help from local pediatricians, diaper banks, and donors to supply the participants with formula and diapers. They even raffle off big ticket items like strollers.

“In the gospels, we see Jesus heal and restore through community,” Connor said. “YoungLives gets to live out that value in collaboration with the local community, especially in providing tangible expressions of love and care. Teen parents in YoungLives also grow a network of peers and mentors to cheer them along.”

Staff and volunteers attest to the potential and capability of teen parents. What they need most is what any new parent needs: support.

Creating a nonjudgmental space

ABAYEA PELT DIDN'T have that support when she became a teen mom at age 17. She left home, where she was not supported, and spent most of early adulthood trying to figure out how to access benefits, health care, and education for both her and her child. “I was really committed to being the best parent I could be,” Pelt said. “At the same time, I know things should not be as hard as that.”

As senior director for maternal and child health at the Washington, D.C. nonprofit Community of Hope, Pelt tries to make the journey easier for others. Community of Hope works with parents of all ages, not just teens. It runs federally qualified health centers, with three sites and a team of midwives, and offers perinatal care coordination until a child is 18 months old. This can include everything from breastfeeding support to just making sure the new mom is comfortable holding the baby and interacting. They teach baby massage and nursery rhymes — anything a parent feels they need to step confidently into the relationship with their baby. “We want to communicate to all of our patients, and all of our teen patients, that they are the experts on their own situation,” Pelt said.

Throughout their pregnancies, the patients at Community of Hope also have opportunities to learn from each other, Pelt said. They form peer support groups based on due dates, which puts teen moms in groups with older moms and moms of multiple children. “We’ve seen some really beautiful relationships spring up between teen patients and older patients,” Pelt said. The groups, part of the Centering Pregnancy model, create a nonjudgmental space for teens and others to grow in confidence as parents.

Programs that support teens who choose to have their babies are not necessarily anti-abortion, and believing that a teen can be a good parent doesn’t mean that they would pressure a teen who wanted an abortion not to seek one. Because it is not a medical service, YoungLives would refer a student to their family, guardian, or caregiver to make that decision, Connor said. Volunteers come with their own values, of course, but the training they get instructs them to let that decision remain with the teen, their doctors, and whomever else the teen wants to include. Community of Hope can offer information about what is available, and they do offer birth control, but their services do not include abortion. “We come alongside birthing people with support, respect for their decisions, [and] knowledge of what’s available,” Pelt said.

‘We’re an intervention program’

THESE MINISTRIES HAVE been supporting decisions like these since before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 — data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services indicated that, in 2017, 58 to 62 percent of teen pregnancies ended in birth. That decision should not disqualify them from a hopeful future, said Lisa Delgado, who runs the School Age Parenting Program (SAPP) in the Northside Independent School District, San Antonio’s largest public school system. “It’s not a prevention program,” Delgado said. “We’re an intervention program.”

Despite the growth of the school district, Delgado said, SAPP serves fewer teens than it did in the mid-1990s when she started. It’s a local snapshot of a national trend. Since 1989, teen pregnancy rates have fallen by 82 percent for the 15-to-17 age group, and abortion rates had similarly declined. This was true even before the end of Roe, when abortion was made essentially illegal in many states. Most experts attribute the decline to wider availability of contraception and a delayed start to sexual activity. Though numbers have fallen, Texas’ teen birth rate remains among the highest in the nation — it tops the states for repeat pregnancies. Without mandatory sex education and with parental consent required to obtain contraception, Texas lags behind in the factors that may be reducing teen pregnancy rates nationwide. Delgado and her team still have plenty to do.

From the time a student reports to the district as pregnant, they are given the option of services through Delgado’s team. To ensure a healthy pregnancy, they connect the teens to public benefits such as WIC (a nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children) and obstetric care — this also alleviates some of the initial mental load that might lead a teen to drop out of school. Once the baby is born, the district brings parents and their children to a special school with on-site child care and individualized instruction for six weeks. Then it’s back to regular school, with support from SAPP to help them manage.

The teen dads are included as well, with mentoring programs. “We know that if he’s active in that baby’s life, he’s going to have a better chance,” Delgado said. “Even in the midst of teenage angst, [the support helps him] continue to be the dad that that child needs.”

Delgado has been in the role long enough to see the children of her first teen parents graduate from the same school district. “We know our work has a multigenerational impact,” she said. “We will be educating those children, in some cases, even before those students graduate from high school.”

A vision for their future

ADRIAN FARRUGGIA IS one of those kids who was raised in the halls of Northside schools. He first started showing up at Holmes High School with his mom, who was part of the School Age Parenting Program. Farruggia went on to graduate from Holmes and is now a special education teacher and basketball coach there. His grandma, aunt, and wife all work at the school too. The personal connection to the district is central to their family legacy, he said, but even more important to him is reaching educational goals, because of the commitment he saw from his mom.

“For me, seeing all these hurdles she had to accomplish, finishing high school, working a full-time job, and going to night school ... there was no excuse for me not to do the same,” Farruggia said. He’ll be passing down that legacy to his own child, now 2 years old.

Farruggia has followed a more conventional path toward fatherhood, having his first child at 25, degree in hand, married, and employed. But he doesn’t look back on his mom’s path, or his own childhood, as lacking. “I never felt that I was without, and I know that came at the cost of her going without.”

His experience is not unusual, say those who work closely with teen moms. Pelt herself sees the sacredness of the work in supporting moms as they give not just birth but life to their children. “When I think about the life of Christ, and honoring his life, I think about his relationship with his mother,” Pelt said. “That is a model for me.”

The young people often become very wise, said Becca Eby, who has been on staff with YoungLives since before she had her own children. When she got pregnant for the first time, she said, the teens in her ministry were full of wisdom and advice: “I learned so much from them.” Contrary to stereotypes of irresponsible teens who might look for any chance to get some free time, she said, the moms are often so protective of their children that they must be convinced to leave them with the camp nursery. “A lot of the campers have never let anyone outside immediate family care for their kids,” Eby said.

Those immediate family members are usually vital supports, Pelt acknowledged, and typically Community of Hope welcomes their involvement from the first sonogram onward. At the same time, she said, “It can be a delicate balance of making a welcoming environment for the family and making it clear that the teen patient is the one calling the shots.”

Delgado works with her students to set similar boundaries with grandparents whose information may be out of date or incorrect. It’s tricky, she said, because “we are often helping them be a child in a home where they’re a parent.”

It’s one more way these teen parents must carve out a space for themselves not readily available in a society defined by goals, accomplishments, and timelines. But if that fleet of strollers outside the dining hall at LoneHollow Ranch proves anything, it’s that such a space exists.