Mary Patrice Erdmans and Timothy Black: On Becoming a Teen Mom: Life Before Pregnancy

On becoming a teen mom: life before pregnancy, presents a unique perspective on the subject of teen motherhood in America. Erdmans and Black take one of the most important issues in society today, one that has been used both socially and politically to bolster numerous agendas and legislation, and approach it from a fairly novel direction. The authors choose to focus not on the culpability of the mothers for their pregnancies and lifestyles but on the familial, social, educational, and economic environments that these girls lived in both before and after becoming pregnant. Thus, they seek to understand the reasoning behind the decisions these young mothers make by considering the motivations and pressures they were facing at the time of their pregnancy decisions and those that they may continue to face in their daily lives. The methodology for achieving this understanding is presented in the book’s introduction and involves presenting the life stories of several of the teen mothers in conjunction with other data collected from the study to support the various arguments that the authors present. The first chapter of the book highlights how teen motherhood has become such a hot topic in today’s social and political arenas. The authors imply that teen pregnancy is an incredibly useful tool for politicians to use in bolstering their political image because it resonates on two basic fronts: it promotes religious and moral values of the ‘‘nuclear family’’ as American ideals and it confronts issues of welfare spending by emphasizing that lower teen birth rates would mean lower welfare expenditures. They suggest that both of these ideas stem from an undercurrent of racial fear and segregation. The issue of teen pregnancy is used as a platform to discuss welfare reform and urban crime rates. In the past, the majority of Americans were concerned with the growth, or ‘‘fertility,’’ of the underclass because it was seen as a threat to the established order or way of life. As a result, poverty-stricken communities have been prime targets for political and social advocates to use as examples of the importance and necessity of the policies proposed for poorer, ethnic communities (e.g., crime, teen pregnancy, truancy, welfare dependence). This is said to have helped fuel a racial undercurrent of fear in white majorities regarding the financial and moral stability of their country. Although the evidence shows that teen pregnancy rates are decreasing, these ideologies still affect the policies being written and enforced today. It is further suggested that these ideologies of ‘‘blame and shame’’ are being used as distractions from more pressing and less easily targeted social issues, such as poverty, lack of funding within the local education system, or gender and racial inequality. It is apparently easier to focus on the symptoms of these larger issues, such as crime rates and teen motherhood, than these causal issues that are in the public spotlight. The authors also discuss the selection of 108 racially and socio-economically diverse teenage mothers from Connecticut who comprised the research sample interviewed for their study. In the next chapter, the issue of young mothers, also known as ‘‘children having children,’’ is addressed in the context of child sexual abuse. While clearly supportive of protecting young children from abuse, the authors acknowledge the inherent difficulties in studying this population because the abusive situations are often complex and not easily categorized. The authors proceed to challenge three specific explanations for teen motherhood: poor parenting, high fertility rates within Latino communities, and & Stephen William Risk swrisk@indiana.edu