Experiences of Being a Teenage Mother in

the UK: A Report of a Systematic Review

of Qualitative Studies

Elizabeth McDermott1
Hilary Graham1
Val Hamilton

Rikka Grace B. Crisostomo, RN

 Aims: To undertake a systematic review (SR) of
qualitative research on the experience of being a
teenage mother in the UK.

Objective: To systematically review the qualitative

evidence on the lives of young mothers, under the
age of twenty, in the UK from 1990 to 2003.
 Results

(1): The search strategy located twenty studies

meeting the inclusion criteria (i.e. a UK study,
published between 1990 and 2003 of the experience
of young women who have become a mother in their
teenage years). Ten of the studies met the quality
criteria, and were therefore included in the
systematic review of findings.
 Results

(2): Integrating findings across the ten studies enabled a set of recurrent
and dominant experiences to be identified. These experiences related both
to the constraints operating on teenage mothers and the mothering
practices that they developed in the face of these constraints.

With respect to constraining factors, teenage mothers are poor mothers,

having to care for their children in impoverished circumstances,
which are hard to either improve or escape from.
They are also young mothers, going against the grain of social prejudices,
which position them as irresponsible and inadequate mothers.
Against these constraining factors, young mothers develop resilient
mothering practices by drawing on the only two resources to which they
may have access: the support of their families (emotional, practical,
financial), and their personal capacities as mothers. At the heart of
these practices is the development of a good mother identity, a sense of
self nurtured by investment in the mother-child relationship and supported
by family (and by their mother, the maternal grandmother in particular).
 Conclusions

The SR points to the potential value of including well-

conducted qualitative studies in the evidence base of
policies to reduce teenage pregnancy and support
teenage mothers.
Using a combination of standard SR procedures and
meta-ethnography, it demonstrates that such studies can
be synthesized in ways which provide deeper and broader
understandings of the lives of teenage mothers.
Qualitative syntheses clearly provide only one segment of
the evidence base. Nonetheless, they offer an important
insight into the constraining contexts and resilient
practices which structure the everyday experiences of
young mothers in the UK.