Becoming a young mother: Teenage pregnancy and parenting policy

Introduction

The dominant policy and media discourses which construct teenage pregnancy and motherhood as a mistake and a cause of social exclusion were solidly entrenched during New Labour’s period in government, with policy makers remaining seemingly impervious to voices critical of this construction. Duncan (2007), for example, in asking ‘What’s the problem with teenage parents? And what’s the problem with policy?’, concluded that teenage parenting ‘could be seen as more opportunity than catastrophe’ (Duncan, 2007: 329). New Labour’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy must be viewed in the context of that government’s wider attempts to tackle social exclusion and anti-social behaviour, this behaviour being framed around discourses of moral pathology and deficit of the working class (McCarthy, 2011; Skeggs and Loveday, 2012). The Strategy’s wider context also encompassed Sure Start (providing services for young children and their families, aiming to promote development of pre-school children in disadvantaged areas), which again demonstrates tensions between the important shift of resources to parents of young children, while at the same time focusing on ‘the manipulation of the child’s immediate environment, primarily individual maternal behaviour, rather than on structural inequalities’ (Clarke, 2006: 716). This exclusive focus on maternal behaviour is exacerbated by the acute social divisions that exist between mothers (Thomson et al., 2011).

This study was undertaken with a focus on New Labour’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy (1999–2010), which aimed to halve the number of teenage conceptions in England and Wales (by implementing, amongst other strands, improved sex and relationships education and access to contraception and sexual health services) and to increase the participation of young parents in education, employment and training. From 1998 to 2011, the estimated conception rate for women in England and Wales aged under 18 decreased by 34% (ONS, 2013). While the Strategy ended in 2010, teenage pregnancy has remained an area of policy interest. The current government has included the under 18 conception rate as one of its three sexual health indicators in its Public Health Outcomes Framework (2013–2016) and it is one of the national measures of progress in relation to child poverty (ONS, 2013). My study considered the impact of policy discourses and interventions upon the experiences of young mothers who were participating in antenatal and parenting courses at a vocational training provider in London. This article is framed within the increasing political focus on the importance of parenting and parenting skills, in a context in which ‘policy makers have sought to establish parenting as a complex skill which must be learnt’ (Gillies, 2011: 4), and which has involved the targeting of particular ‘problem’ or ‘risk’ groups such as pregnant teenagers (Churchill and Clarke, 2010).

Young motherhood, parenting and regulation

While New Labour’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy involved significant investment into education both to reduce teenage conception rates and to encourage young parents’ participation in education, it simultaneously categorised teenage mothers as ‘socially excluded’, unreservedly casting teenage pregnancy as a mistake, leading to negative economic and health outcomes. A large body of work in relation to teenage pregnancy has critically interrogated this problematisation (for example, Kidger, 2004; McDermott and Graham, 2005; Alldred and David, 2007; Duncan, 2007; Arai, 2009; Stapleton, 2010), pointing out, amongst other issues, the problems inherent in relying upon economic measures of inclusion and exclusion and in neglecting relational and local dimensions. MacDonald et al. (2005), for example, in relation to people ‘objectively’ categorised as ‘socially excluded’, stress the importance of their feeling of being included in strong and supportive family and social networks. Teenage pregnancy is not necessarily considered problematic or undesirable in some families and communities (Arai, 2009).

While all pregnant women are to a certain extent subject to disciplining ‘into the correct modes of behaviour’ (Gross and Pattison, 2007: 2), particular attention has long been paid to (working-class, young) women considered potentially unfit to mother. The term ‘teenage pregnancy’ came into use in the 1960s (Phoenix, 1991), with the teenage unmarried mother depicted as a moral problem. In the 1970s the psychological problematisation of the teenage mother became more prominent with concern around her adolescent emotional immaturity (Koffman, 2012). Following this period, the development of neoliberal ideas encouraged the denigration of the ‘welfare scrounger’. The Head Start programme, beginning in 1960s America, sought to provide early intervention for children in deprived communities, and this was an inspiration for Sure Start in the UK initiated by the New Labour government in 1998, which was a cornerstone initiative in their determination to pursue ‘early intervention’ as a way to tackle social exclusion.

