Florida State University Libraries

Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2015 Just Wait Until the Baby Comes: Time, "Reality", and Teen Motherhood Tara Mantovani Stamm

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND PUBLIC POLICY

JUST WAIT UNTIL THE BABY COMES:

TIME, “REALITY”, AND TEEN MOTHERHOOD

By

TARA MANTOVANI STAMM

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Sociology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2015 Tara Mantovani Stamm defended this dissertation on April 6, 2015. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Deana A. Rohlinger Professor Directing Dissertation

Leigh H. Edwards University Representative

John R. Reynolds Committee Member

Douglas P. Schrock Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii

For The Stammily

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to thank the Florida State University Sociology department for supporting my teaching and research. The faculty and staff have made a meaningful contribution to both this dissertation and to my future in academia. I would also like to than The Claude

Pepper Center fellows and staff for providing me with a quiet place to work and a warm welcome each day.

I would like to thank my dissertation adviser, mentor, and friend, Deana Rohlinger for her unwavering encouragement over the past four years. She willingly adopted a wayward, pregnant graduate student who she somehow managed to shape into a respectable researcher.

For her time, enthusiasm, hugs, and lasagna I will be forever grateful. She is exactly the person I needed in my corner pushing me to be far more productive than I ever thought possible. In countless ways, Deana went far beyond what is typically required of a major professor to mentor me as a student, a researcher and now a colleague. She makes her process transparent and never misses a moment to instruct. She is direct, organized, thorough and prompt. My future students will also thank her for her contributions here. I would also like to thank the rest of my committee, John Reynolds, Doug Schrock, and Leigh Edwards for mailing countless letters of recommendation and cheering me on. Thank you John, for taking a risk and admitting me to the program and working with me to help me think sociologically. Thank you Doug for shaping my views on difference and thus this final product through coursework and assignments. I truly needed their support and encouragement. I am so lucky to have the opportunity to work with such an amazing group of teaching scholars. Beyond Florida State, thanks as well to Chris

Gabbard and Julie Ingersoll for setting me on this path and celebrating each milestone with me.

iv Thanks also to my smart and insightful cohort of friends and professional colleagues:

Ashley Daily, JoEllen Pederson, Katy Glasgow, Daniel Lanford, Stephanie Bradley, Lori

Gonzalez, Melissa Bamford, Dawn Godboldt, Amanda Koontz, J. Sumerau, Kirby Thomas,

Rusty Shekha, Erica Toothman, Pina Valle, Andrew Mannheimer, Miriam Sessions, Linda

Gordon, Patrick McGrady, Courtney Twitty, and Christian Vaccaro. I truly appreciate all of your advice, comments, and encouragement. A very special thank you to Tze-Li Hsu, Rebecca

Redmond and Teresa Roach for being on-call technical resources and outstanding friends. In addition to their varied expertise, they provided a circle of care and inspiration in the dissertation trenches. I would also like to thank my marvelous friends Stephanie Kennedy, Emily Dowd-

Arrow, and Magie Ozarowski for years and years of fun. You make work lovable and laughable.

I would also like to thank my loving friend Luna for her patience and company through every writing project for the past 14 years.

My rock solid is the origin and inspiration for my resolve to doggedly pursue this goal. I would like to extend a special thank you to my Aunts: Lee, Ingrid, Esther, Lenora and

Susie (Suah) for narrating the voices in my head. Thanks to my brother Adam for his patient life-long friendship. My , all of them, constructed a community of love around The

Stammily that made “having it all”, possible: Gloria and Russell Mantovani, Allen and Lori

Stamm, and Julia Marano. Last and most importantly, I would like to thank, Jason, my husband and partner. His contribution to my well-being is too substantial to list. Thank you for tiny tasks, flow charts, office supplies, giant computers, a night stand coffee maker, and of course, for

Geneva and Carlin. The best luck I had was you.

Onward!

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ...... vii List of Figures ...... viii Abstract ...... ix

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2. TIME USE OF TEEN MOTHERS COMPARED TO THEIR NON-MOTHER COUNTERPARTS: ATUS RESULTS ...... 5 3. WHEN SEX EDUCATION INTERSECTS WITH POP CULTURE: MIXED MESSAGES OF TEEN MOTHERHOOD ...... 31

4. CONCLUSION ...... 64

APPENDICES ...... 76

A. ATUS INDEXED VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS ...... 76 B. CODEBOOK ...... 77 C. TEEN MOM TIME USE ...... 83 D. IRB APPROVAL LETTER ...... 84

REFERENCES ...... 85

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 92

vi LIST OF TABLES

1. Distributions and percentages of teen female characteristics ...... 21

2. Average number of minutes per day mothers and non-mothers spend in various activities, 15- 19 year-old females, 2003-2012 ...... 23

3. Results from ordinary least squares regression predicting the number of minutes per day teen females spend in childcare and education when controlling for motherhood status, 2003-2012 ...... 25

4. Teen mom descriptions ...... 41

5. Portrayed teen mom emotions summary ...... 46

6. Teen mom emotional portrayals by season ...... 55

vii LIST OF FIGURES

1. Teen Mom Time Use by Season ...... 50

2. Top Time Use Portrayed on Teen Mom ...... 51

3. Top 5 Time Uses by Mom ...... 54

4. Overall Emotional Portrayals by Season ...... 56

5. Emotional Expressions by Teen Mom ...... 57

6. Emotional Expressions of Each Mom by Season ...... 60

viii ABSTRACT

In two empirical studies, this dissertation explores the how young mothers spend their time constructing motherhood. The first study (Chapter 2) explores self-reported teen mother time use and compares it to their non-mother counterparts. When to have a child is the single most important economic decision most women make. Teen moms birth and raise their children usually before formal education ends thus subjecting themselves to the double burden of a truncated educational history as well as the financial hurdles that come with minimal education. Qualitative studies emphasize that teen mothers repeatedly convey that they have the additional burden of holding dual roles as both “mother” and “teenager”- subordinated statuses. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), I show that teen moms spend their time similarly to their non-mother counterparts with the exception of the amount of time spent on schooling and childcare. Teen mothers replace time spent on school with time spent caring for their children. Otherwise, all other time such as leisure, sleep, shopping, travel, etc…is insignificantly different from other teenage girls who do not yet have children. The results of Chapter 2 suggest that teen mothers view schooling as neither a teen activity nor a mothering activity even though schooling is where most of their teenage, non-mother counterparts spend a significant portion of their day.

Taking a social constructionist approach in the second study (Chapter 3), I explore the portrayed images of teen moms through their use of time and how television producers convey teen mom emotions. I focus on the social construction of teen motherhood through popular portrayals of young mothers participating in common activities. My methods include watching the show, coding 33 variables in each scene and taking extensive notes on the narrative arch for each teen mom. Despite the “documentary” style of the show, producers editorially construct mixed messages about the realities of teen motherhood. My analysis reflects the central messages of

ix the Teen Mom television series and highlights two aspects of constructing motherhood: images of how teen mothers spend their time and the emotional complexity of their choices. In order to understand the specific social constructions of young motherhood, the viewer experiences both negative consequences and the emergence of a teen mother construction. I find that the young mothers quickly learn to spend much of their time in the company of such as parents, partners and siblings. I also find that the teen mothers on average are portrayed more often as having a negative emotional response to their situations. Like the ATUS teen moms, the MTV teen moms struggle to attend and complete school while not sacrificing other parts of the teenage experience such as dating, first jobs, and time with friends. Overall, my research shows how teen mothers selectively draw from both teenage and mothering behaviors and attitudes to construct a unique character in the face of a historically stigmatized one.

x CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In 2007, Juno won the Academy Award for best original screenplay and secured multiple

Oscar nominations. Juno is a sympathetic comedy-drama depicting the experiences of a smart, insightful teenager as she embarks on pregnancy and childbirth (and subsequent ) while still in high school. In 2008, two high profile teenagers, Bristol Palin and Jamie Lynn Spears, generated their own comedy-drama about adolescent childbearing. Bristol Palin announced during her mother’s bid for the Vice Presidency of the United States that she was expecting her first child at age 18. Jamie Lynn Spears, Nickelodeon television personality and sister of the also famous Britney Spears, announced that she too was expecting a child at age 16. Both announcements were covered in mass media with exceptional fanfare. Finally, in June of 2009 the 16 & Pregnant debuted on MTV. This was the first reality television show to feature the stories of pregnant teenage girls in high school.

The popularity of blockbuster movies such as Juno, famous teen mothers such as Jamie

Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin and popular television shows such as , Baby

High, and Teen Mom portrays early motherhood as a celebrated status. Overwhelmingly positive images of celebrity teen moms also portray young motherhood as a viable option without visible consequences. That is, teenagers can be both mothers and successfully follow their dreams or even remain in school, young, skinny, and beautiful. In the past, television portrayed one version of motherhood – the good mother - the 1950’s version. Recently, however television is branching out into subordinated motherhood statuses, specifically adolescent motherhood

(Jonsson, 2010). Other than researchers who specialize in unmarried teen mothers, sales professionals and media are some of the first groups to recognize the untapped market (Bute &

1 Russell, 2012). They view teenagers who mother as a consuming subculture similar to Goth,

Skaters, or Preps. Companies who make infant products like clothing, strollers and high chairs strategically market certain products toward the unmarried teen mom demographic. Likewise, television outlets that cater to the teen market develop shows such as 16 and Pregnant or Baby

High specifically for the population who receives a prestige boost associated with their new status as a “good mother”.

In addition to the highly visible nature of motherhood, mothering generally is a contested sphere. That is there are many versions of motherhood commonly portrayed by different groups.

Motherhood is obviously not prohibited but certain behaviors while mothering are taboo. For example, U.S. culture demands a child centered form of . In other words a parenting practice that considers the needs of the child over the needs of the mother. If a mother chooses to engage in an activity that is not necessarily child oriented such as having a drink at dinner with the child present in a restaurant her mothering may be called into question by other mothers. In some mothering circles choices such as feeding from a bottle, covering a breastfeeding infant, or using a pacifier might be sanctioned by other mothers. Even mothers who work and put their children in daycare likely seek validation from their own working mom groups. Like homosexuality, there is a political imperative to make motherhood visible but then because there are so many choices to make about how to mother, the mothers themselves are subject to conventions by the watching public.

Television programs featuring teen mothers are also popular with school based sex and sexuality educators. Across the United States, in more than 3,000 middle and high school classrooms, reality televisions shows such as 16 & Pregnant and Teen Mom are presented as educational tools that inform students about the pitfalls of young parenting. In addition, the real

2 life celebrity teen mothers who star in these shows travel to middle and high schools giving assembly style lectures on avoiding early pregnancy and parenting. Critics argue that we are turning our sex education curriculum over to cable television. Proponents say the programs make it easier to talk with teenagers about sex when the topic revolves around a television character. This research provides the first empirical analysis of the content of Teen Mom 1 and evaluates the messages teens receive about the lived experiences of young parents.

Data for this dissertation is twofold. The first article uses the American Time Use

Survey. I constructed an index of the more than 400 time variables in order to compare how teen moms and teens who are not moms use their time. The second article is a content analysis of the

Teen Mom 1 television show aired on MTV from 2009-2012. For each of the 925 scenes of the show I coded for 33 variables resulting in 30,000 data points. For these articles, the unifying theme is how teen mothers spend their time. Time, in this case, is an imposed value of the construction of teen motherhood. I openly assume that how a person spend their time directly represents what they value.

In Chapter 2, I show time use comparisons between teen moms and non-moms in 18 different categories. In doing so, I first contribute a novel use of the ATUS data. I also contribute to the literature on teen pregnancy and childrearing by answering the question, do teen moms spend their time differently? If so, what is different? I find that teen mom time use differs in two fundamental ways – that of education and childcare. Teen moms seem to replace their educational obligations with childcare obligations leaving virtually every other category of time use unchanged. On one level, this information is useful. It says that teens spend a lot of time in primary care of their children. On the other hand finishing school is also an important obstacle

3 for future success. I end the chapter by discussing the possibility that engaging competing roles simultaneously may be protective for future success.

In Chapter 3, I shift focus onto a wholly new data set to examine how teen mothering is represented by producers of the MTV series, Teen Mom. I again look at how the producers portray the mothers spending their time. I present multiple graphic representations of the commitments of the producers to demonstrate teen moms engaging with other adults in their time use. I also show how producers portray teen moms’ emotions throughout the series and how those representations change over time and for each mother. Whereas previous research on the

Teen Mom television series focused on viewer responses and the show’s ‘effect’ on teen pregnancy in the United States, I show the hidden consequences the show features.

In Chapter 4, I review the findings of the previous two chapters and introduce further implications of the study on the consequences of young parenting. The real consequences I find are housing insecurity, the trap of online coursework, and the prevalence of legal interventions in the lives of teen moms. These consequences are presented by the media and are rarely (if ever) included in the broader literature concerning the pitfalls of adolescent parenting. I conclude by discussing how to apply these results in my future research.

4 CHAPTER 2

TIME USE OF TEEN MOTHERS COMPARED TO THEIR NON-

MOTHER COUNTERPARTS: ATUS RESULTS

The social problems of early pregnancy and adolescent parenting advancing toward ruinous results is a relatively new social phenomena (Coontz, 1992). While public policy scholars, beginning in the 1970’s, focused on the economic costs to society of adolescent childbearing (Hayes, 1987) social scientists examine the causal relationship more closely attempting to understand whether unfavorable consequences are due to the pregnancy itself or are part of a broader issue in the teens’ environment in which pregnancies and childrearing are situated (Hoffman & Maynard, 2008). As of 2010, about 6% of adolescent females in the United

States become pregnant which is 614,000 possible adolescent mothers (Boonstra, 2014). Even though these numbers seem high the teen pregnancy and birthrate is actually at an all-time low since the rates peaked in 19901. Despite the status of teen motherhood in the United States and the emphasis on its consequences, scholars have not explored whether teen moms are different than their non-mom peers in their use of time. Time use matters because it may help parse out which factors could contribute to the short and long term consequences of adolescent childrearing beyond the pregnancy itself.

