Mid-American Review of Sociology, Volume 19, Number 1amp;2 (WINTER, SPRING 1996): Book Review (original) (raw)
Related papers
Teenage Girls and the Construction of Motherhood
The Sociological Review, 1980
Most women have kids because they don't want to be left out...'-SaUy, '.. Mothers would feet depressed. shopping, working, being in the same room, not seeing people. Makes you feel as though you've been left out...'-Carole. '^ See M. Young (ed.
Family Relations, 1991
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Life situation of teenage mothers
Medycyna Ogólna i Nauki o Zdrowiu, 2019
Introduction. Various factors, i.e. culture, economics, and education, are recognized as being related to the number of juvenile pregnancies worldwide. In Poland, teenage pregnancies account for 3.4-8% of all pregnancies. Juvenile pregnancy makes a teenage mother change her lifestyle, and motherhood in the period of adolescence influences her further functioning in psychological, social, medical, and legal domains. Objective. To discover what the life situation of teenage mothers is like, and to establish conditioning factors. Materials and method. A survey study using an original questionnaire was carried out among 308 teenage mothers, 13-19 years old in eight hospitals in Poland. The study obtained the consent of the Bioethics Committee of the Medical University in Lublin (KE No. 0254/157/2012). Results. The girls taking part in the study constituted a diverse group in terms of demographic and social characteristics. The youngest group were 13-15-year olds. Over half of the respondents (57.1%) were rural residents, most (70.8%) of them unmarried and economically dependent on their parents (88.6%). The age difference between the child's mother and father was on average four years, and was statistically significant (p <0.00001). Conclusions. The life situation of teenage mothers must be considered difficult due not only to their young age, but also the necessity to stop school education, lack of work and economic independence, an uncertain future with the child's father, and / or a shortage of social support. There is a need for appropriate education regarding human sexuality, including issues of fertility, emotional relations and responsibility.
The Long-Term Evolution of the Family Structure of Teenage and Older Mothers
Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1982
Research into the evolution of the, family structure is important in understanding the consequences of teenage motherhood. In this longitudinal study of black, urban mothers in Woodlawn, a Chicago community, we compare 15 years of family evolution of teenage and older mothers. Teenage mothers not only frequently begin child rearing as the only adult at home but also are at high risk of becoming the only adult and remaining so as long as 15 years after the child's birth. This tendency towards mother aloneness is associated with less help in child rearing and less participation in voluntary organizations. Article: * The authors wish to acknowledge the crucial contributions of the Woodlawn community, its families and children, and the board members who over the last 18 years have provided support and guidance for this research and service enterprise. Rose Bates, a member of the Community Advisory Committee, has been particularly important to this work in the last few years. The teachers and principals of the Chicago public schools and the Chicago Archdiocesan schools were essential contributors. The school district superintendents, Mr. Byron Minor, Mr. Jack Mitchell, and Dr. Donald Blythe, were extremely helpful. Dr. Curtis Melnick, formerly Associate Superintendent, and Mr. George Flores of the Chicago Board of Education were especially important. Our thanks to Jeannette Branch, formerly Director of the Southside Youth Program, who has been involved in all aspects of the research. We are grateful to Jennifer Giancarlo for executing the diagrams.
Deleuze and the Teenage Mother: Trouble Makers for Education and Transition
A Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century, 2000
Well, I left school when I was 17. I was pregnant; I wanted to continue my education but they asked me if there was anything I had to tell them and, when I told them I was pregnant, they told me that it wasn't possible to be at school. I was out of school for years before I came back here and enrolled to do Year 11. It was a really big step to come back when you've been out of the system. (Sara, quoted in Shacklock, Harrison, Angwin and Kamp 2006, 25). I've been motivated since the day I found out about the school and having that opportunity to come back and right things that I didn't do so well the first time around. I knew this time I wanted to do it right and do my best. (Katie, quoted in Harrison, Angwin and Shacklock 2010, 43). The title of this chapter is doing some work, albeit in a somewhat awkward fashion. Giles Deleuze appears, philosopher of a "bastard kind" (Massumi 1992, 1). Deleuze opens the work because he, and his concepts, do something they are rather good at: a bit of troubling, a bit of "prying open" of habitual ways of thinking (Massumi 1987, xv). In this chapter that bit of troubling and prying open is directed toward a rethinking of youth transition and the role of schools in that particular form of 'becoming'. Teenage mothers appear as they, too, are 'known' to be trouble makers: the 'teenage mother' signifier is by default a negative one. As Sara found, 'teenage mother' as a signifier doesn't rest easily alongside 'school girl' as a signifier. It is this assemblage of teenager+parent+school studenta gathering in which I too was once involved (Kamp and Kelly forthcoming)that is the focus of this chapter. I engage with my prying by plugging into the academic literature and empirical research 1 In this chapter I deliberately use the term 'teenage mother' for two reasons: first, the dominant (negative) use of category 'teenage mother'; second, in recognition of the gendered nature