Teenage Pregnancy, Parenting, and Intergenerational Relations

In Teenage Pregnancy, Parenting and Intergenerational Relations, Sally Brown analyses how the discourse of teenage pregnancy affects experiences of reproduction for teenage parents from families ‘where grandparents and great-grandparents have themselves been teenage parents’ (p. 40). These are people who are popularly dehumanised as ‘benefit broods’, popularly disparaged as coming from families that are culturally ‘faulty’, and popularly condemned to intractable ‘cycles of disadvantage’ (p. 40). Brown's study illustrates how generations of teen parents have navigated reproduction in a world that perpetually sees their existence as a social problem. Her work is an attempt to alert policymakers to what teenage parents deserve: ‘not vilification [...] but commendation for doing a good job’ (p. 232). Brown begins with a thematic review of the UK's moral panic over teenage pregnancy under neoliberalism (chapter 2). Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s made teenage pregnancy a public health issue to avert health risks to the potential mother and child, reflecting long-standing concerns about the morality of sexually active youth. Subsequently, Labour governments from 1997 to 2010 cast teen pregnancy as a moral hazard to economic growth and as a risk factor for poor health and ‘social exclusion’. After Labour fell out of power in 2010, and with political capital from the 2011 London uprising, Coalition and Conservative governments attributed blame for social unrest to bad parenting practices among ‘lone mothers’ in ‘troubled families’ (p. 27). Through narrative analysis of in-depth interviews and focus groups with teenage parents from 30 different families spread across six locations in the UK, Brown demonstrates how ‘socially excluded’ mothers, depicted as single and as part of troubled families, are really nothing of the sort (p. 143). She provides readers with counter-narratives from several generations of women (and a few men) on the discovery of pregnancy (chapter 4), the achievement of parenthood (chapter 5), the important transitions in family that ensued (chapter 6), and on teenage parents’ orientations toward the future (chapter 8). Brown also collects narratives from 28 social service workers from the selected locations to understand how popular constructions of teenage parenthood relate to local understandings of the issue (chapter 7). Brown's study is important for UK policymakers because of its ability to dismiss popular claims that there is a generationally transmitted culture of early childbearing in certain poor communities and families. Nearly all of Brown's participants reported that their own parents actively tried to prevent teenage pregnancy prior to conception, and were initially disappointed on discovering their child's pregnancy. Brown's study also refutes popular claims that teenage reproduction is primarily a means to access resources from the state. Participants resist the idea that they are condemned to a life of being ‘on the dole’ (p. 206) because of teenage pregnancy and instead engage with what Brown calls ‘rewriting the life script’ (p. 217). This is a discursive technique that allows teenage mothers to see pregnancy as a critical moment where they can reorient their lives toward a more meaningful purpose. The value of Brown's study for sociologists interested in health and illness is its ability to situate the social problem of teenage pregnancy in the power relations of neoliberalism. Brown argues that the decades-long problematisation of teenage parenthood has produced a contemporary mentality among teenage parents that is fully compatible with neoliberalism. It becomes clear over the course of the book that the narrative of ‘rewriting the life script’, a way of reinventing the self to fit a changing external reality, emerges through a matrix of domination that is co-constituted by neoliberal economic policies. Brown's participants are caught between felt stigma from considering abortion, enacted stigma from experiencing teen pregnancy, and the risk of future stigma if they become bad parents, all while they exist at the bottom of an ageist, sexist, class structure that demands the assumption of heteronormative gender roles in the pursuit of family stability and financial independence. Unfortunately, Brown's critical awareness of social forces stops short of recognising race as a powerful influence on experiences of reproduction for teenage parents in the UK. Despite drawing heavily upon the American sociological literature on teenage reproduction, which takes seriously the meaning of race for gendered and classed reproductive experiences, Brown's work is explicitly colour-blind. Readers receive no information about the racial or ethnic identification of participants or their family members. We need only look to the role of race in sparking the London uprisings, and its subsequent role in the public discourse on ‘troubled families’, to understand that race matters to the stigmatisation of teenage parents in the UK. Ignoring race or ethnicity as an organising principle for social reality reduces the strength of Brown's study because it renders invisible a critical discourse of power in neoliberal societies. For example, if it were true that all of Brown's participants were White and had resided in the UK for several generations, we might be able to think about how white racial identity, and its material accoutrement, influences and shapes reproductive stigma for teenage parents and their families. By obscuring the influence of race or ethnicity, Brown's work will have a more limited contribution to a growing intersectional literature on the relationship between reproductive stigma and experiences of teenage pregnancy

Abortion · Blame · Criminology · Developmental psychology · Grandparent · Moral panic · Morality · Political science · Population · Pregnancy · Sociology · Teenage pregnancy · Demography · Family Dynamics and Relationships · Gender Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology

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