Adolescence is a time of increased peer influence. The central question of this research is the extent to which adolescent mothers adopt behaviors similar to those of their peers as mothers or retain the behaviors of their teen counterparts – or some combination of both. Faced with

1 According to Guttmacher Institute research, teen pregnancy rates decrease in one of two ways: less sex or more effective contraception use – or possil a oiatio of oth. Guttaher’s poli analysts indicate that teens are getting the message about contraception. However, the evidence is not as clear about the social, cultural and economic factors affecting teen behaviors associated with adolescent pregnancy and childrearing (Boonstra, 2014).

5 being both a mother and a teenager, I want to understand how those two roles intersect through their use of time, a limited (and limiting) resource. Time in this instance is just one measure of how similarly teen mothers behave to their non-mother peers and is indicative of how they structure their daily lives. This article is a unique application of the American Time Use Survey

(ATUS) collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and explores the time use of 15-19 year old females both mothers and non-mothers to examine which daily activities are retained while caring for a young child in their own home.

The purpose of this project is to begin filling the gap in the academic literature about the possible factors that contribute to short and long term consequences of early parenting. Rather than considering young motherhood in terms of right and wrong – or whether teenagers should be mothers, I seek a more nuanced contribution to an overall understanding of both young mothers and their children which includes knowing more about barriers to income, education, health, empowerment and social status. I begin by providing an overview of the role of choice and personal agency for young mothers by reviewing feminist analysis of the constructions of the stigmatized teen mother. I then present information about the costs and benefits (“motherhood boost”) of early parenting. Finally, I present some general expectations about the data and how the use of time as a construct illuminates the social, geographic, and economic pressures of adolescent motherhood.

Contemporary theories of teen motherhood

There is a pervading tension among many feminist scholars that young women do not participate in political movements regarding issues of femininity and womanhood. The reason for the younger generation’s absence from the political arena could be in large part due to the belief that feminism was a huge success and is no longer necessary to improve the lives of

6 women in the U.S. (Baker, 2010; McRobbie, 2004). Motherhood also restricts women’s access to the political arena especially given the demands of intensive, child-centered mothering practiced in the United States (Bobel, 2002; Collins, 1994). Postfeminist scholars argue that feminism has worked so well that any differences noticed between genders are now the result of choice and personal agency rather than the circumstances or the structure within which the woman exists (Jeffries, 2005; McRobbie, 2004; McRobbie, 2009; Scott, 2006).

The absence of young women from the dominant debate about femininity leaves room for the maternal figure to also be reconstituted under the neo-liberal umbrella (McRobbie, 2007;

2008). Specifically, McRobbie identifies a ‘new sexual contract’ available to young women which is that young women are seen at the forefront of a workforce economy and may enjoy recreational sex, however they must not procreate. The most harshly judged are those women with the status of young mother – a form of failed femininity, “Young motherhood carries a whole range of vilified meanings associated with failed femininity. Middle class status requires the refusal of early motherhood.” (McRobbie, 2007 p. 731-732) It is only after women have secured the appropriate wage earning status and partner that they become deserving subjects of motherhood.

In a postfeminist world women are free to perform different versions of themselves as the situation dictates. These performances, contrary to prior generations, are not perceived to be dictated by patriarchy or the capitalist structure. Relationships, careers, and personal fulfillment pull women in multiple directions compelling them to conform with complex rules and roles.

Most women can easily lose sight of analyzed “authentic” characteristics of the individual self

(Gergen, 1991). These multiple performances of femininity are typically couched in the discourse of playful self-expression, freely chosen from among the plentiful options the modern

7 Western world provides (Scott, 2006). Celebrity figureheads such as Miley Cyrus, Rihannna, and Lady Gaga seem to behave of their own volition (Gill, 2011 & 2012). They are solo artists who wear provocative clothing, make headlines for their music and their fashion choices. These choices are mimicked and sold to millions of Millennials all over the world. Superficially at least, it seems that free choice is something women generally have access to and are not constrained by wider social influences.

Historically, during second wave feminism “choice” discourse specifically referred to a woman’s right to choose her sexual partners, the time of sexual intercourse, and her reproductive options including whether or not to end a viable pregnancy. Contemporary motherhood has adopted the choice discourse wholeheartedly (Jacques & Radtke, 2012). On average most women choose to become mothers (81% in the U.S. by age 44) at some point in their lives2.

Motherhood as a practice and symbol are still fundamentally perceived as natural, God-given, inevitable, and ‘normal’ (Russo, 1976). Understanding agency or choice provides researchers some insight into the relative stubbornness of the teen pregnancy and childbearing predicament.

For example, in the U.S. (1998), the intended adolescent birthrate in the United States was 18 births per 1000 teen females3. However, it seems that data about intentionality of teen pregnancy is no longer collected4. A thorough search of databases using multiple terms comes up lacking after the 1990’s decade. Luckily, interview data and qualitative research continue to reveal the intentional theme of early pregnancy (Allen & Osgood, 2009; Bailey, Brown & Wilson, 2002).

The literature on teen pregnancy and childbearing offers two corresponding threads.

The dominant line is research focused on preventing teen pregnancy. It highlights the fact that

2 https://www.census.gov/hhes/fertility/data/cps/2010.html 3 https://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/or_teen_preg_survey.html 4 https://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/or_teen_preg_survey.pdf

8 the U.S. has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world – 31.3 pregnancies per 1,000 women are teen pregnancies5 (Boonstra, 2014) the highest rate among developed countries. I am interested primarily in the second line of research which examines the consequences – only consequences – of teen childbearing and parenting. Research examining the consequences of teen pregnancy and childrearing are both quantitative and qualitative.

The quantitative studies give us some insight into the tangible hurdles teens face after becoming mothers – on average. Most adolescent mothers struggle to finish high school (Astone

& Upchurch, 1994; Beutel, 2000) and struggle to support their children financially (Gibson-

Davis, Christina, Edin, & Mclanahan, 2005). Their children are at higher risk of also dropping out of school and becoming parents themselves before they are 20 years old (Hoffman &

Maynard, 2008; Black, Papas, Hussey, & Dubowitz, 2002). Among the statistics associated with the negative impacts is the cost to the US taxpayer. Between $9.4 and $28 billion is spent each year in a variety of ways including, lost tax revenue, public assistance payments, and increased expenditures for public healthcare6. The negative impact of teen childbearing research in short details the wide range of problems teen parents, the children of teen parents, and taxpayers face.

Over the past 30 years, scholars offered a number of appealing theories explaining the consistent incidence of teenage motherhood, despite multiple political and educational efforts to curb the trend. The most recent research examines the effectiveness of “abstinence only” sex education courses, the role of the feminist movement in liberating women from forced , the effect of the “war on drugs” on the pool of marriageable men in segregated communities, and whether generous welfare programs inadvertently incentivized early motherhood (Adams,

Adams-Taylor, & Pittman, 1989; Barratt, Stevenson, Roach, & Colbert, 1991, Astone, 1994,

5 http://thenationalcampaign.org/resource/fast-facts-how-does-united-states-compare 6 http://thenationalcampaign.org/resource/counting-it-key-data-2013

9 Gibson-Davis, 2005). All of these areas of inquiry certainly contribute to our understanding of the persistent social problem early motherhood presents. These studies offer structural explanations about why early motherhood endures in the U.S. culture.

Qualitative research on the consequences of early parenting, provides a more nuanced account of how motherhood changed the teen. These studies suggest a much different consequence – one that changed the teen for the better, improved her outlook on life, and transformed her once destructive attitude to one of hope for the future. The first piece of evidence for the benefits of early parenting is that children add meaning to a young adolescent girls’ life. Meaning, in this sense is a new, permanent identifier and thus purpose in their lives

(Gibson-Davis et.al., 2005; Garrett & Tidwell, 1999; Glenn, 1994). Joanna Gregson analyzes the self-transformation this way, “Thus while they may have doubted themselves when they were pregnant, it did not take long for the new identity of motherhood to give the young women a different perspective of themselves. When I asked the young women how they felt about motherhood, the overwhelming response was positive, and often reflected back on this notion that they now had a new definition of themselves and, as a result, a new purpose in life.”

(Gregson, 2009 p. 140). Gregson posits a complete identity shift for these young mothers which is not surprising as most women claim an identity shift upon becoming mothers regardless of race, education, class, and marital status (Marshall & Thompson, 2014; Stone, 2008; Warner,

2006; Ireland, 1993; Russo, 1976).

For the unmarried teen mothers the positive identity transformation is just the beginning of their benefits. Qualitative data also suggests that motherhood “transforms” teen mothers from victims of their circumstances (drugs, alcohol, abusive relationships, gang participation, eventual prison) to active, responsible agents with a desire to “do better” (finish high school, go on to

10 college, off drugs and alcohol, off street, out of jail) (Westall & Liamputton, 2011; Wilson, 2006;

Trad, 1995; Thompson, Powell, Patterson, & Ellerbee, 1995) . They also report their children as an instant source of family, love, and healthy relationships (Edin & Kefalas, 2009 p. 204). In summary, many of the unmarried teen mothers report a positive self-image and a positive relationship with their children despite having their children early (Barcelos & Gubrium, 2014).

During her four year study of a teen mom community center, Joanna Gregson writes that many unmarried teen mothers report a new sense of purpose and direction in their otherwise limited prospects. The teen mothers in her study report a renewed interest in high school, continuing education, and career aspirations. Gregson quotes teens saying things such as, “I’m doing it for my son” or “I knew I couldn’t support my son if I didn’t get an education”. Other qualitative interviews find this same discursive tactic (Wilson, 2006; Paskiewicz, 2001; Wayland

& Rawlins, 1997; Thompson et.al., 1995). This sentiment was echoed in a 40 year longitudinal study of more than 400 teen mothers of varying marital statuses, Furstenberg finds that “their circumstances had substantially improved during the following decade. There were dramatic changes in education levels and employment as well as a steep decrease in the proportion receiving welfare as the teen mothers reached full maturity compared to their situation at the five-year follow-up.” (Furstenberg, 2007 p. 33) In addition to practical accomplishments such as: completing their education, finding gainful employment, and leaving the welfare roles – these mothers also perceive their lives to have “improved significantly” as they moved from early adulthood to middle age (Furstenberg, 2007 p. 39). Deeper exploration into the lives of teen mothers before and after having children suggests that teenagers’ long term goals changed for the better.

11 Finally, qualitative research also suggests that in disadvantaged communities for teens with few other prospects, motherhood can be a respected vocation. Although it may not be apparent to many middle class evaluators, teen mothers feel they are making their contribution to society by actively parenting their children. (Kirkman et. al, 2001; Wilson & Huntington, 2005).

“Disadvantaged youth who have children early have about the same long term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid or late twenties to have children.” (Ellwood, Wilde, Batchelder; 2004; Kaplan, 1997) Early childbearing in disadvantaged homes and communities has the same temporary costs (diapers, strollers, childcare, etc…) as it does in middle class homes. Early childbearing does not however carry the same long term repercussions for girls with low earning potential (O’connor, 2009). A respectable vocation results in achieved adulthood and autonomy.

The large scale consequences of teen childrearing is still up for scientific debate (see for example, Lawlor & Shaw, 2002; Lawlor, Shaw & Johns, 2001; Hotz, McElroy, & Sanders, 1996;

Luker, 1996; Nathanson, 1991; Geronimus, 1987 & 1997 & 2002). Well publicized conventional wisdom continues to espouse teen childbearing, in all cases, an antisocial act, an economic burden, and an important public health problem. Despite the warnings, early motherhood is likely to continue. This paper examines just one component of the experience of the teen mother which is how she spends her day. Part of understanding particular pitfalls to young motherhood requires a serious look at how she exercises her daily choices. Time use provides a clue of the lived experiences of young motherhood and how they choose to incorporate parenting into their daily activities looking for differences between mothering and non-mothering teenage females. The literature above reflects that while young mothers certainly struggle to complete their schooling, are economically disadvantaged, and may suffer adverse

12 health effects due to stigma and isolation, they also benefit from their choice to become young mothers. How teen mothers choose to structure their daily lives may also provide insight into how they challenge the neo-liberal order (or not) to overcome a stigmatized social position. In order to understand the choices young mothers make, I compare how they spend their time to their non-mother counterparts. In doing so, I hope to glimpse the particular pressures teen mothers face to both identify as teenagers worthy of a future and capable young mothers. The following are the main expectations I have given the above research.

I expect to find general differences between teen mothers and non-mothers. First, I expect that teen moms will have higher levels of paid employment than their non-mother counterparts. Paid employment suggests that teen mothers feel social pressures to be independent – not government dependent. It also shows a desire to improve their economic stability and overcome imminent poverty. Second, I expect that teen moms spend fewer minutes every day in leisure activities including time with their friends when compared to their non- mother counterparts. This use of time suggests that the young mother “works” at mothering and is fully invested in her new parenting role. Third, I expect that teen mothers engage in equal amounts of time spent doing typically teen related activities such as talking on the phone or shopping. This measure seeks to understand how much of their teen time use the young mothers retain and whether they are making choices that counteract with neo-liberal stigma by retaining their self-worth. Finally, I expect that teen mothers spend significantly less time doing school related work than their non-mother counterparts. Schooling is a major hurdle for young mothers in the U.S. Are the young mothers making a concerted effort and just not able to keep up?

