Teenage mothers manifest their love by protecting, connecting with, and imagining for their babies in ways that challenge dominant cultural assumptions or social mores. Some of this has been discussed in my prior essays, where my observations were primarily offered as a researcher (Moodley). My fieldwork interviews implore sociological and medical anthropological theory in order to situate teenage motherhood within broader conversations about motherly love, care, stigma, and protection. By contrast, this essay adds new perspective to previous observations.
Now, as the physician in a labor and delivery room, my vantage point now exposes variations on and connections between young mothers’ experiences. Herein, I describe some of the experiences of a laboring sixteen-year-old (whom I call Amy, a soon-to-be teenage mother) and her mother (whom I call Michelle, a soon-to-be grandmother). Standing beside a laboring sixteen-year-old and her mother, I witnessed degrees of worry, tension, and excitement unfold as dimensions of motherly love.
Mother and Daughter
Amy approached 48 hours of labor. Exhaustion wrapped around her tiny body in a too-big hospital bed. Her induction of labor, begun for post-term pregnancy, stretched longer than anticipated. She had not slept for almost three days. When she was finally ready to push, she was unsure if she was strong enough to try. Even the epidural could not temper the fatigue seeping into her bones. Michelle helped her daughter realize that she could try. Amy’s responding smile showed she was immensely grateful for her mother’s tireless support. In between contractions, Michelle persistently offered juice or jello, sometimes overshadowing Amy’s partner (16-year-old Matt) at the bedside. The hospital room was overwhelming with beeping monitors, fluorescent lights, and noxious smells. Still, Michelle tried to make the foreign environment more tolerable for her daughter. There was no end to the pillows and blankets, or the pleasantly damp washcloths placed on Amy’s forehead.
It seemed that Amy did not really notice her mother’s hovering. She was tired – tired of pain, tired of waiting, tired of being watched. Juxtaposed with her fatigue was her unmistakable worry. With small bouts of strength between waves of nausea, she worried aloud for her unborn son: was his heartbeat normal? Was he tolerating labor? Should she turn to help his head move down? Would the medication hurt him? Contrastingly, her mother’s actions embodied another kind of tension, a different but overlapping burden. Michelle worried for her daughter’s body—her blood pressure, her stamina, her potential lacerations, her headaches, her capacity to endure. Yet she simultaneously worried for her grandson’s safe arrival. Michelle’s worries seemed braided in parallel, which is perhaps why they felt strained. Michelle asked: should we prioritize maternal rest or fetal progress? Continue medication or pause? Escalate or wait?
Between contractions, the teenager’s quiet voice could be heard among the beeping machines. She wondered whether her son would have hair, or inherit her smile. Whether he would cry loudly or sleep peacefully. It could be observed that her love manifested as anticipation—an imaginative reaching forward. She spoke of holding him, naming him, introducing him to music she loved. Her mother responded differently. Did she want water? A shower? Had she eaten? Were we providing the correct medication doses, or offering alternatives? What were the comparative risks? She asked me, respectfully but repeatedly, to explain all benefits and tradeoffs.
Discussion
Current research underscores that teenage motherhood is frequently framed through deficit narratives, obscuring the relational strengths some young mothers try to cultivate (SmithBattle; Mollborn). Further work has shown that maternal practices may be embedded within kin networks, for example, where grandmothers might play central roles in shaping infant survival and caregiving norms (Scheper-Hughes; Colen).
Herein, Amy and Michelle offer us some examples of intergenerational care – teenage mother, grandmother, unborn child – bound together with shared yet differently weighted responsibilities. These responsibilities do not negate care, instead they reveal an underlying complexity involved in mothering work. In the delivery room, motherly love might emerge not as sentiment alone but as action—balancing risk, conserving strength, imagining futures, and protecting what is deemed fragile.
