Talking to a colleague at a research workshop, during the early days of the fieldwork for the study that is the subject of this book, the topic turned to the challenges of balancing work and childcare. Bea was in her late thirties, working part-time and writing up her PhD, and had two small children aged four and six. Sympathising with the challenges of having to manage home and school routines and somehow find time to write, I said that my daughter was five when I started my PhD. âHow old is she now?â Bea asked. âOh, sheâs 21, my PhD was a long time ago!â I said. âYou must have been really young when you had her.â âNo, I was 27.â âBut that is young!â she exclaimed. Around the same time, I met some of the young women who took part in one of the focus groups for the study. Chatting as we got settled, and telling them a little about myself, I mentioned that I had a daughter, aged 21. âHow many bairns has she got, then?â one of the young mothers asked. âNone,â I replied. âSheâs at university.â
The same life story can look very different depending on the perspective of those viewing it. From Beaâs perspective, 27 was early to have children, although the year I had my daughter, it was the average age for women having their first baby in the UK. Now, with over half of all births being to women over 30, I probably would seem young to many other new mothers. On the other hand, for the young women I was talking to, all of whom had had babies during their teens, it seemed natural to assume that a 21-year-old would have had at least one child, although the teenage fertility rate was continuing to fall, so that only 3.4 per cent of all conceptions that year, in the UK, had been to teenagers. By the time the young women reach Beaâs age, their oldest children will be adults, whereas Bea will be in her fifties before her children reach adulthood.
From an educational perspective, the various mothersâ stories also illustrate very different, and classed, trajectories, with my daughter taking the middle-class route to adulthood, staying on at school and going to university at the ârightâ age. Meanwhile, most of the young mums I spoke to had left school before they reached 18, some having been rare attenders from the age of 14 onwards. What Walkerdine et al. refer to as the âterrible and central factâ (2001, p. 4) of the way social class divides working-class and middle-class girls is writ large on our lives.
Donât panic, the teenage pregnancy epidemic is over!(The Telegraph, 28 February 2013)
Stories about teenage pregnancy, and in particular the UKâs record of having the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe, often feature in newspapers; the two headlines above are both written in response to announcements that the teenage pregnancy rate in the UK had fallen for both the years reported on in the stories, as it had been doing for several years previously, and as it has continued to do. In July 2015, as I was coming to the end of writing this book, the latest statistics on pregnancy and births in England and Wales were released, showing that once again, in 2014 there had been a decline in teenage pregnancy rates, to the lowest rate yet recorded. The report also notes that births to all age groups under 30 had fallen, and that the average age of mothers in England and Wales had crept over 30â30.2 in 2014 (ONS 2015). The most fertile age group in 2014 was women aged 30â34, and the under 20s had the largest decrease in fertility. Overall, birth rates fell for the second consecutive year, having risen for over a decade between 2001 and 2012. Almost half (47.5 per cent) the babies born in 2014 were born outside marriage or civil partnership, compared to 42.4 per cent just ten years previously in 2004. Changing patterns of who has children and when, how families are formed and how people construct their family have changed dramatically over the past few decades.UK still has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in Western Europe(Daily Mail, 15 October 2014)
Alongside the problematising of teenage pregnancy, stories in the popular press emerge fairly regularly about women âleaving it too lateâ, with the associated message that being a âcareer womanâ will lead to having regrets at lost opportunities to become a mother. The shift in fertility patterns has led some newspapers to argue that young and poorly educated women are having too many babies while clever women are not having enough, if they are having any at all. In the summer of 2012, Dr Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces and well-known presenter of historical documentaries on the BBC, talked about the connections between her educational path and not having children, saying that she had been âeducated out of the reproductive functionâ. When this led to media stories about some women feeling âtoo cleverâ to have children, Dr Worsley explained that rather than it being an issue of cleverness, it was more about the strong emphasis that her school had placed on becoming educated to as high a level as possible, which left little time for women in her situation to think about having a family (Wintle 2013). The flurry of media interest led the Daily Mail to link supposedly high numbers of teenage mothers with falling numbers of intelligent mothers, and claim that the wrong type of women were having children.NHS chief warns women not to wait until 30 to have baby as country faces a fertility timebomb(Daily Mail, 30 May 2015)
Both younger and older mothers are positioned by the media as making wrong choices in terms of timing (Hadfieldet al. 2007), the younger ones because they are perceived to be too young to cope, the older ones because they may need treatment for infertility having left it too late to try to conceive (Macvarish 2010; Perrier 2013). Poor parenting, in particular single parenting, has also been blamed for a range of social problems, including riots in the UK in summer 2011, prompting Sarah Teather, then Childrenâs Minister, to announce the piloting of parenting lessons in three areas of the UK in 2012, saying âit is the government's moral and social duty to make sure we support all parents at this critical timeâ (Teather 2011). Although not compulsory, and not aimed solely at young or single parents, it is an example of a technical, and individualised, solution to the âproblemâ of poor parenting, which could easily be used as an instrument of blame: if your child turns out âbadâ it is your fault for not attending parenting classes. As an individualised solution, it does not address structural or educational disadvantage, and it is ironic that the classes were announced while funding for Sure Start (a measure aimed at addressing disadvantage, particularly in early yearsâ education) was no longer ring fenced, with the effect that many local authorities in the UK were cutting service provision. This is a shift of parenting support from being part of welfare services to being the subject of individualised corrective measures. Structural inequalities are rewritten as a set of factors that put young people at risk, and individualism means that people are responsible for their own fate; thus young people are âat riskâ not because of class or circumstance, but as a result of their own irrational behaviour. Furthermore, there is a sense in which young parents are criticised for not making the ârightâ choices, but those choices, and life courses more generally, are overwhelmingly determined by middle-class norms and choices.
