Reproducing Stories: Strategic Narratives of Teen Pregnancy and Motherhood

Abstract

Pregnant and parenting young women are simultaneously silenced and overrepresented by raced and classed social narratives on adolescent childbearing in the United States. These narratives posit teen childbearing as an unequivocal social, health, and economic problem, although some scholars and policy makers construct alternative narratives that focus on inequalities and propose different perspectives on causes and consequences. Narrative inquiry that analyzes how stories are produced and utilized can enable a more nuanced approach to complex social problems. We conducted 19 individual, in-depth, and semistructured interviews with young mothers ages 16 to 21 who attend a community-based alternative education program in a low-income northeastern city. Interviews were analyzed using thematic narrative techniques. The young mothers we interviewed used a process of strategic negotiation to distance themselves from prevailing social and cultural stories about the problem of teen motherhood. Participants demonstrated this strategic process through their attempts to assuage stigma and construct unproblematic identities. Young mothers reproduced and reinterpreted a variety of circulating narratives on teen childbearing. They reproduced dominant narratives through pathology, missed adolescence, and redemption stories, and reinterpreted dominant narratives through stories of stratified reproduction, sexual health education, and stigmatization and surveillance. Our participants' narratives illustrate the need to think broadly about the meanings of early pregnancy and motherhood in terms of how they play out in research and policymaking. We call for a discursive shift in ways of knowing about and doing research and policy surrounding teen childbearing.Pregnant and parenting young women 1 are one of the most disparaged groups to capture the attention of policy makers, educators, health and human service providers, and the public writ large. They are also simultaneously silenced and made hypervisible by the political, social, and moral narratives of teen childbearing in the United States-narratives that are raced and classed in particular ways (Pillow 2003). While these young women are at the center of a research and policy agenda that seeks to explain and prevent early childbearing, their voices are largely absent. We explore how one community of young mothers negotiates social narratives on teen childbearing. In a context where multiple-often pejorative-stories about teen pregnancy and parenting circulate in the media, schools, clinics, and among young women themselves, it is important to consider the stories that young mothers tell, in addition to how and why they tell them. Like all social actors, they are embedded in discursive contexts that delineate the pool of available stories, The authors would like to thank the project participants for sharing their thoughts on these important issues. This project would not have been possible without the assistance of Center staff and their enthusiastic engagement. Rossana Salazar pr...

Bodies as evidence: Mapping new terrain for teen pregnancy and parenting

“…The topic of teen pregnancy commonly positions young parents as either redeemable good mothers or irresponsible, bad biocitizens (Greenhalgh & Carney, 2014), without considering whole lives and lived experiences (Barcelos & Gubrium, 2014). The value of a participatory methodology such as body mapping is that rather than being an object to be analysed and mined for data, the research participant becomes a co-creator of knowledge and information.…”

Gender Perspectives on Social Norms Surrounding Teen Pregnancy: A Thematic Analysis of Social Media Data

“…Finally, the dominant social narratives on adolescent childbearing in the United States are based on both race and class [22], and disparities in US teen birth rates are reported by ethnicity and socioeconomic status [59,61,62]. Data limitations here did not, however, permit an exploration of normative differences by demographic characteristics beyond age.…”

“…After consultation with other authors, the first author sought to develop related etic codes from extant conceptual frameworks in qualitative studies on normative contexts of early childbearing. Three such studies were identified [22,31,54], and 10 resulting etic codes on social norms were used in analysis. Subsequently, a second codebook on social norms was developed specifically for the analysis of comments and associated responses that were initially coded as “Value Statements or Judgement Surrounding Teen Pregnancy.” In the final phase of analysis, the first author checked the integrity of the themes in relation to their component coded extracts as well as to the dataset as a whole.…”

“…A steady stream of professional and popular literature continues to circulate the narrative that early childbearing leads to considerable and devastating costs to the public and teen mothers and their children (for example, materials from New York City’s controversial 2013 campaign against teen pregnancy; Figure 1 [16]). Indeed, the dominant narrative in the United States deems teen pregnancy a social and public health problem [17-21], unequivocally bad for young women, their children, and society [22]. This dominant narrative is represented and mutually reinforced in multiple arenas including academic literature, media and popular discourse, and social policy [22,23].…”

“…Indeed, the dominant narrative in the United States deems teen pregnancy a social and public health problem [17-21], unequivocally bad for young women, their children, and society [22]. This dominant narrative is represented and mutually reinforced in multiple arenas including academic literature, media and popular discourse, and social policy [22,23].…”