The Coalition government has intensified the focus on early intervention, maintaining some investment in Sure Start, as well as funding programmes such as the Family Nurse Partnership (again originating in the US, this provides nurse home visiting for first-time young mothers on the basis of an identification of ‘at-risk’ families (Dodds, 2009)) and the CAN Parent scheme, a network of parenting classes run by independent organisations including the National Childbirth Trust and Parent Gym. The government is keen to normalise and de-stigmatise parenting classes, with evidence suggesting a certain level of demand for classes (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2012) and also of effectiveness (Day et al., 2012), although take-up of CAN Parent classes has been slow (Cullen et al., 2013).

Parent Gym classes are described as being ‘located in areas of multiple deprivation, not because these parents are in any way less effective (sometimes, quite the opposite) but because wealthier parents have easier access to other sources of guidance and advice’ (Parent Gym, 2012). Co-founder Octavius Black is quoted as saying, ‘There is no correlation between the quality of parenting and wealth. There are great parents at all levels of the social scale and there are parents who could do better’ (Griffiths, 2012: 6). This idea forms part of what I later refer to as a ‘common sense’ discourse around parenting: that social class is not related to parenting ability.

However, critics have pointed to governments’ preoccupation with parenting behaviour change rather than addressing the problems of social structures (Clarke, 2006). Gillies (2005a: 71) has argued that ‘the government’s commitment to “supporting” parents is driven by a particular moral agenda that seeks to regulate and control the behaviour of marginalized families’, with little attention paid to the significance of economic resources in the promotion of life chances. The Coalition’s recent focus on intervention for ‘troubled families’ has similarly engendered criticism for its conflation of severely disadvantaged families with families that cause trouble and again for locating the problem in the behaviour of the poor (Levitas, 2012). Churchill and Clarke (2010: 51) argue that policies focusing on parent behaviour must be ‘integrated with policies that address the structural obstacles to social inclusion … [and which transform] the wider environment in which such families live’.

Methods

This article draws on an interview- and participant observation-based ESRC-funded ¹ doctoral study with fieldwork conducted during 2007 and 2008. My research examined young pregnant and parenting women’s changing identities in the context of an alternative educational setting, relating these to questions of social inclusion and exclusion. My data are drawn from interviews with sixteen pregnant young women and mothers between the ages of 16 and 20, and with all members of staff at the educational setting. I spent one afternoon a week at the setting for seven months as a participant observer, as the young women worked (three days a week) towards a portfolio-based Level One qualification (equivalent of grades D–G at General Certificate of Secondary Education, national examinations taken at age 16) consisting of life and parenting skills as well as other Key Skills at Level One. Two midwives provided a monthly antenatal session at the setting. The young women, either having left or been excluded from school or college, were paid fifty pounds a week to attend the programme. They were mainly of mixed White/Black Caribbean, Black Caribbean, and White parentage, and came from working-class backgrounds. I conducted semi-structured interviews, taking a biographical approach, and also asking the young women and staff for their views on teenage pregnancy and policy; these were recorded and transcribed. I undertook a thematic analysis of the data, as well as drawing on narrative and discourse analytic approaches (Riessman, 2008; Phoenix, 2008), in particular, the concept that discourses function in regulatory ways to define, categorise and exclude groups such as teenage mothers. This article employs an approach bringing together analyses of gender and social class; while dimensions relating to ethnicity are important, they are not considered directly here.

Young women’s responses to the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy

Most of the young women in the study reacted to the idea that government policy was trying to reduce teenage pregnancy with scepticism and defensiveness, stating that the government could not stop people from having babies:

Taylor: And how are they gonna do that? They can’t stop us from having sex. What are they gonna do? Handcuff us, you know what I’m saying? If they wanna handcuff us, they handcuff us to the bed, mate, then we’ll make more [laughs]! I’m being honest. You can’t stop teenagers from having babies.

Jade had a similar response:

Some people generally want to have kids young. Seriously some people, from really young, have always wanted to have babies. You can’t stop it, and if somebody really doesn’t want to have a baby, they’ll have an abortion. If I really didn’t want to have this baby, I would have had an abortion. But you can’t prevent somebody, you cannot do it. And, why do they class it as just ‘teenage pregnancy’? It’s just somebody having a baby. Forget the teenage bit, coz in a couple of years they’ll be a adult.