Evaluating the time they spend on school related activities will provide insight into where personal choices overlap with structural restrictions. The analysis also seeks evidence of role

13 uncertainty – for example, whether teen mothers will spend a lot of time cooking or cleaning which are not typical teen activities but efforts that would be undertaken by older mothers to care for their children. Making sure children are clean, fed and dressed appropriately are some of the most important aspects of good mothering that other teens are not concerned with undertaking.

Time allocation is not evaluated by race beyond the descriptive characteristics because the sample of teen mothers divided by racial categories – or any other category for that matter - becomes too small.

Data and Methods

This study makes use of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) collected by the US

Bureau of Labor and Statistics. ATUS is a nationally representative cross-sectional data source that launched in 2003 and is conducted annually. In the data to be presented, the survey time period is from 2003-2012. The broad range of time allows a sufficiently large sample size of teen mothers and their non-mother counterparts. ATUS interviewers randomly select individuals ages 15 and older from a subset of households who previously completed the Current Population

Survey (CPS). ATUS is traditionally used to measure changes in how much time Americans spend working or taking care of a household. ATUS samples from about 40,500 households annually. Of those 40,500 approximately 5,200 households have children under 6 residing there.

ATUS uses a combination of data collection techniques including a survey, a time-use diary, and long form interview. Areas the survey is specifically concerned with are household composition, employment status, a detailed account of respondent's daily activities, eldercare, trips, labor force status, earnings and school enrollment.

14 ATUS collects information on the ways individuals spend their time in a 24 hour period, including the activity, when the individual began the activity, when they ended, where the activity took place, who the individual was with at the time of the activity, and whether the activity was the primary or secondary activity. For example, many individuals list parenting as their primary activity and watching television as a secondary activity. This survey provides a snap shot of how Americans allocate their time for one full day. Because interviews are conducted using a computer assisted telephone interview process every day of the year, researchers can limit responses by weekend, weekday, or holiday which enables them get a fuller grasp of leisure time as well as work and family engagements. Weights are used to adjust for nonresponse and oversampling to correct for bias.

The survey collects data on more than 472 possible uses of time. For the purposes of usefulness and interpretation I grouped these 472 time use variables into one additive index of 19 categories of time use. I included a table in Appendix A which lists the variable names, indexed measures, a description of the possible uses of time, and a relevant sample from the survey. The primary unit of measurement is the minute and any decimal places are in hundredths of a minute

(not seconds).

Independent Variables

I am primarily interested in how teen females spend their time based on motherhood status which lends insight into dismal educational outcomes for teen mothers. It may also provide insight on whether teen mothers are benefiting from early motherhood or have adopted the dominant stigma that they made bad choices. Therefore, the independent variables are teen females both mothers and non-mothers. The non-mother group acts as a comparison group. The sample comprises of 4440 teen females total, 186 are mothers with their own children living in

15 the home. The other 4254 are the comparison group of teens ages 15-19 who are not yet mothers. All teen females who answered the survey were included regardless of their living situation or their school status. Previous qualitative research shows that teen mothers live in a variety of housing options including with their parents, partners, subsidized, and with roommates

(Hotz, McElroy & Sanders, 1997; Allen & Osgood, 2009, Craig & Mullan, 2011). This project seeks to understand how teens spend their time, where and how they live are relevant but not sufficient reason to exclude them from the group.

Control Variables

The regression analysis controls for race, metropolitan status, whether the survey was answered on a weekend or weekday, the educational attainment of the teen female, and the marital status of the teen female. The first control, race, originally contained five possibilities:

White, Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian, and Other. Because the last three racial identifiers contained such small numbers – especially when looking at the teen mom category – I created a dummy variable for race. 1 equals white and 0 equals all other. Fundamentally, this control holds race constant so that any variation in the models can be attributed to motherhood status and differences in how teens spend their time. As I will show later (in Table 3) race proved an insignificant variable and did not add nor subtract from any model.

Metropolitan status is not collected by the ATUS survey but is imputed using US Census definitions. The standards used to delineate a metropolitan area and a micropolitan area are reviewed and revised every ten years. As of the 2010 census there are 381 metropolitan areas and 536 micropolitan areas. In order to be classified as metropolitan 50 percent of the county must reside within an urban center of 50,000 people or more. If these criteria are met and the urban core contains more than 2.5 million residents the area could get subdivided into smaller

16 groups called “metropolitan divisions”. For the purposes of this paper, the original imputed code is either that the person lives in a metropolitan area, does not live in a metropolitan area, or refused to answer. This variable controls for all of the complexity involved in living inside a large urban cluster. It was recoded as a dummy variable. 1 equals metropolitan.

ATUS surveys are collected every day of the week, including weekends. Therefore, responses to questions about employment and leisure can vary widely between the work week and the weekend. Because this paper is primarily interested in comparable differences between groups rather than the exact amount of time spent on each activity the average, weighted time for weekend and weekday was sufficient for these purposes. For example, it is not necessarily important that a teen mother spends an average of 10 hours sleeping every day. It is more important to this study that she spends 27 MORE minutes on average than her non-mother counterpart sleeping every day regardless of whether that is a weekday or weekend. This research compares two groups and is not concerned with averages based on weekday/end tabulations. I do control for day of the week the survey was answered in the OLS models and use dummy variable coding with 1 equaling the weekday survey.

The education variable has multiple responses and requires respondents to answer the question “what is your highest level of schooling completed?” The variable is then grouped into multi-year categories with labels ranging from “less than first grade” to “PhD”. I created a dummy variable with 1 equaling “completed high school”. This is the variable I used in the analysis recognizing that all other educational attainment is complimentary to a high school diploma.

Marital status is determined by whether the respondent is “married”, “single” or “left blank”. I created a dummy variable with married indicated by 1 and all other responses coded as

17 0. Recognizing that people who have partners present spend different amounts of time in activities such as childcare, I hold marital status constant in these analyses. I label marital status as “Partnered” in the descriptives chart to be inclusive of all varieties of partnership even though the ATUS only asks about legally binding marriages.

The following section describes the total minutes per day, on average that adolescent females both mothers and non-mothers spend in each of their activities. These averages are broken down by motherhood status. Then ordinary least squares regressions are used to standardize for differences in motherhood status and family characteristics in order to assess whether, net of differences in covariates, teen mothers and non-mothers spend differential amounts of time in similar activities.

Results

Even though this study is specifically designed to examine teen mother time use compared to their non-mother counterparts I still provide a broader picture of who these teen mothers are based on descriptive characteristics in Table 1. The racial breakdown of teen mothers are as follows, 69% of teen mothers in this sample are white, 22% are black, and 29% of teen mothers claim to have Hispanic ethnicity. The teen females who comprise the comparison group of non-mothers 80% of this group are white, 12% are black and only 17% claim to have

Hispanic ethnicity. Fewer teen moms are white than the overall sample size and there are more teen moms who are black and Hispanic than the comparison group. These differences are likely due to structural and cultural differences in the implications of young motherhood. For example, on average white Americans have access to more financial resources and are insured at higher rates than other racial groups making abortion easier to obtain. Likewise, religious imperatives

18 adhered to by ethnic minorities make abortion or adoption unlikely alternatives for most young women. (Finer, Frohwirth, Dauphinee, Singh & Moore, 2005; Allen & Osgood, 2009).

Thirty-two percent (32%) or about one third of teen mothers were married at the time of the interview while less than 1% of teens who are not yet mothers were married at the time of the interview. In addition to marital status, the teen mother student status was also highlighted some very interesting distinctions in the two groups. Despite Title IX laws that ban sex discrimination in federally funded educational activities, most of the teen mothers in this study (67%) were not enrolled in schooling of any kind. 58% of these young mothers had not achieved a high school diploma at the time of the interview. Only 24% of young mothers were enrolled in school full time and another 10% part-time. When comparing the young mothers to their non-mother counterparts the differences are stark. Seventy-seven percent of (77%) teen females who are not yet mothers are enrolled in school full-time whether that is high school or college. Only 4% are enrolled part-time and 19% are not enrolled at all. While 84% of the non-mother teens do not yet have a high school diploma, we assume based on the high rate of enrollment that many more of these teen females will go on to complete at least their high school degrees.

Also included in this table is a comparison of employment status of the teen females in this study. Comparing rates of employment between mothers and non-mothers addresses the first expectation which predicted that teen mothers would be employed at a higher rate given the financial demands of young children. These rates of employment find that expectation to be unsupported by evidence in that teen mothers and their non-mother counterparts are employed at virtually the same rate. Unlike student status, the rates of young mother employment are clearly similar to their non-mother counterparts. Both groups, the teen mothers and non-mothers have an employment rate of 35% and 39% respectively.

19 Dependent Variables

In order to get at the underlying composition of a teen mother’s day, the 400+ variables had to be reduced to a manageable set. In their original form it was typical to find that teen females spent .4 minutes overall each day participating in rodeo competitions or .6 minutes paying parking fines. In the raw form the data was hardly meaningful. With this in mind I created an index of 18 variable categories from the original 400 possible uses of time throughout the day. The categories include: sleep, self-care, interior house care, exterior house care, food preparation, household repairs, financial planning, childcare, work, school, shopping, obtaining childcare, using professional services (hair stylist, lawyer, etc…), leisure, sport, religion, community service, phone calls, and driving locally. (Full descriptions of each indexed variable found in the Appendix A).

Table 2 shows the average number of minutes each day that teen females spend on various activities. There are notable similarities found in this table regarding the average amount of time teen mothers spend participating in certain activities. For example, as was previously highlighted in the descriptive statistics, teen moms seem to spend a relatively equal amount of time in paid endeavors each day. Teen mothers average 59 minutes per day in paid endeavors, compared with an average of 65 minutes per day for non-mothers. Similarly teen moms spend

331 minutes each day or five and a half hours participating in leisure activities. They spend a full 5 minutes more each day relaxing, on average, than their non-mother counterparts. Keep in mind that this data set takes into account all teens who spent all day working and those who never work.

20 Table 1

Distributions and percentages of teen female characteristics

Characteristic Total Mother Non-Mother N 4440 186 4254 Household Background - Race White 3561 80.2 128 68.8 3433 80.7 Black 550 12.4 41 22 509 12 American Indian/Alaskan Native 43 0.97 4 2.15 39 0.92 Asian 143 3.2 5 2.69 138 3.24 Other 143 3.2 8 4.3 135 3.17 Household Background - Ethnicity Hispanic 777 17.5 53 28.5 724 17 Non-Hispanic 3663 82.5 133 71.5 3530 83

Rural Status Lives inside the city limit 813 18.3 34 18.3 779 18.3 Lives outside the city limit 3627 81.7 152 81.7 3475 81.7

Education Less than high school diploma 3692 83.2 108 58.1 3584 84.3 High school diploma or some college 742 16.7 77 41.4 665 15.6 College degree or higher 6 0.14 1 0.54 5 0.12

Student Status Full-time 3315 74.7 44 23.7 3271 76.9 Part-time 187 4.21 18 9.68 169 3.97 Not enrolled 938 21.1 124 66.7 814 19.1 Employment Status Employed 1716 38.7 66 35.5 1650 38.8 Unemployed and looking 666 15 35 18.8 631 14.8 Not in labor force 2058 46.4 85 45.7 1973 46.4 Marital Status Partnered 97 2.18 60 32.3 37 0.87 Single 4343 97.8 126 67.7 4217 99.1

While the non-mother group is employed at a slightly higher rate, the disparity is small when compared to the disparity of school enrollment and as we will see later in this study the time spent on paid work endeavors is statistically insignificant between the two groups. These

21 characteristics are important to note because they begin to tell the story of who these teens are and what are the likely demands placed on their time.

Most importantly Table 2 highlights the wide differences reported in the amounts of time teen moms, on average, spend on educational activities compared to their non-mother counterparts. The row titled, “Activities associated with completing a degree or certificate” shows this wide disparity. Teen mother spend 116 fewer minutes on school activities than their non-mother counterparts. That is almost two fewer hours each day and again, these numbers account for all teen moms those who are in school full time and those who are not enrolled. It is most important to note that teen moms spend less time in schooling activities and the wide disparity of that difference when comparing it to other activity categories.

The same is of course true for childcare – but this is to be expected as teen moms of course spend more time than non-mothers caring for children. Teen moms spend 115 minutes each day, on average, in the primary care of children. Non-mothers spend around 10 minutes each day in the primary care of children but these activities could be related to family responsibilities (sibling care) or work related (babysitting). It is however interesting to note that the mean difference in time spent on schooling is almost exactly the amount of time teen moms report spending in primary childcare. Both of these hypotheses tests were highly significant and will be pursued later in the paper.

While there seemed to be substantial differences in how mothers and non-mothers spend their time, only 10 of the original 18 categories had significant t-tests (p< .001, two-tailed t-test).

This means that, despite relevant literature (Gay, Lee, & Lee, 2004; Wolfson, Crowley, Anwer,

& Bassett, 2010) or common knowledge assumptions that mothers and non-mothers would have

22 significantly different sleep times for example, only half the categories maintained statistical significance in this group of teenagers.

Table 2

Average number of minutes per day mothers and non-mothers spend in various activities, 15-19 year-old females, 2003-2012 Independent Samples Test Group N 186 4254 4440 Activity Mother Non-Mother t-test sig All Sleep time reports 609 582 No All reports of care of the self 42 58 Yes All interior house care 49 22 Yes All exterior house care 2 2 No All food preparation for family including clean up 38 11 Yes Household repairs appliances and vehicles 1 1 No Financial planning tracking and communication 11 10 No All time spent in childcare and related childcare activities 115 10 Yes All activities associated with paid endeavors 59 65 No All activities associated with completing a degree or certification 38 154 Yes All shopping including groceries 34 27 No All time spent obtaining paid childcare outside the home 21 seconds 6 seconds Yes Time spent using professional services including government 6 4 No Time spent relaxing 331 326 No Time spent participating or observing competitive activites 7 31 Yes Time spent participating in religious events 9 12 No Time spent in service to the community 1 9 Yes Time spent making phone calls 10 18 Yes Time spent traveling locally to and from appointments 64 86 Yes 1426 minutes / 23.76 hours 1428 mins / 23.8 hours All enties are rounded to the nearest minute unless labeled as seconds p<.001 Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey

Teen mothers spend significantly more time cleaning and caring for the interior of their homes, a full 27 minutes more each day. They also spend an average of 27 more minutes each day preparing and cleaning up food than do teens without children. While teen mothers spend more time everyday seeking out and obtaining childcare, even the average time spent each day doing this is relatively small listed here in seconds. The differences are significant but not very meaningful.

