By Anne Harding
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Teen motherhood does not always
ruin a young woman’s life, but instead may drive her to greater
maturity and ambition, according to the results of a small,
long-term study.
“For some of them it’s a turning point experience,” Dr. Lee
SmithBattle of St. Louis University Doisy College of Health
Sciences, the study’s author, told Reuters Health. “They now
have more educational aspirations and want to do better and
turn their lives around because they have this child to care
for.”
SmithBattle has been following a group of former teen moms
for 17 years, interviewing them every four years and also
talking with the women’s parents, partners and children. In the
study, published in the November issue of the Western Journal
of Nursing Research, she reports on the moms at the 12-year
point, when the women were in their early 30s.
The study included 11 adolescent girls, who were an average
of 17 years old when they delivered an infant. About half of
the subjects had dropped out of high school.
Women fell into three groups, SmithBattle notes, those for
whom motherhood helped provide a coherent structure or
“narrative spine” for their lives, and who fared well in their
adult love relationships and work; those who also drew meaning
and structure from motherhood, but did not fare as well in
their adult relationships and work; and those for whom
mothering did not provide structure or meaning. The study
includes the stories of three young women, each representing
one of these groups.
Support from family and community is essential for helping
teen moms to find their way successfully, SmithBattle notes.
Previous research exaggerated the difficulties teen moms
face, she adds, by comparing women who gave birth in their
teens with women who first became mothers in their 20s.
“That’s a very unfair comparison because teen mothers tend
to have lots of adverse childhood experiences and they tend to
be more disadvantaged than women who wait (to) have children,”
SmithBattle said. Newer studies that have controlled for such
factors have found teen moms actually fare as well as or even
better than women from similar socioeconomic backgrounds who
did not have children early, she added.
Research has also shown that many teen moms do better over
time, eventually achieving independent, stable lives. “For some
teen moms becoming a parent can turn around their lives in
really positive ways, they want to do better for themselves
because of the child; they want to do better in school because
of the child,” SmithBattle said.
Motherhood, she added, can be a rite of passage into
adulthood, similar to what going to college may be for more
advantaged teens.
But if teen moms don’t receive adequate support, they may
fall prey to the factors that contributed to their becoming
pregnant as teens in the first place, SmithBattle’s study
shows.
One way society can help young women avoid teen pregnancy
in the first place is to give them a sense of a real, positive
future, she said. In addition to providing support for young
women who do become mothers, efforts should be made to wipe out
stereotypes and stigmas many hold about these women.
“The kinds of stereotypes we hold about teen mothers are
not very helpful, because teen mothers feel very stigmatized by
the assumption that they’re failures,” she said. People should
understand, she added, that teen motherhood isn’t “an
unmitigated disaster.”
SOURCE: Western Journal of Nursing Research, November 2005.
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