Mia similarly suggests that while more information and advice is necessary, it will be an individual’s choice as to whether to have a baby:

You can’t stop somebody from, you can only talk, give encouragement, advice and education, but at the end of the day, it’s down to the individual whether they want to listen to that or not. However, accidents happen and also you have to remember rapes, and all that stuff, so all the government can do is give advice and education, and also … more teaching about sex education, I think that should be brought up a bit more. … whatever they say to me, you’re too young to have the child or whatever, I say to them, well, for your information, I think this is the best time that I’ve had a child actually.

Mia’s statement that it is the ‘best time’ for her contradicts the policy construction of teenage years as the worst time to have a baby. Carabine (2007) argues that New Labour policy on teenage pregnancy attempted to produce a self-governing, knowledgeable and rational individual, a young woman who, equipped with effective sex education, can then be held responsible for making the ‘right’ decision to delay motherhood. This is almost the position that Mia takes up, echoing the pragmatic realism and distancing from a conservative moral framework that Carabine suggests is infused in policy. Carabine argues that New Labour approaches to improving sex education ignored the ‘chaos and unpredictability of desire’ (2007: 960) and that while policy did not stigmatise pregnant teenagers for making an immoral choice, it did stigmatise them on the basis of their lack of responsibility with information given to them and lack of rational choice to delay motherhood. While providing comprehensive sex education is far from the sole solution to the ‘problem’, it remains important. New Labour did not go far enough in terms of a progressive approach to young people’s sexuality and breaking out of the promotion of traditional family forms, and did not achieve its intention to make PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education) part of the compulsory curriculum; the subject remains non-statutory under the Coalition.

Taylor, Jade and Mia here demonstrate themselves as reflexive subjects who contradict yet are not able to disrupt policy discourses. Some of the other young women, however, had a more mediated response to this question, and their narratives are more cautious:

Claudia’s response addresses policy concerns succinctly: having a baby as a teenager may not be the right time, but it is never a mistake. She also expresses her scepticism at policy intending to reduce the number of teenage pregnancies, a sentiment echoed strongly by the midwife who provided antenatal education at the setting, who felt that this was a very class-based judgement, and commented to me that the government had about as much chance of halving the teenage conception rate as they had of flying her to the moon. When I interviewed Claudia, her daughter was 14 months old and Claudia had just begun a childcare course. Although she did not regret having her daughter, and spoke of her love for her, she told me that she did regret becoming sexually active at the age of 15, and that the reality of the difficulties of childbirth and parenting had shocked her.

Danielle similarly articulated two sides of the issue to me, also drawing on the idea that having a baby as a teenager was ‘good for some people’. Notably, Claudia and Danielle do not place themselves in the category of young women for whom having a baby was a way of calming them down or seeking love that they had never had. Danielle’s first pregnancy had been accidental, but her second was planned and very much wanted:

Like when young mums say who is the government to say that they can’t [have a baby] – it’s true. Coz it’s their body and they can do what they want with it. At the same breath, yeah, you haven’t lived your life. … And that’s why I think the government are right in what they’re saying, because everyone should get an education first before they think of kids, and be into work, because otherwise they are just gonna be living off benefits. … some people have lives where they never got loved, so they want a baby to like kind of reflect and want someone to love them back, so that’s why I feel like sometimes it is good for some people, because it’s for their sanity as well. … But there’s certain people who’ll do it just to get a house or a council property or for the money and stuff like that and that’s where it becomes all a bit like, why are you doing that? … So it’s hard to put a view on it, because it’s wrong and right for certain people.

Danielle begins by employing a feminist defence of the autonomy of the female body against the control of the (masculine) state, although she then goes on to acknowledge that at the same time, the government does have a point: it is wise to gain an education before having children. Interestingly, Danielle is very clear about the girls for whom pregnancy is wrong: those who are doing it for a council flat or benefits. While Danielle sought to distinguish herself from girls who became pregnant because they were looking for love, she was not critical of them.

In response to my questioning them about policy, Kim and Melanie, however, both drew on dominant discourses of teenagers being too young to have babies. Kim, who was pregnant at interview, and Melanie, the 20-year-old mother of 2-year-old twin boys, both felt that they should have waited before having children. Despite the fact that Melanie had stressed to me that she had experienced considerably more than other teenagers, felt she was an adult from the age of 16, and already felt very responsible before her pregnancy, she thought she would have coped better being older:

From all of these responses it is possible to see a range of discourses infused in the young women’s narratives; sometimes an acknowledgement on the one hand of the difficulties of early motherhood is mixed with an assertion that it might be a positive decision and experience for some. These narratives complicate the black and white casting of teenage motherhood as ‘always a mistake’.

