Motherhood a "Rite of Passage" for Some Teens

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.