Some activities get less attention from teen mothers than their non-mother counterparts.

As a group teen moms spend 16 minutes a day less than non-mothers in activities related to self-

23 care. They also spend 24 fewer minutes each day participating in sporting events (which includes exercise for health). Teen moms spend 8 fewer minutes than their non-mother counterparts making phone calls. They also spend 8 fewer minutes each day participating in activities in service to the community. Finally, they spend 12 fewer minutes traveling in the car locally every day. These categories are all areas where the teen mother is caring for herself and others by making connections and getting out of the day to day mothering experience.

There are hints of other time allocation differences in this table as well. Teen females who are not yet mothers do spend a good deal more time each day, on average, in service to the community. They are also a bit more active in their religious communities. These are two areas where community service skills and experiences contributing to endeavors such as political campaigns, that might be valuable throughout the life course have reduced significance for young mothers. Also, teen mothers spend more time consuming, purchasing food and clothing than their non-mother counterparts. While shopping may be a typical teen activity the fact that mothers must shop for others is an important note. In order to assess the extent to which differences in time use between mother and non-mother teen females may reflect differences in race, education, marital status, or metropolitan status multivariate analysis is applied to only the significant set of dependent variables labeled on Table 2 in the third column.

Next, I ran a regression analysis using all 10 significant independent variables comparing teen moms to only their non-mom teen female counterparts (limited set to N=4440). I ran the teen mom variable as a covariate thus allowing it to affect the independent variables. The two independent variables that came up significant (p<.001) were Childcare and Education. Table 3 summarizes the results of these two variables only. In Table 3 I show how dramatic the differences are in time spent on education verses time spent in childcare. Teen moms spend at

24 least 128 minutes less every day on education related activities than their non-mother counterparts. While also spending on average 101 minutes each day in childcare. These of course can then be adjusted to take into account the other control variables.

Table 3

Results from ordinary least squares regression predicting the number of minutes per day teen females spend in childcare and education when controlling for motherhood status, 2003-2012

Activity Childcare Education

Teen Mom 101.61* -128.26* (3.96) (19.90) Race (1, white) -0.22 3.05 (1.60) (7.61) Metropolitan (1, metro area) -4.02 -14.32 (1.95) (9.30) Weekday (1, weekday report) -0.33 190.87* (1.44) (6.88) Education -4.18 41.32* (1.74) (8.31) Marital Status 6.89 -38.13 (5.46) (26.04) Constant 17.11* 31.65 (2.56) (12.22) Adj R2 0.153 0.162

Results are for coeffiecient B; standard errors are in parentheses p<.001 Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey

For example, teen moms who are married spend an average of 7 minutes more per day on childcare than those teen moms who are unmarried possibly because they can. That is, their partner may contribute to other areas of household management allowing them a few extra minutes each day with their children. Teen mothers do seem to be making an attempt to participate in schooling activities – at least during the work week but their total time each day

25 spend on schooling is only about 60 minutes whereas non mother spend three times that amount on schooling each day. Also, those mothers with higher education levels do spend more time each day on education related activities.

This model provides additional support for my fourth expectation which predicts that teen mothers will spend significantly less time doing school related work than their non-mother counterparts. Teen mothers in fact replace their schooling activities with mothering activities almost directly. They do not replace any other activity to a significant respect with mothering.

For example, teen moms are not sleeping far fewer hours each day and buckling down on school work in the early morning hours before their children wake up. Neither are they sacrificing leisure time to get school work done during naps or after . They are simply foregoing school at this point in their mothering experiences. Unfortunately, this is not a useful long-term strategy.

Prior research in the work and life course outcomes for mothers finds that putting off work while children are young has far reaching effects for earning potential and productivity all the way to retirement. (Cameron & Heckman, 1993; Stone, 2008; Jacques & Radtke, 2012)

Discussion

This research takes advantage of the relatively large samples in the American Time Use

Survey (ATUS) to explore how young mothers are spending their time when compared to their non-mother counterparts. The first thing I expected to find was that mothers and non-mothers would work at different rates. That expectation was not vindicated by the data. Teen mothers and teen females who were not yet mothers engaged in paid employment at virtually the same rates. The second expectation was also incorrect, I found instead that teen mothers spend insignificantly different amounts of time at leisure than their non-mother peers. Leisure is

26 actually a place where mothers and non-mothers are similar. The next expectation was a little more nuanced. While it was true that teen mothers spent less time in typically teen related activities (shopping, talking on the phone, driving around town, etc…) those variables did not remain significant in the OLS regression analysis. Finally, however, my expectations were correct that teen mothers spend far fewer minutes each day in schooling and replace that time almost exactly with childcare. In addition, I found that a little over half of the time use category hypothesis comparisons were significant. Teen mothers spend significantly more of their time taking care of the interior of the home, doing food preparation, caring for children, and obtaining childcare than their teen female non mother counterparts. They also spent significantly less time caring for themselves, participating in school, participating in athletics, serving their communities, on the phone and in the car. The teenagers in this sample spent more time overall doing typically “mom like” activities and were foregoing “teen like” activities, including specifically school.

If similarity in daily activities among mothers and non-mothers is an indicator of the relationship of those activities and the role of teenager then it is reasonable to assume that this similarity would extend into educational attainment. That is, the majority of teen females complete their high school education (9 out of 10) and teen mothers report wanting to continue to be part of the mainstream teen trajectory (Edin & Kefalas, 2011; Gregson, 2009; Beutel, 2000) yet 66% of the teen mothers in this sample are not enrolled in school of any kind. Educational achievement is part of adolescence and yet it is the one part of adolescence behaviors that varies both significantly and dramatically from their non-mother peers. Young mothers are not fully engaging continued education while also taking care of young children.

27 This research can inform future studies in sociology of education on young motherhood by presenting detail not otherwise found in the literature. Adolescents who are also mothers

(within educational settings) are a highly protected group making getting research subjects very difficult. This research provides some insight into how they spend their time and what parts of their lives they value given the limits of time. There are quite a few informative studies on adolescent health, mental health, and teaching adolescents how to be mothers (Westall &

Liamputtong, 2011; Cox et.al. 2008; Black et.al. 2002; Trad, 1995). Many times the literature places heavy emphasis on the consequences of young parenthood for offspring and is hidden in nursing and pediatric journals or clinical reports (Smithbattle & Leonard, 2012; Pinzon & Jones,

2012). As I mentioned earlier existing literature focuses on the causes and consequences of teen pregnancy and childbearing and the policies surrounding those efforts (Hoffman & Maynard,

2008; Hotz et.al. 2008 & 1995). Thus what I, and other researchers must fall back on are the bleak trends and research institute reports using secondary data sets reminding us that in fact adolescent mothers truly struggle to complete their educations. Some efforts are being made to increase graduation rates among young mothers however the research thus far about barriers to education are limited to qualitative studies. This study offers additional evidence that children take up a lot of time. In the life of an adolescent mother they take up the time that she could otherwise be in school.

A limitation of this study is that it lacks outcome measures. It therefore cannot say for certain that more time spent on school related activities would result in higher graduation rates.

It is possible, for example, that women who eventually became teen mothers were already spending significantly less time participating in school related endeavors. That is, poor academic performance may have spurned these young women further into a motherhood vocation at an

28 earlier age. Therefore one of the assumptions of whether teen motherhood “causes” a drop in educational attainment is also lacking. These results cannot provide temporal evidence that young mothers were doing well in school until they decided to and then their school attendance dropped. Even so, this study highlights the dramatic difference in schooling participation that young motherhood impacts. The practical application of these results is that it is possible to understand the competing endeavors for time which leave young mothers without an education until much later in life.

Despite these limitations, the glimpse into the daily activities of young mothers is a rare opportunity to begin examining the ongoing process of achievement and dual role playing. In order to achieve full teenage status, young mothers engage in leisure and social activities at the same rate as their non-mother counterparts. However, like older mothers, teen mothers spend more time shopping, cooking, and cleaning than their non-mother peers. Although the differences are statistically insignificant, these are still commitments of their time which is accounted for numerically. While teen mothers trade schooling for motherhood, they do not seem to trade their teen lifestyle for the practices of traditional – older - motherhood. This is an area that warrants further investigation as there might be a link between the preserved teenage behaviors and long term success. Engaging the behaviors of both mother and teenage roles simultaneously may be one protective measure for future success at both roles.

The next chapter of this dissertation evaluates the media representation of young mothers.

I examine how popular media represents early motherhood using an empirical content analysis of the Teen Mom television series. Again, I aim to focus specifically on how mass media producers and editors portray teen moms spending their time. I also include an analysis of how teen mom’s

29 emotions are portrayed. Finally, I examine in more detail which specific consequences of teen motherhood editors and producers highlight using the Teen Mom television show.

30 CHAPTER 3

WHEN SEX EDUCATION INTERSECTS WITH POP CULTURE: MIXED

MESSAGES OF TEEN MOTHERHOOD

Social scientists have long been interested in reality TV since it emerged in 1938 with the popular show, Candid Camera. Since then, numerous shows have aired including, Ripley’s

Believe It or Not!, The Crocodile Hunter, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, Unsolved

Mysteries, America’s Most Wanted, The Bachelor, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The Swan,

Supernanny, , World’s Funniest Home Videos, The Amazing Race and many others. One way to understand reality of “Reality” TV is through the lens of political economy, which emphasizes the notion that reality programming is a carefully crafted construction designed to make money. Political economy takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying the merger of economics with other fields, like sociology, to explain the power relationships in resource allocation (Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, & Sasson, 1992; Bagdikian, 1980; Gans, 1979).

This approach is also adopted to study aspects of media and television paying close attention to the power relationships between producers, advertisers and consumers.

The relationship between producers, advertisers and consumers is highly complex and dominated by strategies that are largely kept as secret as possible in order to win the competition for audiences. New marketing tools that include embedding consumer products and specific values inside a television show are designed to make the audience feel more comfortable with messages the producers and advertisers are sending. Advertisers and producers blend income, generations, marital status, and gender into character profiles they call “lifestyles” (Turow,

1997). Featuring these narrow lifestyles attracts a relatively small audience of like-minded consumers. The targeted audience is a small group or segment of broader society. Dismantling

31 viewing audiences into smaller and smaller groups, or lifestyles, is called “segment-making media” and is designed to encourage those small parts of society to talk to themselves rather than encouraging all the segments to talk to each other (Marx, 2015). Producers and advertisers are making unprecedented attempts to exploit differences in consumers focusing primarily on entering the private spaces of individuals – their homes, cars, offices, etc. – in order to attract additional customers who fit these narrow profiles (Elkins, 2013). Lifestyle media is relatively new to the mass media markets and the most salient example of segment-making media is reality television.

Two of the most popular reality shows with more than 2 million viewers each episode are

16 & Pregnant and the spinoffs, Teen Mom 1 and . Despite the sociological interest in reality TV generally, shows depicting teen moms have largely been analyzed through the framework of the audience, teenagers between 12 and 19. Recent research focuses primarily on the how the show influences teens’ perceptions about the reality of life as a teen mother and ignores how producers shape the construction of teen motherhood (Kearney & Levine, 2014;

Wright, Randall, & Arroyo, 2013; Guglielmo, 2013; Johsson, 2010). Martins and Jensen (2014) find that teens who watch 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom have an increased tendency to believe that teen mothers have an enviable quality of life, a high income and involved fathers. Another recent study (Aubrey, Behm-Morawitz & Kim, 2014) also used survey data as well as on online field experiment which included watching episodes of 16 and Pregnant or another MTV reality series not related to pregnancy. They examined girls’ beliefs, attitudes and behavioral intentions toward pregnancy and found that the girls who watched episodes of 16 and Pregnant reported a lower perception of their own risk for pregnancy and a greater perception that the benefits of teen pregnancy outweigh the risks than the girls in the control group. In addition these researchers

32 found that the girls in the exposure group had higher measures of homophily, or higher levels of association and bonding with the pregnant teens on television. Another line of research emphasizes the celebrated status and lifestyle improvements the teen moms enjoy as a result of appearing on the show (Montoya & Scott, 2013; Dunfee, 2012) These studies emphasize the potential social effect of the program whether for the mother or the viewer. There is a tension between the social and economic functions of mass media and the above scholars are currently emphasizing the former – with respect to the Teen Mom television show – without exploring the implications of the latter.

The producers of Teen Mom clearly have a message to convey. The say their show provides an insider perspective of the consequences of early sexual behavior, teen pregnancy and young motherhood. For example, Teen Mom producer, Liz Gatelely, strongly disputes the claim that her show sensationalizes young motherhood in a 2010 interview on NPR, “…anyone who makes that argument obviously hasn’t watched either series.”7 Research does suggest that sexual health messages embedded in entertainment programming may reduce sexual risk-taking

(Broadbear & Broadbear, 2012; Sood, 2004; Singhal & Rogers, 1999). To that end, MTV’s reality television content partners with The Kaiser Family Foundation’s “It’s Your (Sex) Life

Campaign” and The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to provide streaming information through website content about contraceptives and pregnancy prevention.