‘Working-class’ mothering: Parenting skills and support

The two tutors who worked with the young women, Leyla and Suzanne, developed close relationships with many of them, encouraging them to go to the weekly yoga class offered, and to eat healthily, to give up smoking, to breastfeed, and to consider what they might do educationally after they had their babies. While the class backgrounds of the tutors and the young women were similar – Leyla and Suzanne both identified as ‘normal working-class’ from the ‘ghetto’ – the tutors took on a didactic relationship to the young women, at the same time as forming caring relationships with them. Leyla, who had two children and was pregnant with her first child at 19, described herself as ‘from a normal working-class family, I’m a normal working-class person myself’. While Leyla was very protective and defensive about the young women’s early pregnancies, she admitted that she would be ‘devastated’ if her teenage daughter got pregnant, saying that she had ‘high hopes for my children [aged 12 and 7], that they will study, go to university, have a career and then engage in that side of things’. I asked Leyla what she thought about the concept of parenting education:

Leyla presents herself as a parent who is able to invest time in learning parenting skills, and as able to discipline her children by ‘talking alone’ without resorting to the ‘naughty step’ or to physical punishment; she does not need Supernanny’s strategies, while at the same time indicating their value for other (less competent) parents. While her narrative here constructs her as a successful mother who does not allow her children to get out of control in the way that ‘failing’ parents on Supernanny do, Leyla affirms the general benefits of acquiring parenting skills.

Suzanne also felt very strongly about the importance of parenting, saying that she thought there was a need for parenting classes since ‘you don’t just naturally learn how to be a parent’. In response to a question about teenage pregnancy and social exclusion, she commented:

I don’t know, it’s hard to be judgemental. A lot of things come down to parenting. I feel bad saying it, but as a parent myself, I can only hope, I’ve made it top of my list to install the right ethics and morals into my son so that he can grow up and be grounded and be a leader not a follower and all those things I’ve been conscious about as a parent. You may call me extra conscious or a normal parent, but some parents don’t have that, and if they don’t have that consciousness of bringing up their children and they don’t worry about school and they don’t support them, it comes down to that …

Again here Suzanne, similarly to Leyla, distances herself from ‘some [other, failing] parents’, while at the same time she indicates the difficulty in defining ‘normal’ – and by extension – ‘good’ parenting. In being a single parent without any support from her son’s father, Suzanne was raising her son in difficult conditions, similarly to many of the young women on the course. Suzanne felt that a ‘support network’ for teenage mothers was important:

if it’s happening, and teenagers are deciding that they want to go ahead and have the baby – which is completely their right to do that – then the support network needs to be there in order to do that, coz otherwise we will have people bringing up children who maybe lack certain skills, certain knowledge, and that can be dangerous. … most of them are actually incredible mums – when they come in with their babies, they’re absolutely incredible and they surprise me every time, but I think sometimes with the immaturity, the mentality, just not living enough life, sometimes that worries me a little bit.

Even though here Suzanne refers to a ‘lack’ that can be ‘dangerous’, or uses a deficit discourse, it is contextualised in her statement that most of the young women are ‘incredible mums’, a powerful adjective of praise in this context.

Karen, who was the course manager, similarly emphasised a need for post-natal support (describing something similar to the concept of the Family Nurse Partnership [FNP]):

I think it would be much more beneficial to the young person … in an ideal world, the health visitor would continue to support a young person, or even an older person, if they haven’t had that support before, for a period of time after having the baby, to ensure that they are confident in knowing when the baby’s hungry, and breastfeeding and changing nappies and bathing – all those silly questions that you want to ask and can’t, or you feel intimidated to ask in a class. And again, young people learn through mentoring and through support, more on a one-to-one basis than in a group session when it comes to parenting. Because a lot of the time they feel embarrassed to ask the questions in front of other people.

Gillies (2005a) argues that ‘support’ in New Labour terms became a shorthand for guidance, education and parenting classes. There is obviously a difference between universally available support (in this case, the minimum contact that a health visitor will have with mothers is one home visit shortly after birth) and targeted support such as the FNP (visits to mothers occur regularly until the child is two). The Coalition plans to extend and strengthen health visiting services in addition to its promotion of the FNP, indicating an increase in the amount of ‘support’ available for all mothers. The actual nature and manifestation of ‘support’ seems crucial in the context of its interpretation as compulsory ‘intervention’.