of the 'parenting problem' notwithstanding that an equal number of young men, some of them teenagers, must become parents. undertaken in Australia on the becomings of those young people, most commonly young woman, who through their 'becoming-parent' form or reform their connections with the education system. In this becoming they create assemblages that can be profoundly troubling for schools. In doing this work I am taking up an approach similar to Nancy Lesko's (1995, 180), where she reflected on her need to "write against the grain" and hold onto the "simultaneous statuses as mother, student, wage earner, family member, young person with racial identity, and sexual being" of the teenage mother as student. For me, it seems Lesko was connecting to the concept of becoming, a concept that portrays young people as multiplicity, continually transforming themselves according to the thresholds they cross within the course of their lives. Becoming a parent, becoming-parent, is a very powerful threshold to cross (at whatever age it occurs). A threshold is a point at which, by definition, connection occurs. In crossing the threshold new possibilities appear for a line of flight where established arrangements, identities, trajectories are disrupted; relations change their tone, register and directionality (Rabinow 2009). When the parenting threshold is crossed in the context of schools profound, and enduring, tensions are brought into play. These tensions challenge the limits of signifiers such as 'school', 'teacher', 'school girl', 'adult' and 'child'signifiers that are created and sustained by the habitual operation of what Massumi (1992) refers to as The World As We Know It. This brings a further consideration into the discussion. Human beings are not the only actors who are in a process of becoming: educational structures such as schools are also multiplicities, albeit "disciplined" ones (Massumi 1992, 55). School becoming is, however, of a different kind: a "making-the-same" (Massumi 1992, 106). Schools are calibrated for students to follow one linear trajectory through and beyond education in a timely, ageappropriate, independent manner. In this one might suggest that, for students such as Sara and Katie who want to continue their education through and beyond their pregnancy, schools are the trouble makers. Yet while we might understand schools as a 'whole' given the forms of expression conventionally available to us, this understanding is limited: there are 'cracks' in schools in which becomings of other kinds can and do occur. It is these becoming-spaces and how they can contribute to the parent+student+... assemblage that I pursue in this chapter in the task of troubling education+training+transitions+critical youth studies. The Teenage Mother as a Lost Cause While teenagers from all social classes become pregnant it is those from disadvantaged social groups who are more likely to persist with their pregnancy and become teenage parents (Angwin and Kamp 2007; Kelly 2000; Lesko 1995). The reasons for this correlation are not my focus here. However, the consequences of it are, particularly in regard to the ways that media representations evoke the working-class teenage mother and a particular, disgusted, attitude toward her. Imogen Tyler (2008) provides a startling overview in her exploration of the new vocabulary of class in Britain: the working class white "chav" with its compulsory teenage mother, in many ways embodied by Vicky Pollard, the fictional construction of David Walliams and Matt Lucas in the television series Little Britain: The reason Vicky Pollard caught the public imagination is that she embodies with such fearful accuracy several of the great scourges of contemporary Britain: aggressive all female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who'll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye. (Delingpole 2006, 25) These media portrayals sit alongside other less strident, but equally powerful, portrayals that associate teenage parenting with a range of behaviours and consequential disadvantages for the teenage mother, for the child, "for society in general and taxpayers in particular" (UNICEF 2001, 3). The dominant portrayal of the teenage parent remains overwhelmingly negative: teenage mothers are "the epitome of the problematic mother" (Silva 1996, 8), both social threat and social victim (McDermott and Graham 2005; Selman 2003). The general consensus has been that long-term economic, social and health risks suggested to be associated with teenage parenting are elevated when combined with prior
Just Managing: American Middle-Class Parenthood in Insecure Times
Social reproduction is high-stakes drivel, childhood much the same. Unrecognized by most analysts of political economy and class formation, the material social practices associated with social reproduction in all their grind and glory are-like childhood itself-critical to the making, maintenance, and any possibility for remaking social and political-economic life. In a time of economic crisis the stakes are that much higher, and can perhaps be felt most acutely around childhood or, more precisely, parenthood, since aspirations are commonly defined, managed, reached, and deferred in and through the family, among other sites. The time-spaces of middleclass everyday life intrigue me, and are a way to get at its heart in every sense of the term. The generational and intergenerational strivings up and fallings down; the spatial expressions of class position and its protection through comportment, style, distance, and increasingly through bunkering; and its imagined but fraught horizons-all suggest some of the ways the middle class is a "field of dreams" in always already turbulent times and heterogeneous spaces. At the heart of social reproduction, the family tenders a cluster of practices that reach toward and modulate possible futures for its members, defining as it mediates a battery of aspirations and scrambles to manage the risks associated with them.