Sexual health messaging research is done from an entertainment education perspective, or

“edutainment” which is a stream of programming designed specifically to educate but is also entertaining (Herman, Moore & Anthony, 2012; Herrman, Moore, & Anthony, 2012). My research examines the Teen Mom television show in order analyze what messages producers

7 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128626258

33 send about teen motherhood and how the tensions between media as carrier of social messaging and economic product out.

Drawing on an empirical content analysis of 4 seasons of Teen Mom, I find that producers send contradictory messages about teen motherhood. On the one hand teen mothers conform to societal understandings of what good mothers do, such as provide food, shelter, and other physical provisions for their babies and young children. On the other hand the producers portray teen mothers largely engaged in negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, and frustration. I conclude by discussing the contradictions in the depictions and their implications for the construction of teen motherhood. The following literature will briefly review sociologists’ interest in gender as a social construction. I summarize “doing gender” as the foundation for the performative act of mothering through which women assume the category “mother”. This category is more than simply a biological relationship or a primitive urge. There are behaviors, practices, and emotions that society expects mothers to achieve. I operationalize how the producers construct a teen mother character in two ways, doing and being. In order to capture how producers portray teen moms behaving and feeling as mothers, I aim to answer two questions specifically: 1) How are teen mothers portrayed as spending their time? Time use operationalized as the “doing” of motherhood. (friends, family, childcare, self-care, home- making) and 2) How are teen mothers’ feelings and emotional states portrayed in response to the new challenges of parenting?

Literature Review

Doing Gender Doing Mothering

34 Typically, sociologists think of gender as a social construction. That is, there are no objective male or female forms but rather a male category and a female category developed by society that then creates the perception of male and female. These categories are constructed and then affirmed and reaffirmed through particular practices assigned to females and males. For example women are typically associated with attributes such as gentleness, empathy, and sensitivity while men are associated with attributes such as courage, independence, and assertiveness (Shields & Diccicco, 2011; Fancher, 2000; Deaux, 1999). Because both men and women exhibit a mixture of both male and female attributes, scholars began examining these categories in terms of roles or gendered tasks assigned to men and women. In the late 1970’s, beginning with the work of Erving Goffman, sociologists moved away from studying gendered roles and made substantial advances by studying gender as an iterative process constructed through interactions individuals perform in order to guide the impressions of others. In his work,

Gender Display (1976), Goffman theorizes that gender is a displayed through expressing a series of signs that denote an individual’s chosen category.

Building on Goffman’s work, Candace West and Don Zimmerman argued that gender is something that individuals actually ‘do’. In their 1987 article, “Doing Gender” they provided a comprehensive case that gender is a set of daily practices one uses to manifest a version of masculinity and femininity. The result, or gender performance, is the outcome of social structures and repeatedly performing gender identities legitimizes and reinforces the dominant social structures. Under this paradigm, “doing gender” means to perform complex societal interactions defined by society as either masculine or feminine. An individual’s gender is established in context through interacting under the supervision of others and is accomplished or society recognizes the individual to be in one or another gendered category.

35 Social researchers were quick to pick up on the “doing gender” theme expanding the concept into complimentary perspectives such as “doing difference”, a way to organize the interaction of individuals and institutions (West & Fenstermaker, 1995). Doing gender is also used to document the range of feminine and masculine performances (Connell & Messerschmidt,

2005) as well as the range of embodied performances (Martin, 2004; Schrock, Reid, & Boyd,

2005; Vaccaro, Schrock, & McCabe, 2011). Scholars also look at how gender is performed in institutional setting like work, church, and educational settings (Acker, 1990 & 1998; Maier &

Messerschmidt; Martin J., 1994; Martin P., 1992 & 2003; Prokos & Padavic, 2002; Simmons,

2002)

Gender as a social construction or performative act is a useful starting point to understand media messages that are likely contradictory. I use the sociological literature on gender to inform two aspects of gendered behavior, those activities associated with “good mothering” and emotional expressions surrounding motherhood. Framing motherhood as a social construction stems from a relatively small line of academic research. Researchers have examined ways in which “motherhood” is constructed by medical and psychological professionals through childcare and parenting manuals (Marshall, 1991) and conversations (Tardy, 2000). These studies find that health professionals define and exemplify acceptable mothering practices that are many times not in line with how women functionally fill the role. Mothering is also a role that is constructed within specific historical periods and thus changes over time (Glenn, Chang,

& Forcey, 1994). Missing from the academic literature are the specific tasks or practices that align with performing motherhood. What are the daily practices that comprise a “good” mother’s day?

36 Popular literature seems better prepared to answer this empirical, task oriented question and has picked up where the academic literature falls short. Thus far mothering performances, or tasks, center on the many possible styles of mothering (Russo, 1976; Ellison, 2005; Baker,

2010). Popular literature highlights the experiences of “Attachment Parents” popularized by

William Sears emphasizing the strong emotional bond children form with caregivers in early childhood. Attachment parents use activities such as birth bonding, co-sleeping, extended breastfeeding, and baby wearing to demonstrate good mothering (Sears & Sears, 2001; Bobel,

2002). “Tiger Moms” are another segmented parenting style popularized by Amy Chua which emphasizes the rigor imparted by Chinese immigrants that enables their children to excel academically. Tiger parents are strictly support academic success by placing heavy emphasis on effort and the close friendship networks of their children (Chua-Rubenfeld, 2011). “French

Parenting” is another segmented parenting style popularized by Pamela Drukerman which takes a more relaxed approach to parenting than the more intensive American style. Parents adopting the French style of parenting would go to great lengths to expose their children to a variety of foods and social situations while expecting them to carry themselves like adults (Druckerman,

2012; Skenazy, 2010). The list of popular that articulate particular tasks for parents to perform in order to be “good” could go on and on and might include other parenting styles such as “Free Range Parenting”, “Slow Parenting”, “Playful Parents” and “Helicopter

Parents”.

Constructing a parenting dialogue in segments further divides mothers from one another.

No longer are women trying to understand motherhood within a 1970’s paradigm of working or not, also known as “The Mommy Wars” but rather through a lens of ‘what “brand” of mother are you?’ Dividing parents by practical tasks is another example of how the political economy has

37 infiltrated the dialogue specifically around parenting choices. Complicating the issue further is where a woman stands on feeding practices, sleeping arrangements, styles of discipline, and modes of education. Women (and men) are pushed to new heights of extreme parenting and no longer is good enough – well, enough. Rather than looking at the teen mom as a “type” or a

“lifestyle”, although it may be one or both of these, this study ties the tasks associated with mothering to “time” or time spent engaging in behaviors and activities on television. The age of the mothers, as well as the format of for-profit television, means that it is unlikely that MTV will promote parenting brands or mothering style choices. It is more likely that they will focus on creating drama and conflict in order to boost ratings.

Like other mainstream mothers, young mothers are also constructing and reconstructing a a set of behaviors that will convey the appropriate mothering status based on their role models, areas of interest, and social influences. The newest “millennial” mothers spend a lot of time with media and therefore it is worthwhile to examine the messages they receive as a segmented audience about mothering performances. In addition to evaluating how teen mothers are portrayed performing motherhood in the mass media, this research also seeks to understand how teen mothers are portrayed feeling about those mothering tasks. It is important to examine how producers construct ideals of motherhood.

Like mothering as a practice, there are feelings associated with good mothering. There are also feeling norms associated with everyday social situations. Arlie Hochschild (1983) proposes that society provides individuals with prototypes of acceptable displays according to ideological and cultural standards. Hochschild asserts in The Managed Heart, that we have feeling rules deeply rooted in culture and in light of such rules we manage our feelings according the situation. The emotion rules are imparted to young children, are social and intimately tied to

38 gender performance (Adler, Kless & Adler, 1992; Erickson, 2005; Ezzell, 2009). For example, mothers are expected to have a varied and intricate set of emotions ranging from elation and joy upon the arrival of their newborn to despair for those new mothers experiencing postpartum depression. Sad and anxious feelings are known to increase in the immediate postpartum period whereas other emotions such as anger are scarce (Behringer, Spangerl, & Reiner, 2011).

Women traditionally have been socialized to portray a limited range of emotions. Parents perceive emotional expressions differently as a function of the gender of the parent and the gender of the child allowing, for example, daughters to express more sadness than sons

(Cassano, Zeman, & Perry-Parrish, 2007). Women are also primarily responsible for managing the emotions of other members of their , both children and spouses (Lois, 2013; Elliott &

Umberson, 2008; DeVault, 1999). They are also more engaged with the emotion work involved in recounting and remembering which helps children better regulate themselves in future situations (Schrock & Knop, Forthcoming; Zaman & Fivush, 2013; Reese, Haden, & Fivush,

2006). While there are of course exceptions to the gendered labor of emotion work, these studies suggest that women remain primarily responsible for the primary tasks of both managing their own emotions and those of others.

Given the existing literature on the emotions of new mothers, we would also expect teen moms to express a similar range of emotions. However, the spectrum of depressive symptoms are the most commonly studied when examining adolescent parenting (Schmidt, Wiemann,

Rickert, & Smith, 2006; Black, Papas, Hussey, Dubowitz, & Kotch, 2002; Trad, 1995).

Decreased social support and partner support are primarily blamed for the depressive symptoms in adolescent mothers (Cox, Buman, Valenzuela, Joseph, Mitchell & Woods, 2008; Black et.al.,

2002). Qualitative research done by sociologists does present a broader range of emotions - other

39 than depression (Edin & Kefalas, 2011; Furstenberg, 2007). Frank Furstenberg (2007) argues that the causes and consequences of early teen parenting have been misunderstood because they are refracted through the American political culture. He finds through an extensive 40 year longitudinal study that mothers who began parenting earlier are better able to articulate overall feelings of happiness (p. 41) than their counterparts who began motherhood later in life. This study aims to evaluate how television shows represent the tasks and emotional labor of young mothers, a new to television emotional construction.

Data and Methods

The Importance of Teen Mom

The above literature provides an overview of the social construction of gender and emotion management. Both constructs are used by television producers to construct a teen mom character targeted at a segmented audience. In order to analyze depictions of teen motherhood, I examine four seasons of Teen Mom. The producers of this show use film and narrative to consciously constructing motherhood as well as constructing a reproducible teen mom prototype.

The goal of producers is not necessarily to inform about the consequences of young parenting but is rather to generate viewing audiences and engage a consuming public. Looking for ways to reach teenagers – and spend “evidence based” sex education funding – the organizations syndicated the television show for distribution in public sex education classrooms. Together these educational campaigns use teen media opportunities – the political economy - to focus on reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV in younger populations. The primary contribution of this analysis to identify and dissect the hidden constructions of the celebrity status of teen motherhood. I analyze both the time use and the emotional state of

40 produced images of young mothers. By analyzing both the systematic message construction engaged in by the show producers and the micro level components of character portrayals, this research presents broad examples of media discourse on young motherhood.

Episodes of Teen Mom 1 offer a unique opportunity to examine ongoing media portrayals of active teen mothering. The viewer has the opportunity to watch the mothering practices change over time and see the “real” consequences of choosing to parent at such an early age. In order to remain relevant in the fragmented genre of Reality TV, I focus specifically on one show, Teen Mom 1, and four mothers, Amber, Catelynn, Farrah, and Maci. Table 5 provides a brief description of each of the mothers in this analysis.

Table 5

Teen mom descriptions

Age at first Highest Name birth Baby Daddy Race State Education Amber 18 Gary White Indiana GED Catelynn 17 Tyler White Michigan Some College Bachelor's Farrah 17 †Derek White Nebraska Degree Maci 17 Ryan White Tennessee Some College

My central research questions looks at how producers portray teen motherhood by specifically evaluating: (1) How are teen mothers portrayed as spending their time? (2) How are teen mothers’ feelings and emotional states portrayed in response to the new challenges of parenting?

I also address the broad messages the show sends about the consequences of choosing early motherhood, (3) What does the show convey are the specific consequences young mothers face?

In sum, this project looks at how media contributes to ongoing constructions of young mothering and the mixed messages it sends about the outcomes of choosing to become a young mother.

41 The women on the Teen Mom 1 television show refer to themselves as “teen mothers”.

Even though I prefer the more inclusive and accurate (many of the mothers are not actually teenagers when the shows are produced) “young parents”, I chose to adopt the teen mother identifier throughout this document because the show makes an obvious attempt at signifying a teen mom archetype. They do this first through labeling or naming the young mother.

Data Collection

I performed a thorough content analysis of the show Teen Mom 1 which airs on MTV, currently in its fifth season. The results presented here employ 4 of the 33 coded variables. I coded 46 episodes in all. I chose to analyze Teen Mom 1 because they are the most popular set of mothers. They are also the only set of mothers where one of the mothers chose to give her baby up for adoption thus providing a counter narrative to primary caregiving. In addition, these four mothers were cast prior to the producers knowing which storylines would keep audiences watching. I found in doing the coding on Teen Mom 2 that the producers seemed to take the most extreme stories from Teen Mom 1 – the stories that garnered the most audience views and just reproduce those in a new set of mothers. Teen Mom 2 was an extreme version of Teen Mom

1. Teen Mom 1 was organic in its construction. Finally, these teen mothers are not your traditional nunnery bound, shotgun wedding, drop out of school, live off welfare kinds of stereotypes. These teen mothers are average teens who made a reasonable decision to parent their children and are struggling to balance their status and their aspirations postpartum.

Each episode is 42 minutes long with the exception of the final episode of each season which runs 65 minutes. At the end of each season the mothers all sit down with a celebrity therapist, Dr. Drew to process the season’s ups and downs. I do not code these couch style counseling sessions – although I did watch them. While these sessions are important to the

42 character development and the well-being of the mother, I did not have a way to incorporate the settings and conversations into an already over flowing coding scheme. I would need a wholly separate coding scheme for these portions of the show8.

