Abstract
Pregnancy and birth rates for teens aged 15 to 19 have been steadily decreasing in the United States since the 1950s, reaching a record low in 2010. Yet, teen motherhood—as a quintessential expression of deviance, delinquency, and underclass—still haunts outraged policy makers, scholars, and public opinion. Using ethnography to give voice to actual adolescent mothers, Erdmans and Black’s On Becoming a Teen Mom and Silver’s System Kids challenge the academic and mass-media oversimplified representations of teen pregnancy. Both books draw upon qualitative social science research that aims at disentangling teen births from the “presumed tapestry of pathology” (On Becoming a Teen Mom, p. 17), while revealing how “power work[s] in complicated ways through a matrix of gender, class, race, and age divisions” (System Kids, p. 11).
Based on life-story interviews conducted between 2002 and 2003, On Becoming a Teen Mom follows the complex and varied life trajectories that led 108 socioeconomically and racially diverse Connecticut teenagers to become mothers. Unlike most policymakers and social scientists, who focus on the macro- and micro-structural consequences entailed by teen pregnancy, Erdmans and Black strongly argue for the need to shift the gaze from consequences to causes and look at the “backstory to the baby.” By retracing the diverse biographies of adolescent pregnancies, the book contests uniformly stigmatizing views on teen motherhood.
Chapter one retraces the “historical narratives of blame and shame” that have construed adolescent pregnancy as deviant, immoral, and dangerous. In the following chapters, the authors challenge such stereotypical representations, by integrating verbatim large excerpts from the 108 young mothers’ life stories. Each chapter from two to six looks at a different route to teen pregnancy. Chapter two focuses on the “young young mothers” who conceived before the age of 15. Their stories defy the notion that poor parenting, Hispanic culture, and predatory men are the absolute factors explaining why “kids are having kids.” Erdmans and Black’s data rather point to systemic gender inequality, unsafe neighborhoods, and urban poverty. Chapter three discusses child sexual abuse and school dropout rates in relation to teen pregnancy and finds that there are no standard trajectories connecting these life events. Erdmans and Black look at violence against women in chapter four, which is full of intense and disturbing stories. However, beyond the “life worlds of chaos” (p. 118) that these young women narrate, motherhood appears to empower some of them to imagine a better and hopeful future for themselves and their offspring. Chapter five focuses on education and teen pregnancy. Continuing the discussion from chapter three, the authors describe several different school achievement trajectories in teen mothers, thus challenging the views that early pregnancy always triggers school dropout. Finally, chapter six looks at adolescent mothers coming from nondisadvantaged households, who do not face structural barriers to contraception or abortion. Erdmans and Black raise here the question of why some of these young mothers chose to carry their pregnancies to term. They find that even for privileged teens, patriarchy shapes power relations between sex and/or romantic partners in more subtle, yet consequential, ways. Religion and family members’ opinion were also found to influence reproductive decision making among pregnant teens. In the book’s conclusion, the authors reinsert the adolescent mothers’ lives in larger sociocultural and economic contexts. They argue for reconsidering the role that gendered violence, urban poverty, and cultural change play in shaping young people’s diverse life trajectories. The book also includes two appendices that detail the study research methodology and the sociodemographic characteristics of the interviewees.
Acknowledging that life stories are performative representations, Erdmans and Black employ a finely tuned discourse analysis—especially in chapter six—emphasizing the shifting qualities of women’s narratives. The book could have benefited from inserting some of the interviewed male partners’ stories, as well from the addition of one more annex dedicated to issues of ethnographic reflexivity.
Ethnographically grounded and theoretically sophisticated, On Becoming a Teen Mom is relevant across disciplines and audiences. The study could interest sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists, as well as social workers and policy makers. Furthermore, its rich and captivating writing style makes Erdmans and Black’s monograph a compelling reading choice for an upper-division college course focusing on the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and citizenship in the contemporary United States.
Erdmans and Black acknowledge the impact that their own subjectivities had on research design and methodology, yet they choose to remain almost invisible within their book’s overall narrative. In contrast, Silver casts herself as “a player” in System Kids—an intimate and intense account of teenage mothers navigating the complexities and paradoxes of welfare bureaucracy. Using qualitative research methods, Silver follows the everyday lives of adolescent mothers (many of them African American, ages 16 to 20) who were part of the oxymoronically called Supervised Independent Living (SIL) program in an unnamed American inner city between 2003 and 2005. A former SIL project manager herself, Silver strives to act as a researcher-advocate and frames her findings through the lenses of feminism and critical youth studies.
Chapter one describes the institutional culture surrounding SIL. The disconnect between bureaucratic procedures and lived realities makes SIL a “dangerous, underresourced, and demoralized” work environment (p. 35), governed by confusion, fear, and miscommunication. Chapter two discusses some of the ways in which SIL residents and workers cope with such a living and working milieu. Resistance strategies go from mimicking compliance and hiding violence and rule-breaking to creating familiar zones of “moral underground.” Chapter three continues with these topics, focusing on the ways SIL teen mothers navigate bureaucratic webs by shifting between discourses of victimization and self-determination. Adolescent mothers continuously negotiate their identities through a politics of self-representation, which they use to face the structural violence embedded in a welfare system that casts them as “underclass.” To convey how the inner workings of bureaucracy could be twisted through active resistance, chapter four focuses on a case study. Silver introduces Nyisha, a young mother whom the author shadowed and assisted during her interactions with the SIL bureaucracy. Nyisha’s life story brings together sexual abuse, homelessness, delinquency, and poverty. Silver looks at the unjust and unrealistic SIL regulations through Nyisha’s eyes. With Silver’s help, Nyisha will eventually instrumentalize her victim status and will re-write to her advantage an oppressive cultural script. Chapter five explores additional everyday resistance tactics—ranging from deliberately disengaged silence to violent escalation of conflict—that SIL youth employ to bend inflexible and neutral governance. In the book’s conclusion, Silver provides an update of the welfare legislation concerning adolescent mothers and articulates policy recommendations to improve the SIL program. The author endorses ethnography as “a tool to promote social justice and healing” (p. 166). Finally, the volume’s afterword further elaborates on the deeply intimate character of doing ethnography. The author reveals herself as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and acknowledges the complex ways in which biography shaped the work’s research agenda and findings.
This disclosure forces the reader to reassess the whole book as a feminist ethnography about the struggles of adolescent mothers to maintain their dignity. System Kids beautifully narrates some intense episodes that stick to the reader’s mind. Yet, the conclusions to the book’s chapters tend to be frustratingly brief, and sometimes the narrative is broken up into multiple disconnected vignettes—such as in chapter five—that at times obscure rather than illustrate the main argument.
As is the case with other ethnographies of structural violence, On Becoming a Teen Mom and System Kids grant voice to the repressed and misrepresented and situate the marginal and “deviant” at the center. Both books challenge monolithic, stereotypical representations of adolescent motherhood using ethnography as a tool to immerse the reader in intense and often disturbing stories of abuse, fear, and violence but also of innocence and hope. The life-worlds of adolescent mothers that emerge from reading On Becoming a Teen Mom and System Kids advance our understanding about the kind of power relations that shape reproductive decision making.