Much sociological work has investigated the differences between working- and middle-class parenting in relation to educational or childcare practices (Walkerdine et al., 2001; Gillies, 2005b; Vincent et al., 2008). Care must be taken to avoid a ‘blunt middle class/working class dichotomy’ (Vincent and Ball, 2007: 1062) in terms of these practices. Nevertheless, research has stressed that working-class family practices should not be seen as pathological, but as ‘produced in an attempt to adapt to much more difficult conditions’ (Walkerdine et al., 2001: 120). Working-class parents have limited economic resources with which to meet ‘good mothering’ criteria (Braun et al., 2008), and may be engaged in giving their children emotional resources to boost their resilience (Gillies, 2005b). They are ‘less likely to see their children as a project for development’ in terms of involvement in ‘enrichment activities’ (Vincent and Ball, 2007: 1068). Gillies describes New Labour early intervention initiatives as a regulation of working-class childrearing practices, ‘part of an almost evangelical drive to equip working-class parents with the skills to raise middle-class children’ (2005b: 838). This course appeared to demonstrate a softer, more sympathetic approach, and the varied self-positioning and views of the tutors and – as I will later demonstrate – the young women, suggested a diversity of working-class parenting ethics (Irwin and Elley, 2011).

As part of my study I interviewed a worker from Connexions (an information, advice and guidance service for young people), Caroline, at a local school, who expressed a strong opinion in relation to distinctions between working- and middle-class parenting:

Caroline here draws on a ‘common sense’ discourse (that criteria of good parenting can be agreed upon and are not class-bound), and does not make any reference to the idea that working-class parents have fewer economic and cultural resources to bring to bear on their parenting. She implies that ‘support and guidance and love’ are things that every parent can and should provide. However, what Vincent (2010) calls ‘professional mothering’ (the practice of middle-class parents seeking out and evaluating advice in relation to their children) goes beyond support, guidance and love; this kind of mothering, Vincent argues, has become normalised and is universally promoted. I am suggesting here that Caroline, Suzanne and Leyla did not necessarily see middle-class economic and cultural resources as crucial to successful parenting, but they did place importance on acquiring skills and receiving support. They were invested in the value of the intervention they were providing.

Maternal learning

Several of the young women attended a parenting course that was later offered alongside the antenatal provision. Sabrina had placed her daughter in a nursery for three days a week from the age of three months, so that she could attend the course, and was planning to study for her A-levels the following year. The parenting course was accredited as a certificate at different levels in a similar way to the antenatal course, and contained three mandatory units: Child Safety, Practical Parenting, and Bonding and Play, aimed at new parents with little or no experience of childcare and child development.

I was able to observe two sessions of this course, and one afternoon I sat with the mothers while they were working on the Bonding unit, which was focused on how children develop through bonding and play. One mother, Natalie, was using an Argos catalogue to find appropriate toys to complete a table to show ‘social’, ‘emotional’, ‘physical’ and ‘intellectual’ toys for babies’ developmental stages. Zaide, who had a 7-month-old daughter, was doing a wordsearch that was part of the unit, but the tutor encouraged her to do the task together with Natalie. Zaide pointed to the word ‘physical’ and asked me ‘what’s that?’ I read the word to her and asked if she knew what it meant and she said yes. I asked her if she found the course useful and she smirked and shook her head. Natalie had put down ‘baby gym’ under ‘physical’, and Zaide, seeing this, commented, ‘I’ve got a baby gym – so what?’ Zaide here appeared to resist the idea that she needed to be taught how to bond and play with her daughter. The extent to which Zaide was participating in the course of her own volition was not clear; when I asked her if she felt she had a choice as to whether to be a full-time mother, or participate in education, she told me that she felt she did not, and that the Job Centre had told her that she had to be in education. New Labour policy in relation to teenage pregnancy simultaneously encouraged young mothers to place their children in childcare and return to education, and to gain education in parenting skills, skills which must then be put into practice outside of working hours. As Lister (2006: 61) comments, ‘the responsibilities expected of parents … [place] strains on lone mothers in particular. On the one hand they are increasingly being encouraged to participate in the labour market as responsible citizens while, on the other, they are exhorted to do more to control their children’s behaviour and involve themselves in their education as responsible parents’. Levitas similarly suggests that the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy ‘compels’ young mothers to place their children in childcare and return to school, and that the ‘suggested exclusion of young women from their social role, obligation and status as mothers, and exclusion of children from their family of origin, is social exclusion of a profound kind’ (2005: 197). It was unclear as to whether Zaide was typical of the mothers undertaking this course, but my observations suggest difficulties inherent in engaging mothers in this kind of post-natal education.