Before formal coding began, I watched a sample of each season to determine important categories. Then I developed a coding scheme broken down by scene and character/mother

(Burns, & Thompson, 1989; Altheide, 1996). The scene is the primary unit of analysis. Most scenes feature the mother engaging in conversation with other characters both face to face and on the phone. The mothers never speak directly to the camera or the viewer which gives the feeling of secretly listening in on private interactions. Each scene averages a minute in length and portrays each mother individually interacting with one or more other characters. I coded for as much information about each mother as possible such as age, visual race (unless otherwise stated), employment status, class status, and the like (See Appendix B for codebook). Even though it was very obvious that the teen moms financial status became more secure as the seasons progressed – their work status only changed slightly so I continued to code as if the show were telling the whole truth. For example, at the beginning of season 1 Catelynn was officially living with her parents in a low rent location. She moved out of her parents’ home into an apartment with Tyler that cost $700 a month at the beginning of season 3. They were both still in high school and unemployed at the time yet managed to acquire, furnish and decorate an apartment. Because they were both still in school, I coded them as students and then made notations that their apartment had magically been furnished. Neither Catelynn nor Tyler made

8 For ore o the ifluee of epert ouselors o the sho see Maria Thoas’ ritial aalsis Pathologial Motherhood, Paretal Relatioships, Epert Couselig, ad Heterooratiit: A Framework of Anxiety and Reassurae through MTV’s Tee Mo

43 any reference to where their new furniture had come from they acted as if it had been theirs all along.

In order to generate a list of codes, I watched and re-watched episodes, taking into account new spaces, family members, clothing, environments, camera angles and the like, finally settling into a coding scheme in which no new situations arose not otherwise available in my code book. You can see a breakdown of the 20 primary time use codes in the code book in

Appendix B. If a new code arose late in the series for which I did not have a time use code that neatly fit, I coded time use as other but then coded the scene and activity to account for the lack in a predefined time use. This iterative process was particularly important for coding the mother’s emotions. Rather than begin with a list of emotions from the sociological literature, I began with the portrayals themselves. I coded each new emotion as it arose in the way that it was meant to remain with the viewer. For example, if the scene began with calm discussion but ended in a violent outburst, I coded for the violent outburst because this is the emotional expression the viewer is supposed to remember. While this strategy certainly omits emotions deemed relevant by sociologists the point of creating this data set is to capture the intent of the producers which in the case of emotions tend toward the simplistic and the dramatic. I then asked student researchers to code scenes using my code book. I found they were easily able to reproduce and recognize each code eventually reaching 100 percent agreement.

Throughout the coding process, I assumed there was a difference between the teen moms talking about their abilities and opportunities and actually having an opportunity available to them. For example, in season 1 Amber decides she is going to leave Gary (baby daddy) and take

Leah (the baby) with her. She does not have a job and only a couple hundred dollars available to her. She talks about making a life for herself and that she does not need Gary but ends up

44 staying in a hotel room with her daughter. I code the actions only. In this case I coded Amber’s time use as “moving” and her emotional portrayal as “hopeful”. In order to draw out this distinction, I used the behaviors of the teens themselves to understand how they actively construct their status using indicators such as money, how they spend their time, and the feelings they display in each scene. In addition, I coded for economic opportunity using indicators such as parental financial support, partner financial support, government financial support, and paid employment. These are all signifiers of income and wealth which can usually speak for how much time a mother has available to her while raising a child. Another example of operationalizing time use was to code for how much childcare support is available to the teen mom through data such as availability of daycare, availability of grandparent , and the availability of the father to care for the child. Child care assistance is an indicator of the available opportunities the teen mom has to both seek vocational training outside of motherhood as well as procure paid employment both requiring a lot of time not directly related to parenting.

I coded for thirteen emotions in all. Table 6 summarizes the code name, a description of the facial expressions and behaviors I looked for and an example from the show that provides a relevant scene in which this emotion was identified. Then I combined the emotions into broader categories of positive, neutral, and negative emotions to first simplify the analysis and second to overcome nuances between similarly portrayed emotions such as epiphany versus understanding.

In this way I am able to both code the emotions the characters portrayed while allowing for differences in interpretation. I present the emotion codes here because they are the interpretive.

That is, it was usually clear how the mother was spending her time – it was not as clear how her emotions were portrayed.

45 Each season should be viewed as evidence that teen mother character is evolving as it is produced and that, as a sociologist, I am documenting the changes. I coded each episode inductively while constantly comparing the new evidence to what we know empirically about teen mothers (Glaser, 1965). While I approached the analysis assuming that the image of the teen mother is changing, I did not know how or what has changed about the image.

Table 6

Portrayed teen mom emotions summary

Emotion Coded Description Relevant Example Catelynn receiving Happy Smiling, festive photographs of her daughter Physically Enraged hostile, Amber punching Gary aggressive Excited, Farrah visiting a new city - Hopeful enthusiasm contemplating moving there. Sorrowful, Farrah mourning her ex who Sad tearful died Maci deciding whether to buy Anxious Nervous, wary a house with a new boyfriend Maci considering her mother's Contemplative Quiet, thoughtful advice Annoyed, Amber arguing with Gary Angry inflamed without violence Threatened, Catelynn worried that Tyler Fear doubtful will leave her Maci unable to communicate Paralyzed, Frustrated with Ryan about what she incapable needs Righteous Farrah arguing with her parent Argumentative Indignation about her desire to date Catelynn and Tyler lying in Content Serene, relaxed bed in their new apartment Epiphany Aha!, learning Maci raising her hand in class Catelynn attending group Interested, Understanding therapy with other birth absorbed mothers

46 I answered these questions using an open coding scheme looking for relevant themes. I asked myself questions such as, “What is the primary activity performed in each scene?” “Who is performing those tasks?” “What is the overarching emotional state of the mother?” “Is that person doing other kinds of supporting or nurturing tasks?” During episode coding I took detailed notes about current themes, structure, format and interactions noticed throughout the show (Lofland & Lofland, 1995; Martin & Turner, 1986).

Finally, I entered all the coded data into an excel spreadsheet and uploaded it to SPSS for analysis. In all I coded for 33 variables over 925 scenes totaling more than 30,000 data points for four mothers. Rather than transcribing the script, which leaves out the nuanced emotional displays and setting changes – I coded for the presence of descriptive behaviors and activities. I also coded for time use, setting, primary scene activity and whether the child is present in the scene. After coding and entering all the data I ran basic crosstabulations on the variables that best answered the research questions posed for this paper focusing specifically on teen mom, season, time use, and emotional state. I then ran chi-square tests to determine whether the time uses and emotional portrayals vary significantly by season and teen mom. In order to conduct the following analysis, I begin by identifying overarching themes moving quickly into the tasks and emotions that the Teen Mom show portrays as performing motherhood. I also look for differences by character across the seasons to see if the activities and emotions are consistently portrayed or if each character is developed individually according to a unique construct.

Fundamentally, this is a dramatic representation designed to attract viewers and sponsors thus it requires ongoing conflict both within relationships and from the emotional states of the teen mothers.

47 Results

Portrayals of how teen moms spend their time

In order to answer the first research question: how are teen mothers spending their time – which I operationalize as the activities in which young mothers are portrayed engaging –I originally I coded for 20 possible time uses. From that list, I took the top five uses of time which are represented in Figure 1 to demonstrate the primary ways the show portrays teen mothers doing motherhood overall across the seasons. Overall, I find that teen moms are not portrayed in primary engagement with their children– and more specifically that they are not portrayed emulating any of the popular mothering styles listed in the above research. In addition, schooling was notably absent from the five most popular doing categories. The Teen Mom television show rarely portrays the moms actively participating in schooling activities. During all four seasons, the mothers were portrayed attending classes or doing homework just 7% of the time or in 66 scenes. Also notably absent was time spent in paid employment even though all the mothers were able to live in their own apartments and had colored/styled hair and nails in every episode. Their apartments were also well furnished and the cars the mothers drove improved over the seasons as well. The shows did not mention how these items were acquired.

The shows also downplayed the work required of those moms who actually did complete some schooling (Catelynn and Farrah). While they were portrayed actively participating in school in a few scenes it was not a daily practice which is what is required for most degreed programs – even high school completion. Parents who engage schooling or work do so daily, at odd hours, under duress and with a level of commitment that was not exhibited in Teen Mom. Completing school was certainly on the minds of all mothers but it was not something that was prioritized.

The choice to forego schooling during early motherhood was not portrayed as a particularly

48 harsh consequence. One gets the impression that schooling was not a priority for these girls before they became mothers.

While the children were present in the majority of the scenes, the mother was featured most often interacting with other adults. In season one an almost equal number of scenes show the teen mother actively participating in childcare as hanging out with her friends. All of the teen mothers have a ready supply of friends who are willing to listen, hangout and chat. Friends are never called upon to babysit however. When the babies are smallest the young mothers participate in the least amount of self-care and eating, although remember that these are the top 5 uses of time. So, there is still a significant portion of the show devoted to these activities (7% and 9% of the scenes respectively).

The second season features much more childcare (64 scenes in season 2 only 39 in season

1) and fewer friends but more time spent with family as the teens realize how much they will have to lean on other family members in order to get out of the house. Again, friends were never portrayed babysitting. Notice that in season’s 3 and 4 the amount of time the producers show the teens spending time together as a family (scenes with additional grandparents or siblings) almost doubles. A chi-square test confirms a significant difference between the seasons and the way teen moms are portrayed spending their time, (X2 (12, N=618) = 47.63, p < .001). The N is lower than the original coded set because I am only showing the top five uses of time. 307 scenes were spent participating in the one of the other 15 possible uses of time. (Appendix C)

The show overwhelmingly portrayed the teen moms interacting with other characters not necessarily interacting with their own children. Producers appear to construct teen mothering as a social endeavor that is apparently done by multiple adults interacting around the children.

Friends and family are usually present and the most common communal activity performed is

49 eating. Teen mothers engage in time spent on self-care quite a bit which is typically portrayed as individual therapy although salon trips are also commonly portrayed.

Figure 1

Teen Mom Time Use by Season

The way teen moms spend their time changes by season and it is also different for each mother. Some moms are shown participating in childcare more often than others. This inconsistency in how each mother is portrayed spending her time is further evidence that the show’s producers are more concerned with developing a viewing audience than with an accurate portrayal of mothering behaviors or with portraying consequences of early parenting. Figure 2 disaggregates time use by teen mom and shows the disparity in the constructions of motherhood.

Maci is typically characterized on the show as the “good mother”. She seems to really enjoy motherhood and spends a couple of episodes contemplating having a second child. Maci is shown spending the most amount of time in primary childcare. In contrast, Catelynn, who chose adoption for her child, is almost never portrayed participating in primary childcare. Exceptions to this are when she babysits her little brother (3 years old in season one). However, Catelynn is

50 shown spending the most time in the company of her family members. Interesting given that she is not depending on them for childcare. Catelynn’s parents are actually the ones who need her.

She spends a lot of time cleaning up their messes and there is a lot of discussion of how her parents are the children and she is the parent. These kinds of conversations are used to convey the satisfaction she still feels with her choice to place her daughter with adoptive parents.

Catelynn feels she was able to give her daughter a childhood and spared her daughter from her family’s turmoil.

Figure 2

Top Time Use Portrayed on Teen Mom

Farrah and Amber are portrayed spending relatively equal amounts of time in childcare and with their families. Amber spends much more time in self-care most likely because she is required to attend therapy and was sent to a rehabilitation facility for 60 days in the middle of the show. The rehab facility was in a posh beach town on the California coast. There, she spent her days resting, doing hypno-therapy, boxing, participating in group therapy and individual therapy.

Her daughter visited once in the 60 day period but otherwise she was free to concentrate on

51 dealing with her violent outbursts and withdrawing from her heavy regimen of prescription medications.

While Farrah is also portrayed seeking individual counseling she is also shown getting her body modified with breast implants and corrective braces for her teeth. Information collected outside the show reveals that she got much more plastic surgeries than were portrayed including a second breast enhancement procedure, rhinoplasty, chin contouring, and lip augmentation. There was also very little discussion on the show about how much these procedures cost and where the money for them came from. Farrah and Amber represent the hyper-sexed and violent teen stereotypes on the show. The way they use their time reflects those stereotypes.

I also find that these time use patterns do not persist throughout all four seasons. The moms are portrayed spending more or less time in childcare, self-care, with friends, with family, and eating differently over different seasons. Figure 3 shows the individual teen mother’s top five uses of time by season. The mothers are presented in alphabetical order. A chi-square test was performed and there is a significant (p<.001) relationship between the season and the way the individual teen moms are portrayed spending their time for all moms except Catelynn. The significance test shows that Catelynn’s time use is a bit different from the other moms and is significant at p<.05 level rather than the p<.001 level. (Amber: X2 (12, N=153)=55.10, p<.001;

Catelynn: X2 (12, N=165)=24.90, p<.05; Farrah: X2 (12, N=147)=33.20, p<.001; Maci: X2 (12,

N=153)=47.63, p<.001)

Looking at the time use in this format reveals a few patterns. Amber is portrayed spending the most time at the very beginning engaged in primary childcare activities but by the third season completely blows up and spends much of seasons 3 and 4 over compensating with

52 self-care. Maci maintains relatively similar amounts of primary childcare throughout the four seasons and maintains strong connections with her friends but is able to do little else. Catelynn invests her time heavily into her own needy family but also into Tyler and the family who adopted her baby. Interestingly, Farrah seems to maintain the most balance in her activities over the four seasons. She receives the most financial and physical assistance from her parents. She is also able to complete her associate’s degree, move to another state, and begin working on her bachelor’s degree by show’s end. These findings suggest that the differences in portrayals are not due to successful parenting practices such as finding reliable childcare. They also do not fluctuate based on the needs of their growing infants nor the demands of work/school balance.