These experiences in the delivery room emphasize that teenage motherhood is not a singular story but a layering of social work within intergenerational relationships. My previous articles describe how teenage mothers articulate protection in ways that might disrupt social norms of irresponsibility. I wrote about young mothers doing mothering work to repair familial relationships, connecting deeply with unborn infants, and making meaning of shame and stigma within teenage pregnancy. In this delivery room, for Amy and Michelle, some of these themes materialized before the new baby arrived. Protection was not abstract. It was negotiated in medication choices, in debates about rest, in whispered reassurances. Motherly love was neither naïve nor singular. It was multidimensional and intergenerational, anticipatory and logistical, imaginative and pragmatic.
My experiences with Amy and Michelle encouraged me to reflect on the tension in their worry, that is, the overlapping burdens they brought into the delivery room. Indeed, researchers have persistently noted that pregnancy and birth are socially complicated events, where kinship obligations and risk calculations might intersect (Jordan; Davis-Floyd). The events of birth are “socially marked and shaped” more than simply biologic (Jordan). Maternal subjectivity, especially among young women, is most often shaped by structural vulnerability and moral scrutiny (SmithBattle; Mollborn).
In the delivery room, I similarly observed the complicated tension implicit in the social and kinship bonds forged between mother and daughter and the unborn baby. Yet what I witnessed was not indifference but a collision of care. Each woman, Amy and Michelle, measured risk through their own embodied stake in the outcome. Their worries were not oppositional; they were layered in the delivery room, even if they sometimes felt irreconcilable or at odds, depending on timely decisions as well as the journey of labor and delivery.
Seemingly also in tension were Amy’s sense of imagination and Michelle’s hold on pragmatism. Here too was not a dearth of care, but an abundance of it: I understood Amy’s musings on the future and Michelle’s questions firmly rooted in the present as dimensions of motherly love. Long established work in this field reminds us that mother love is not a singular emotional state, but a continuously and tiringly enacted social practice shaped by context, culture and responsibility (Collins; Hays). “Intensive mothering” norms often demand hypervigilant protection, especially in environments where young mothers feel surveilled (Hays; SmithBattle). Maternal care has been described as both affective and material – a combination of tenderness and labor (Scheper-Hughes). These themes might initially appear divergent, but then seem to align with what Sara Ruddick calls “maternal thinking,” a mother’s ideals grounded in preservation and attentiveness to what sustains her child’s life (Ruddick). In the delivery labor room that night, Amy’s imaginings and Michelle’s fact-finding were not contradictions. They were complementary expressions of care: one oriented toward immediate conditions of survival, the other toward dreams of experiences to come.
It is important to note that my experiences in this delivery room take place in a different community, in a different part of the world, than those described in my prior articles. Therefore, these observations are just that – social observations situated within lived experience. Researchers remind us that motherhood is culturally patterned yet can carry themes which sometimes seem globally resonant (Scheper-Hughes; Colen). Which dimensions of teenage motherhood might young women across contexts recognize in one another? Where do their stories converge, or diverge? Comparative work suggests both shared themes of motherly protection and profound differences shaped by cultural and kinship systems (SmithBattle; Mollborn). Admittedly, further work is needed to explore these questions of commonality across place and time.
Works Cited
Colen, Shellee. “Like a Mother to Them: Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York.” Conceiving the New World Order, edited by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 78–102.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood. Routledge, 1994.
Davis-Floyd, Robbie. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. University of California Press, 2003.
Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Yale University Press, 1996.
Jordan, Brigitte. Birth in Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States. Waveland Press, 1983.
Mollborn, Stefanie. Mixed Messages: Norms and Social Control around Teen Sex and Pregnancy. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Moodley, Sasheenie. “Teenage Mother Love.” Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, 26 Oct. 2020, medicalhealthhumanities.com/2020/10/26/teenage-mother-love/.
Ruddick, Sara. “Maternal Thinking.” Feminist Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 1980, pp. 342–67.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. University of California Press, 1992.
SmithBattle, Lee. “Reducing the Stigmatization of Teen Mothers.” MCN: The American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 235–41.
Header Image. Baby Holding Finger, 2012, https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photography-of-baby-holding-finger-208189/