One message of the course material was that children needed a good role model of their own sex, and that children should have contact with males, which could be uncles, grandfathers or others. On the multiple choice unit assessment test, the choices for the answer to the question ‘What helps your child develop into a well-balanced adult?’ read: 1) contact with mum, 2) contact with dad, 3) contact with both parents, or 4) contact with pets. As researchers have pointed out, there exist problems with policies and legislation encouraging father involvement with children without due regard to some fathers’ domestically violent behaviour (Featherstone and Peckover, 2007), and the implication that a child will only develop into a well-balanced adult if it has contact with both its parents was particularly problematic in this setting. Only half of the young women that I interviewed were in a relationship with their baby’s father at the time of interview. Sabrina told me that her daughter’s father had instructed another man to physically assault her when she was in the early stages of pregnancy, and Melanie told me that her ex-boyfriend and father of her twins had tried to attack her with a knife with intent to kill them during her pregnancy. Despite these incidences, Sabrina wanted her daughter to have contact with her father, and Melanie, although refusing to let the twins’ father see them, could not envisage ever letting another man replace him as their father. The material in this unit, then, passed over the idea that a child’s father may pose a physical risk to mother or child, and drew on discourses implying that single parenting is not a desirable option, and in fact that single parenting in and of itself might be damaging to a child.

The problems with this particular parenting intervention appeared to be the element of compulsion involved, as well as its exclusive promotion and assumption of heterosexual, two-parent family structures, with a resulting lack of sensitivity towards the increasing diversity of family formations, and towards the young mothers’ circumstantial differences. An intervention that seeks behaviour change purely in the abstract is thus demonstrated to be especially problematic.

Being a good mother: Regulation and exclusion

The ways in which the young women negotiated the boundaries of ‘appropriate’ maternal behaviour were complex and sometimes extremely judgemental. The process can be seen as one in which they learn how ‘other’ mothers do things, and they work at forming a positive maternal identity for themselves. The young women were all sensitive towards negative stereotypes of teenage mothers and were defensive against the notion that they were not good mothers. The concept of ‘appropriate’ maternal behaviour, or good mothering, however, was unstable and contested amongst them. Their defence against a label of ‘bad mother’ sometimes took the form of a subtle regulation of each other’s behaviour. Some did not question smoking, wearing ‘inappropriate’ clothing, eating McDonald’s twice a day during pregnancy, or smacking their children, while others strongly distanced themselves from mothers who did these things. Although there were few arguments between the young women, they would occasionally express their disapproval to each other, for example in berating each other for not giving up smoking. Melanie had started smoking when she was nine, and now smoked between twenty and forty cigarettes a day. Samantha expressed to me her disgust at those who continued to smoke. One young woman, Kyra, was particularly unpopular with the others. Danielle told me:

I don’t like her dress sense. I don’t think it’s very suitable for being a mum. And I don’t think you should walk down the street like that, with your big belly and this bum hanging out…. It’s hard enough walking down the street being young and pregnant, let alone walking down the street with your bum hanging out, and being pregnant! Because you gotta try and like show people that you dress like a mum and that you have a bit of respect for yourself. … So that’s why people don’t like her, that’s why she’s always by herself.

Danielle implies that Kyra does not perform the dress practices that enable her to act the part of a mother (Elliott et al., 2009) and she distances herself from Kyra’s lack of respectability. Being a pregnant teenager requires an extra effort to appear respectable, but it is a performance that, according to Danielle, Kyra cannot pull off, and as a result of this and of her aggression, she was excluded by most of the other young women.

I asked Melanie what she thought about her friends’ parenting, and she described one with whom she had a problem:

I’ve even got quite a close friend who I think, how is your mind working for you to think that that is ok? Like, why don’t you get that that’s what’s causing this problem in your child? You can tell them things, but one thing I don’t do is tell my friends this is how it’s supposed to be, because if people told me that I wouldn’t like it, erm, so I would say, in a roundabout way, why don’t you try this, or this worked for me. But this one particular person, she just don’t listen. From knowing her mum, and her mum’s still got young children, erm, she does exactly the same as what her mum does, and it’s so obvious that it’s not quite right. I know everybody has their own different, erm, parenting skills and whatever, I just, it annoys me so much. She’s not a bad mother, she takes care of her child, but it’s just little things.