These fluctuations seem to be random – no “real” pattern emerges and thus no consistent message. These inconsistencies are primarily due to the producers and editors looking for the narrative arch and character development rather than for a common (accurate) portrayal of the reality of young motherhood. That is, the Teen Mom show is primarily interested in the dramatic developments and which story lines generate more viewers.

In sum, these results are interesting because they highlight a clear emphasis by producers and editors on certain kinds of time uses for each teen mom. Each mom participates in a variety of activities each day but those activities are not necessarily portrayed proportionally. This means that the intentional shape of the practices of teen motherhood includes a lot of time with friends and family, a lot of time in primary childcare and time for little else including school or work. There is a primary contradiction in these initial time use findings however. While I coded for specific parenting practices associated with many of the popular styles of motherhood listed above, the teen mothers are represented performing very few activities associated with “good” mothering neither from health care literature nor the popular literature.

53

Childcare Self Care Friends Family Eating

Amber Catelynn 25 30 20 15 20 10 10 5 0 0 1234 1234

Farrah Maci 20 30 15 20 10 10 5 0 0 1234 1234

Figure 3

Top 5 Time Uses by Mom

The mothers do not breastfeed, rock, or respond to their children’s cries immediately. Nor do they consciously participate in more intensive styles of parenting from the popular literature including co-sleeping and baby wearing.

Portrait of teen mother’s emotional state

In order to answer the second research question, how are teen mothers’ feelings and emotional states portrayed in response to the new challenges of parenting, I evaluate the findings for 13 possible emotional states. Table 7 shows the variety and popularity of the entire set of emotions.

54 A chi-square test was performed and there is a significant relationship between the season and the way emotional portrayals of the teen moms, X2 (39, N=925) = 161.188, p < .001.

Table 7

Teen mom emotional portrayals by season

Emotional Portrayal Season 1 Season 2 Season 3 Season 4 Total Mother not present 4 0 1 19 24 Happy 34 49 55 59 197 Enraged 5 34 14 13 66 Hopeful 10 14 38 31 93 Sad 11 14 28 21 74 Anxious 1 5 13 1 20 Contemplative 21 28 19 29 97 Anger 14 4 5 7 30 Fear 8 7 17 13 45 Frustrated 48 56 30 22 156 Righteous Indignation 1 0 0 1 2 Content 1 8 3 3 15 Epiphany 17 24 23 15 79 Understanding 3 10 9 5 27 Total 178 253 255 239 925

This data includes the 24 scenes where the mother was not present (the first column of the table).

During the fourth season when the children were between two and three years old, the mother was absent from the scene most. The total row tallies the number of emotional expressions presented overall. Broadly speaking, the teen moms were portrayed as being happy in 197 scenes or 21% of the show time. That is, the emotion portrayed most by producers and editors is happiness. Happiness on screen was coded when the mother was smiling, joyful, clapping her hands, or laughing.

The second most popular emotion on the show is one of frustration. I coded this emotion when the mother seems exasperated or at her wits end. The emotion is usually accompanied by audibly exhaled breath, hands thrown in the air, or obvious eye rolls. The mothers in this set

55 were portrayed as frustrated in 156 scenes or 17% of the time. While some of the scenes encompassed a range of emotions simultaneously, I coded for the most prominent emotion. I coded the emotion that I felt the storytellers wanted the viewers to come away feeling.

In order to get a clearer picture of the popularity of the types of emotions portrayed on the show, I collected the 13 primary coded emotions into an index grouping the individual emotions together to form categorical emotions. The groups are positive emotions (happy, content, and hopeful), neutral emotions (contemplative, learning, understanding), and negative emotions (angry, scared, frustrated, combative, sad, vengeful, and anxious). Figure 4 provides a clearer picture of how the emotional expressions of the teen moms are portrayed.

Figure 4

Overall Emotional Portrayals by Season

The chart demonstrates that while happiness is portrayed most often for teen mothers the range of negative emotions dominates the programming. That is, emotions that are less desirable are portrayed more often than desirable ones.

56 Similarly, I looked at how the emotional types were portrayed by each mom. Figure 5 shows that some moms engage in more negative emotional expressions than others. A chi- square test was performed and there is a significant relationship between the teen mother and the emotional expressions featured on the show (X2 (6, N=901) = 65.35, p < .001). Amber, Farrah, and Maci are portrayed most often demonstrating undesirable or negative emotions, while

Catelynn in contrast is portrayed most often as having desirable emotions like happiness, contentment, and hopefulness. Catelynn’s neutral and negative emotions are portrayed in equal amounts in 61 and 59 of her scenes.

Figure 5

Emotional Expressions by Teen Mom

Amber is portrayed with the most negative emotions by far with 127 of her 221 (57%) total scenes portrayed as undesirable. Amber’s negative emotions extremely apparent as she is in rehab during season 4 and part of her treatment is for her angry outbursts. The reason she was assigned to rehab initially is for beating up the father of her child, Gary on national television.

57 Her angry rants and furious threats are a constant reminder throughout the show of how unhappy she is with her situation.

Ironically, the show’s supermom, Maci, is portrayed as having desirable emotions least among all four mothers even though she is the one who routinely professes that she loves being a mother and would have more children immediately. This subtlety comes out only when looking at the emotions specific to each mother. While Maci is the “ideal” mother on the show, she repeatedly enrolls in and drops her college courses throughout the seasons. She also has a lot of interaction with her son’s father who makes a concerted effort to be mean and rude to her – calling her names and undermining her decisions whenever he has the opportunity. Even though these patterns are only available through content analysis, the stark contrast between the actively mothering, Maci’s emotional displays and the mother who chose adoption, Catelynn’s emotional displays are further evidence that the show’s producers opt to emphasize conflict and the negative emotions of motherhood, which may aid in the process of social messaging.

Finally, Figure 6 represents how the individual emotions were portrayed over the course of the 4 seasons. The purpose of running this analysis was to see if any moms demonstrated a patterned emotional progression as they adapted to their parenting situations. Interestingly again, there does not seem to be a common pattern present among the mothers. This finding implies that the emotional portrayals are not a consequence of motherhood necessarily but rather a function of that character’s narrative development. A chi-square test was performed however, there is no significant differences between the moms by season of their individual emotional states. Half of the chi-square tests were significant at the .05 level and half were not. Farrah and

Catelynn were significant while Amber and Maci were not. (Amber: X2 (6, N=221)=2.31;

58 Catelynn: X2 (6, N=226)=13.74, p<.05; Farrah: X2 (6, N=224)=17.89, p<.05; Maci: X2 (6,

N=230)=9.09)

Farrah’s emotional portrayals (third graph) over the course of the four seasons is interesting. Her desirable emotions increase incrementally each season while the undesirable emotions remain relatively high. Both Farrah and Amber have lower levels of neutral emotions overall, indicating that they respond to their situations in extremes. Farrah does finish season four with fewer negative scenes than at the beginning of the show. However, both Farrah and

Amber are reactive and quick to respond emotionally to their situations. Both have very little control over their finances (Farrah is dependent on her parents and Amber is dependent on Gary) and are in seemingly constant turmoil over their past and future. Neither mother seems to particularly enjoy parenthood and in volatile conflict with other caregivers.

Catelynn is again portrayed throughout the four seasons as having more positive emotions than any of the other moms – even though she chose adoption for her child. That is, she had some really sad moments at the beginning of the first season but is overall portrayed as happily adjusting to her experiences. Like Catelynn, Maci’s emotional portrayals are less volatile. While she has relatively fewer positive portrayals she also has many more neutral expressions. These neutral expressions cover emotions like learning, contemplating, and understanding. Maci seems to be moderating her extremes and making an attempt to focus on the task at hand. Catelynn and Maci share the common feature that they were highly instrumental in their own outcomes. That is, Catelynn chose adoption and Maci happens to really enjoy parenting – so much so that she contemplates a second child soon after the second birthday of her first. They both have instrumental control over their futures and are not waiting

59 for some future event to get the things they want. The producers of the show, in this case, capture life satisfaction reflected in their portrayed emotions.

Positive Neutral Negative

Amber Catelynn 40 40 30 30 20 20 10 10 0 0 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

Farrah Maci 40 40 30 30 20 20 10 10 0 0 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

Figure 6

Emotional Expressions of Each Mom by Season

Discussion This research is the first empirical content analysis of the Teen Mom television show.

Researchers have previously looked at representations of teen pregnancy, gender norms, intersections of race/class/gender and the cultural power structures present in these television shows. (Guglielmo, 2013; Wilson & Huntington, 2005) However the emphasis here is on how teen mothers are portrayed performing the primary tasks of motherhood and how they feel about those tasks. I find that teen mothers are portrayed as highly interactive with others in their

60 mothering practices, of course this is primarily due to the fact that television as a medium requires action and on this show action takes the form of discourse. Even so, the primary message producers send to teen mothers about how they will spend their time is that they will be surrounded by friends and family a lot. The real isolation new mothers report feeling does not seem to be a threat to teen moms (Marshal & Thompson, 2014; Westall & Liamputtong 2011).

Possibly, as a result of always being surrounded by friends and family, the teen moms do not display common postpartum disorder symptoms of extreme sadness and fatigue, although other negative emotions may arise in their place.

I also find that although the emotional state most often portrayed is happiness when the emotions are grouped together in a spectrum more negative emotions are present in the show than positive ones. This is a contradictory finding because negative emotions included a large amount of anger, frustration, righteous indignation, and rage – not emotions typically associated with mothering. In fact the spectrum of emotions available to mothers, especially new mothers

(not mothers of teenagers!) is relatively narrow and does not include anger. Even when parents report feelings of anger, the feeling is recast as a symptom of “fatigue” (Giallo, Rose, Cooklin &

McCormack, 2013; Fisher, Rowe & Hammarberg, 2012) or is evaluated in terms of the child having a major medical trauma (Akay, Kuru, Ozek, Cengizhan, Emiroglu, & Ellidokuz 2011).

Literature supporting a range of mothering emotions to include varying levels of anger, frustration, and rage is not available in the context of new parenting. Either new parents do not express these emotions or they are not telling researchers about them. Yet clearly, these teen moms expressed negative emotions the majority of the time. In addition, the show is dramatized and requires conflict in order to thrive. The combination of teenager, mother, and dramatic series sends the message to teens that they can expect to feel negatively about their

61 circumstances. It would be interesting to see how teen moms exposed to the show read these messages.

There have also been a few studies on the impact modern television shows about teen mothering have on the viewing audience, specifically narratives from teen mothers who argue that the shows do not accurately reflect their experiences. (Aubrey & Kim, 2014; Martins &

Jensen, 2014; McCarthy, 2007; Kirkman, Harrison, Hillier, & Pyett, 2001) However until this research no one has analyzed exactly how the shows represent teen moms accomplishing their motherhood objective. There is also no analysis on how the shows portray the feelings of teen mothers as they go about their activities.

This research makes two important contributions to understanding the empirical messages conveyed to teenagers in the form of educating them about early parenthood. First, teen mothering requires an excessive amount of time and involves many more people than the mother herself. Grandparents, siblings, partners, and friends all play pivotal roles in raising a young child. Second, young mothers have a highly volatile emotional life. Clearly the needs of raising a child far surpass the teenager’s capacity to moderate their feelings. Producers of these series say that they are making a concerted effort to portray how young motherhood affects these girls’ lives. Groups such as Kaiser Family Foundation think these shows are so effective in discouraging early parenting that they have syndicated them to be shown in public schools as a deterrent. What is not mentioned in when these shows are adopted for use inside public school classrooms is exactly how warning messages are communicated. What are these characters doing and feeling that might discourage teenagers from becoming parents? Micro-interactions understood as the practice and feelings associated with teen mothers are ultimately how the character is constructed. The construction of this modern character is a conscious effort both to

62 persuade young people that parenting is challenging and to dissuade them from making parenting part of their lives before their schooling is complete.

63 CHAPTER 4

CONCLUSION

Throughout this research I have examined how young mothers use their time through daily interactions with both their children and extended networks of friends and family.

The Teen Mom 1 and ATUS mothers participated in activities that were both indicative of their status as teenagers and of their status as mothers. By participating in activities of both groups, the young mothers are defining for themselves what is and is not appropriate behaviors as they work to participate in both groups. They are producing and reproducing the categories “teen” and “mother” by deploying societal norms. By participating in both of these categories simultaneously, these young women are disrupting the inviolability of both. For example, because young mothers do not participate in schooling at the rate of their non-mother counterparts the category “teenager” is called into question. They enact teenager at the same time as they refute it – because schooling is the norms of the teenage experience. Likewise, the young mothers perform the tasks of mothering while maintaining their friendships and dating life thus calling into question their commitment to parenting. The stylized enactments of both teenager and mother are transgressive forms of parody.

Conclusion

Findings and Contribution of Two Articles

Fundamentally, the previous two chapters aim to expose some of the realities of young motherhood. Using the American Time Use Survey I compare how teen mothers and teen females who are not mothers spend their time. Most importantly, I find that they do not spend their time much differently from one another. Teen moms and non-moms have statistically

64 insignificant differences in the time they spend sleeping, caring for the exterior of their homes, conducting household repairs, participating in financial planning, time spent in paid employment, time spent shopping, time spent using professional services (such as hairstylists or getting driver’s licenses, time spent participating in their churches, and of course the time spent participating in leisure activities such as hanging out with their friends or surfing the internet.

Teen mothers spend significantly more time caring for the house, preparing meals, taking care of their children, and obtaining childcare. Their non-mom peers spend more time on self-care

(activities such as showering and applying make-up), talking on the phone, driving around town and of course, going to school. These trends suggest that teen mothers seek to maintain as much of the teenage lived experience as possible (sleep and leisure stand out) while also performing the necessary tasks required of motherhood (cleaning and food preparation). The significant trade they make to be young mothers is their schooling. The time these young mothers spend in childcare mirrors almost to the minute the time that their non-mother peers spend at school.

