Teen Mums
The Age
Wednesday December 29, 1993
Today's teenage mothers are unlikely to fit the traditional stereotype of the irresponsible drop-out seeking a welfare cheque. Yet the stigma surrounding teenage pregnancy remains well-entrenched.
`PREGNANCY changed my life, but it didn't ruin it, like a lot of people said it would. It changed it for the better." Janelle Voyer's experience of teenage parenthood is a measure of how the prospects for young mothers have changed during the past decade or so, as well as of her own strength and optimism.
A social worker, closer in age to Ms Voyer's mother's generation, recalls the way things used to be. As a teenager, she had watched a pregnant cousin spend ``several long months sitting on the veranda of (her) parents' Queensland farmhouse" until her baby was born and adopted. The cousin never saw her baby: ``Real life had been put on hold for my cousin and would resume when she reappeared in her own place in the city, as if nothing had happened."
Ms Voyer, like so many other teenage mothers today, is as far from the traditional stereotypes as she is from that cousin on the veranda.
In the late 1970s, welfare workers spoke of teenage girls getting pregnant deliberately. ``The Superdoll Syndrome" as outlined by welfare workers interviewed for a 1979 newspaper feature runs like this: ``To a certain type of immature girl who has had a rotten homelife, a baby has become a kind of superior walkie-talkie doll".
Such teenagers, the article claimed, were getting pregnant deliberately to obtain social security benefits or something to love, or to avoid the boredom of the dole queues. Then, when they found the baby was more than they could cope with, it would be given for adoption.
Since then, the theme has reappeared every year or so, in a succession of media reports with headings like: `Warning! Dramatic Rise in Teenage Pregnancy', `No Job So Rose Has a Baby', `Teenage Pregnancy Used as Trip to Welfare' and `Pregnancy _ Status Symbol of Jobless Girls'. Yet none of these articles give any evidence of an increase in teenage pregnancy. Nor do they substantiate the claims that teenagers were entering parenthood deliberately to obtain benefits or to avoid the dole queues.
In fact, national teenage birth rates dropped dramatically during most of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly since the introduction of the Supporting Mother's Benefit in 1973. Brotherhood of St Laurence figures show that teenage ex-nuptially conceived birth rates declined steadily, from 38.8 per thousand in 1972 to 17.4 per thousand in 1988, against a trend of rising unemployment.
However, those teenagers who do give birth today are less likely to marry during pregnancy or to give up their children for adoption.
Hence they tend to be more visible.
The research also shows that very few young single mothers plan to be pregnant: eight per cent in a London study; between nine and 20 per cent in several Victorian samples. None of the young women studied in these confidential surveys said they planned to be pregnant for motives such as welfare benefits or because they were unemployed. But while most teenage pregnancies are unplanned, the babies are seldom unwanted.
Outcomes are also better than expected. In the United States, a health researcher, Arlene T.Geronimus, conducted a 20-year follow-up study of young women aged 14-24 in 1968. She found that those who had become pregnant early were ``perhaps healthier and better off economically than if they had waited". The teen years ``may be the optimal time for child-bearing among those who have grown up (with) and continue to face persistent poverty," she told a conference in 1990.
A study of 79 teenage mothers by Ann Phoenix, a researcher at the University of London, found that most had not had their careers or education opportunities limited by motherhood _ largely because they had backgrounds of poverty and were not academically or career-minded to begin with. Ms Phoenix found that most of the children were healthy, warmly welcomed and wanted at birth, and 82 per cent were breastfed.
During the two-year study, most of the mothers and children had fared well in difficult circumstances. The mothers reported a high degree of satisfaction from caring for their children, as well as some regrets.
Only a few believed that motherhood had permanently excluded other options, while, for some, motherhood had been a spur to getting extra qualifications and employment.
Similarly, a 1989 Melbourne study of 81 young teenage mothers by Patsy Littlejohn, a former lecturer in social biology at RMIT and the coordinator of the Teenage Pregnancy Interest Group, found that only 28 per cent were in school or tertiary courses at the time they became pregnant, and all but six per cent dropped out during pregnancy. Yet three years later, with 81 children ranging in age from younger than six months to three years, between 32 and 50 per cent of the women (depending on the age of the child) had returned to part or full-time education.
In ancient societies, it was accepted that teenagers made excellent mothers, just as we now accept that they make excellent babysitters and nannies. It is only our modern, sophisticated societies that question their motherhood, and then generally only if they are single.
Janelle Voyer, now 24, became pregnant at 17, when she was working in a shop and living in a relationship that had turned violent. ``Being pregnant gave me the strength to leave, because I thought `My baby and I deserve better than that'," she said. ``I went back to school and I started to plan my life." For two years she worked with the Nursing Mothers Association, giving support to other young mothers, and now she works as an integration aide in a school. She plans to have a profession by the time she is 30.
For Ms Voyer the worst aspect of being a young mother was that ``everybody is waiting to pass judgment". For three years until her marriage, she managed to live on the pension by budgeting carefully and sharing a unit with another mother.
For Debbie Kennedy, pregnancy came at a time when she had ``lost track of my life". She was 16 years old, technically homeless, drinking too much and smoking too much marijuana. Motherhood has changed all that.
``It made me look at my life and all I wanted to do was to make the best life I could for this baby. It made me appreciate myself and realise I was a worthwhile person."
From where Janice Dedman sits, society's attitudes have changed little over the past 18 years. She was 16 when she gave birth to a daughter in 1975. For her, too, the worst part was the talk: mostly people commenting that she was ``so young". Even now, people find it extraordinary that she should have an 18-year-old.
When her daughter went to primary school, Ms Dedman returned to study and went on to complete an arts degree at Swinburne. Since then, she has worked as a corrections officer, supervising offenders on community service orders, and has managed a special accommodation house for elderly people.
The best thing about being a teenage mother, she recalls, was ``having lots of energy and doing so many things together".
Judith Dwyer, an Adelaide health worker, says that two-thirds of the decline in the teenage ex-nuptial birth rate during the past 20 years is due to contraception and the other one-third to increased abortion.
Ms Kennedy has nothing against abortion, but says it was not for her, even though her pregnancy was also unplanned. She says: ``Some of the research says young women of low socio-economic backgrounds keep our babies because we don't have as many options as middle-class women. I think it's because young women from difficult backgrounds know we can do anything we put our minds to."
Yet, while the evidence is that teenage motherhood is not necessarily a life sentence to the scrap heap of society, the experts warn that it is difficult. Ms Littlejohn says the harsh reality is that the majority of teenage mothers do live in poverty, with 80 per cent dependent on the supporting parents benefit _ which, combined with other benefits, is generally less than $500 a fortnight. Social isolation and access to permanent, affordable accomodation are also very real problems.
© 1993 The Age
Share This