Melanie here asserts a positive maternal identity by illustrating the differences that she perceives between her parenting techniques and those of her friend. Melanie had strong views on how to discipline her children, which included smacking them.

Danielle contrasted herself to her two older sisters, both of whom had children, but had not worked or studied since having them:

She’s like, my two older sisters are one of them people that loves to be on benefits, because they don’t have to do nothing. I’m not one of them people. I can’t stand being on benefits. If I had a choice, I would rather work than be on benefits. I know benefits is free money and everyone says that it’s better and blah blah blah, but I’d prefer to work … They say they wanna work, but they’re lazy, and they don’t wanna work. They lie, they lie to make themselves look good…. You get them people that prefer being on benefits than working because it’s free money, and that’s how they are.

Danielle here is very resistant to the idea that she might be someone who claims benefits because of laziness, and none of the young women spoke favourably of benefits, or of wanting to live on benefits, despite the fact that some of their parents did. They were alert to the stereotype of the welfare scrounger, and to the idea that some young women get pregnant deliberately to ‘get a council flat’. Melanie told me that she knew people who ‘openly say I got pregnant to get money and a place of my own’. However, none of the young women I spoke to claimed that this was the case, and in fact, most of those who were living in council accommodation had received this prior to becoming pregnant, having become ‘homeless’ following family conflicts. The young women were invested in producing themselves as ‘good’ mothers in the sense of intending to be good worker citizens and not rely on benefits.

Danielle, Melanie and Samantha can be seen to produce their ‘good mother’ identities by distancing themselves from mothering or femininity practices (smoking, wearing sexually provocative attire, lack of parenting discipline and claiming benefits) of which they do not approve. They worked hard to draw clear moral boundaries between themselves and ‘others’ (Vincent et al., 2010). Melanie’s smoking of between twenty and forty cigarettes a day did not preclude her from positioning herself as a good mother, and even after describing her friend’s problematic parenting techniques, Melanie admitted ‘she’s not a bad mother’. It was also important for the young women to produce themselves as ‘good mothers’ for the purposes of their interviews and interactions with me. The episodes described demonstrate the constant use of regulatory and exclusionary practices involved in positioning oneself as a ‘good mother’. They also demonstrate a diversity of parenting values, revealing, as Irwin describes, ‘significant internal class diversity’ with outcomes that ‘are shaped but not determined by class background’ (2009: 1135); this blurring of dichotomous classed parenting practices, then, foregrounds the problems with the idea of working-class behavioural deficit.

Conclusions

In this article I have highlighted the complexities and tensions around the idea that policy interventions in relation to teenage pregnancy and parenting are universally similarly interpreted or have any single or simple effects. Policies to reduce teenage conceptions and to introduce parenting education work in such a way as to mask the classed inequalities that produce the ‘problems’ of social exclusion or so-called ‘troubled families’. As has long been argued, it is the problems of poverty that most greatly affect young mothers, rather than their age (Phoenix, 1991). The young women in my study did not by any means embrace the idea of teenage pregnancy and motherhood being a ‘mistake’ or a catastrophe, but instead reflected on the issue from a much broader and more varied perspective. The staff in the setting were generally supportive of the idea of parenting education, but this did not come from a ‘working-class deficit’ approach; rather some of them stressed the need for parenting support for all classes and ages of parent. I pointed to some of the problems inherent in providing parenting education that first of all involves compulsion, and that draws on traditional ideas of heterosexual, two-parent family structures to the exclusion of others. Parenting interventions that focus exclusively on behaviour change and ignore the potential need for support are at risk of obscuring wider social and emotional difficulties. Finally, I argued that what may be conceived of as ‘good’ or appropriate maternal behaviour is subject to local regulation and contestation, and the differences in parenting strategies within social classes – what Irwin (2009) calls ‘internal class diversity’ in parenting values – merit consideration in terms of attempting to define ‘good’ parenting. A simplistic middle-class/working-class parenting dichotomy or hierarchy of practices should be avoided. Policy interventions with regard to parenting, lastly, must be sensitive and attentive to the structural inequalities that lie behind ‘social exclusion’ rather than simply focused on behaviour change.