It sometimes seems, then, as though women are continually bombarded with advice, instruction and criticism as far as motherhood is concerned: donât have babies too soon, donât leave it too late; to be childless is to be pitied, to have too many is to be vilified. Once the baby is born, will the mother be a Yummy Mummy, a Tiger Mom, Alpha Mum or Pramface? Will they become a âProblem Familyâ, faced with interventions and sanctions for not being the right type of family? It seems not only that the ideal window in which a woman can become a mother is narrowing, but also that how to be an acceptable mother is increasingly constrained.
The Generations Study
In the chapters that follow, the issues raised in this introduction will be drawn out as part of the discussion of the findings from âThe Generations Studyâ. This was a British Academy funded study about families where more than one generation had been a teenage mother, the intention being to explore how decisions were made in those families about when (or whether) to become a parent, and what differences and similarities there might be in the experiences of the generations across time. One key question was what role, if any, the older generation had in influencing the decisions of the younger one about becoming a teenage mother. In part, this was an exploration of whether there is any truth in the notion of underclass theorists such as Charles Murray (Murray 1990) that there is a transmission from one generation to another of a range of aspects of deprivation, thus perpetuating those cycles of disadvantage. Another angle on the same question was to explore whether there were aspects of local cultures, in other words influences beyond individual families, that meant certain local authorities in the UK regularly appeared towards the top of âleague tablesâ of teenage pregnancy rates. In other words, is it something that runs in families? Is it something that happens âround hereâ? And if so, why?
Chapter 2 begins by setting out the history of problematic motherhood, from the moral problems of illegitimacy and unmarried mothers, through lone parents, and finally to the appearance of teenage mothers as a social problem to be solved. The chapter discusses the policy approaches adopted over time, from an initial public health approach focussing on the well-being of the children, to a more recent argument encompassing the likely poor health of mother and child. This chapter also discusses international comparisons of teenage pregnancy, setting the UK in the context of European experience as well as the âAnglophone nationsâ (Chandola et al. 2002) of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA.
In Chapter 3, the settings where the fieldwork for âThe Generations Studyâ took place are introduced in order to illustrate the cultural, social and economic contexts within which the participants live. The inspiration for the study itself provides part of the background, and the chapter also sets out the theoretical frameworks that informed the study and the analysis.
Chapters 4 to 8 are the heart of the book, where we hear the participants tell their stories. The chapters take a chronological approach from becoming pregnant (in Chap. 4) and being a parent (in Chap. 5), while Chapter 6 explores how the young parents and their new baby sit within the family, both the new one they have created, and their wider networks of grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles. Chapter 7 focusses on the people who work with young parents in healthcare and welfare settings, and considers their views and accumulated knowledge about the local contexts within which they work. Chapter 8 looks to the future for the young parents, and discusses the aims and aspirations they have for themselves and their children.
In the concluding chapter, I discuss constructions of parenthood and motherhood in social, cultural and policy contexts, and explore the interactions between the individual biographies of the participants in the study and the familial and social settings and cultures in which they live. I introduce the concept of ârewriting the life scriptâ, an active process which young people undertake to make sense of themselves and their lives as parents. Finally I look to potential future policy developments which may impact upon the lives of young parents.
References
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Hadfield, L. Rudoe, N. and Sanderson-mann, J. (2007). Motherhood, choice and the British media: Time to reflect. Gender and Education, 19(2), 255â263.
Macvarish, J. (2010). The effect of ârisk-thinkingâ on the contemporary construction of teenage motherhood. Health, Risk & Society, 12(4), 313â322.CrossRef
Murray, C. (1990). The emerging British underclass. London: IEA.
Office for National Statistics. (2015). Statistical bul...