Likewise, the celebrity teen mothers on the hit television show, Teen Mom 1, are also portrayed engaging in typical teenage activities. They go on dates, hang out with their friends, move out of their parents’ houses, and get their first jobs. The teen moms on the reality program are shown taking care of themselves, taking care of their children, spending time with friends, spending time with family, and eating. They are not shown going to school or work very often.

They are portrayed as having a complex emotional spectrum which trends toward negative emotions being portrayed most often for all four characters.

I also found that the feeling most often portrayed was happiness. However when the 13 coded feeling possibilities were grouped into positive, neutral and negative categories, it was very clear that the range of negative emotions dominated the narrative. The viewer understands

65 the mother’s experience as overall negative with a flurry of happiness throughout. In addition the mother who chose adoption for her child is systematically portrayed as being happier than the other mothers who chose to parent their children and continue to struggle with balancing their time and emotional fortitude. The most visibly distraught mom is Amber who has violent outbursts and spends months in rehab on the show. Maci, the teen mom who seemingly enjoys her role as a parent has the least variation in her emotional displays. Farrah’s is portrayed as getting progressively happier while the viewer knows her life choices are becoming more hazardous eventually leading to a career in pornography.

Implications of this Research

The appropriation of mothering by teenagers subverts both characteristics because the signs (behaviors associated with mothering and behaviors associated with being a teenager) are constructed to begin with. Thus the construction of ‘mother’ itself is also thrown into question by the produced reenactments of teen mothers. This section outlines an additional set of consequences not articulated in the young mother literature – to my knowledge. These are the hidden messages that producers of Teen Mom 1 convey are the “real” consequences of early parenting. I will briefly discuss and provide examples for the consequences of housing insecurity, the lure of online coursework, and legal interventions which point to a gap in the societal constructions of motherhood. These consequences become apparent because I tracked the empirical messages on the show.

When I began coding, I did not have a specific code for shifting living arrangements – I also did not have a code for “moving” as a primary use of time but by the third episode, I knew moving could not remain an “other” category. Moving homes happens a lot. I coded all instances of looking for housing, moving into a new home, staying in a hotel as a primary

66 activity of “home-making”. More than 10% of all scenes involve shuffling around people and things in order to establish a reliable living situation. That is, 100 scenes involve a material shift in living situations. In addition, many scenes involve discussions with grandparents, fathers, friends, and dating partners about housing choices. Some of these discussions are shouted as is the case with Amber. She angrily disrupts her living situation on multiple occasions.

Housing insecurity as ripple effects for the mothers causing further disruption in their relationships with the baby’s father and their ability to complete their desired schooling. For example, Amber says very clearly to her school counselor:

“I have not had time to do my GED whatsoever, I just moved into a house by myself with

my baby. I left Gary. GED is on my mind, of course, but I have to get this stuff done

before GED in order to take care of my daughter.” (S1:E4)

Amber clearly articulates the problem with moving in and out of homes. It is disruptive to schooling and destabilizes any momentum the mother may have had with regard to schooling or vocational goals. Of the four mothers, Catelynn is portrayed as moving the most and Farrah the least. Even though Farrah talks about moving quite a bit and there are more scenes where the primary discussion in the scene is about where she is going to live – she only actually picks up her things and moves twice over the course of four seasons. Once to move into a house her parents own across the street from their own and the second time to Florida to attend school. In contrast, Catelynn’s family are themselves housing insecure. Her step father is in and out of prison and her mother seems to have addiction problems. For Catelynn, housing insecurity is something her entire family has been dealing with her entire life.

Another consequence portrayed on Teen Mom is the trap of online courses. Amber,

Farrah, and Maci are all shown participating in online education. Amber takes GED classes

67 online while Farrah and Maci both take online college level courses. Amber quickly abandons her GED aspirations in the face of all the other upheavals in her life. Farrah has the opposite experience, she is able to finish her Associate’s degree and begin working on her Bachelor’s degree. Farrah’s parents take an active role in primary child care so that Farrah is able to take and complete her courses. Amber’s parents are not able to actively participate in child care.

They are present for birthdays and holidays but are not available for day to day care of her child while she studies and tries to complete her GED. Catelynn does not have the pressure of finding childcare and graduates from high school a year behind her peers. She does however stay enrolled in face to face education and continues to attend classes until she finishes late in the third season.

The trap of the online courses is most problematic for Maci. She enrolls in and drops online classes over and over. She says to her counselor in season 1,

“I got online classes so I wouldn’t have to worry about a babysitter, and now I’m the

babysitter so I don’t have time to do classes.”

In another scene describing the difficulty she is having with online courses to her friends, Maci says:

“You have no idea how hard online classes are. It is probably four times as hard as going

to campus. It sucks. You have to do everything yourself and like you miss stuff because

it’s on the computer you click on one thing and you don’t see one thing you miss it.”

After enrolling in and dropping semester after semester’s worth of courses over two different schools in two different cities, Maci finally enrolls part-time in face to face courses. The viewer is able to see Maci in class for the first time and she is happy. She is engaged, attending class, and participating in the discussion. She completes that semester even though her live-in

68 boyfriend, Kyle, destroys his knee in a motorcycle accident and requires surgery. Maci sticks with the face to face classes and majors in Media Technology and Creative Writing at

Chattanooga State Community College. She graduated with her Associate’s degree in December of 2014 – five years after the birth of her child.

The last consequence for the mothers who participate in this television show are legal interventions. A full 5% of the scenes (50 scenes in all) involve interactions with social problems workers such as personnel from the Department of Children and Families (DCF), police officers, lawyers, social workers, etc…In addition these interventions happen to each teen mom. For example, after Amber repeatedly punches her partner Gary and it is broadcast on national television, the police get involved charging her with domestic abuse. She and Gary have a “no contact” order for much of the third season. Amber also spends two months in a rehabilitation facility to deal with her anger and addiction issues. Although it was very apparent that Amber was intoxicated in most every scene, it was never mentioned nor addressed on the show so I did not code for it. The viewers (and researchers) learned from other media sources after the final shows aired that she violated her probation and failed a drug test so was sentenced to 5 years in jail. She was released after serving 17 months and participating in a drug rehab program in prison.

Maci, Farrah, and Catelynn also have repeated interactions with legal authorities just not to the degree that Amber does. Farrah’s mother beats her up and is arrested and charged with assault. She and Farrah eventually repair their relationship with a lot of mediation and therapy.

Farrah also has to prove her daughter’s paternity. The father of Farrah’s daughter, Derek, died in a car wreck when she was 8 months pregnant. Derek’s mother refused to acknowledge his paternity for social security benefits but later sued for visitation. Maci has the most common

69 struggles with and custody requiring multiple interactions with lawyers and government officials. Finally, Catelynn’s relationship with her daughter, Carly, and the family she chose for her is mediated by a social worker at an adoption agency. In addition, Catelynn’s step father, Tyler’s biological father, is in and out of prison throughout the series requiring multiple interactions with the Department of Justice and their facilities.

By portraying consequences for teen mothers the producers essentially do what Judith Butler calls “undoing”. The producers undo the category “mother”. Using Judith Butler’s radical claim that identity is a type of ‘doing’ made manifest at the point of action. I surmise that motherhood is a social category – like gender - where the social construction predates the biological fact. The category mother (or more specifically “good mother”) predates the biological happenstance of pregnancy. Therefore, extending the analogy to its logical end, when the category “mother” is undone to serve the purpose of exposing mothering realities for teenagers – the category is undone for all mothers. Motherhood, the practice, is exposed a fumbling, frightened, challenging, unsatisfying, and disheartening endeavor. If, like Butler, we assume that ‘identity is a signifying practice’ (p. 145) and in signifying with one identity requires the negating others then the young mothers in this study are in constant turmoil asserting a self by rejecting the other. The constant internal discord forces an approximation of each identity never fully realizing either. This research contributes to the audiences of identity work and social constructionism in that it reveals how teen mothers defensively react to the culturally imposed dissonant practices of ‘teenager’ and ‘mother’ and how they signify that they belong to both and neither. Further, this research reveals how the media selectively draw from social codes to construct positive characters to avoid stigma and structural consequences.

Limits of the Study

70 The limits of this study are divided into two parts: temporal and interpretive. In the first article, ATUS, I highlighted the possibility that the mothers who had, on average, traded their schooling time for primary care of their children may have already been spending significantly less time on schooling activities before becoming mothers. That is, highlighting the time they spend on school after having children still does not answer the question of whether they were challenged by school prior to having children and because of their seeming lack of success found motherhood to be a more viable vocation. Attending and completing high school is the first step toward meaningful employment and ongoing support for young mothers. Even though school regulations demonstrate frequently that motherhood and education are not a good mix this data cannot speak to whether motherhood was the cause or the result of a schooling departure.

The major limit to the content analysis article is one of interpretation. The researcher is put in the role of interpreting emotions from a variety of perspectives: the producers (how do they shape the scene using music, lighting, and setting), the teen mom herself (does she feel anger or frustration?) and the coder (I would be angry at that comment so the character must also feel the way I do). One way I dealt with this limitation is by using multiple coders and then working together to check that we both agreed that the same overarching emotion was present in the scene. Another way that a more objective emotion coding could be accomplished is with an emotion recognition software which would immediately recognize and code a variety of emotions as they flood the character. Certainly each scene is not comprised of a singular emotion even though that is how I coded it. Implementing this software could deepen and complicate the findings.

Future Research

71 To supplement the time use survey and media content analysis in my future work, I will also conduct participant observation and in depth interviews with unmarried teen mothers in an educational setting. The purpose of these interviews is to understand how the unmarried teen mothers interact with media constructions and how the educational institutions have evolved to contend with possibly conflicting cultural messages about unmarried teen motherhood. The central questions these interviews will answer are (1) To what extent do teen mothers participate in the messages they receive about motherhood from the media and (2) How do they practice mothering in light of the mixed messages received from their school and media. These questions will be investigated through the voices of both teen mothers and the adults who influence them.

I will conduct in depth interviews with young teen mothers who attend a public high school and participate in the teen parent development program at the local YMCA. Both of these locations are in the central mid-atlantic region of the United States. I will also conduct interviews with teen mothers at a small regional college about 20 miles north of Boston. The college is unique in that it offers programs specifically for single parents. The program was developed to educate

“Two Generations Together”. These three sites were chosen for future study because of the abnormally high rate of teen mothers enrolled resulting in educational programming directed specifically toward the young mothers. This is an ideal environment for constructing an observable version of motherhood. The young mothers participating in this study range in age from 12-19 (Fine & Sandstrom, 1988). I will also collect interviews from the adults involved in with the young mothers (such as parents, teachers, coaches, counselors, and youth workers). In keeping with a social constructionist perspective and an interest in the schooling context of teen mothers, adults are included in this qualitative research project as they assist in the construction

72 of motherhood for the young women. The participants all have some involvement with the practice and emotions of mothering.

I will use a variety of methods to recruit participants, including: posted notices, announcements in the school newsletter, referrals from other you people (snowball sampling).

Comprehensive interviews will take place on the school property and last between 45 minutes and 2 hours. Each participant will be asked ten general, open ended questions about teen motherhood such as ‘Do you think there are a lot of very visible teen mothers in the media? and

‘What do you think is the purpose of portraying teen mothers on popular programming such as

Teen Mom and The Secret Life of the American Teen?’ As part of the interview, I will also present each participant with scenarios about constructing an identity as a teen mother gleaned from this research. These scenarios are also known as vignettes and are used to focus participants on key factors about constructing the teen mother in the school (Wengraf, 2001;

Martin & Turner, 1986).

The vignettes are drawn from the content analysis of Teen Mom and were chosen as representations of the mixed messages young mothers receive about their ability to both mother and get an education. The vignette is designed to focus and stimulate discussion related to key constructivist ideas that may not be clearly apparent to participants. I chose to use vignettes to get around having to teach study participants about a constructivist standpoint. The vignette is a simple scenario that accesses very complex ideas about associations, identity, time, and how the category ‘mother’ is situated within a social context. Vignettes access complex ideas without alienating the participant. For example, rather than ask a young mother in high school, ‘How do the prevailing television discourses about mothering experiences shape how you see yourself as a young mother?’ I present her with a scenario such as:

73 Jane was a sophomore in high school when she delivered Justin, an 8 pound 12 ounce red

faced baby boy. From the moment she laid eyes on him, she knew she would devote

herself to him lovingly, forever. Jane soon realized how challenging this new love could

be. She spent all her time with Justin. Her school friends stopped calling her to go out

because she always had to tote baby Justin along and sometimes he fussed. Jane used to

think that taking care of a baby would be fun and rewarding but now she longed to go out

with her old friends and to have a social life. Jane felt utterly alone.

After the participants read the scenario, I ask them to discuss whether they felt it was realistic and to comment on any aspects they thought were relevant to the experiences of teen mothers generally or to themselves specifically. They are also asked whether this is the kind of mothering portrayed on television and whether they can understand where this young mother is coming from. Each participant will read scenarios taken from popular television programs to contrast media portrayals of motherhood and real world experiences. Finally, participants are asked who is responsible for this situation and what they might do differently if this were their experience.

In conclusion, young motherhood does not have to have a universally devastating impact.

Young motherhood within a supportive environment has the capacity to develop these young women in a productive way. For many young girls who are struggling, specifically those of lower socioeconomic status, in risky home situations, and without much in the way of career opportunities, motherhood is a viable possibility for success. On average, teens who get pregnant and choose to become full time mothers struggle academically, many struggle because of undiagnosed learning disabilities (Ireland, 1993). Many young mothers have disruptive home lives including, but not limited to absent fathers, drug addiction, and impoverished living conditions (Edin 2000, 2005; Gregson 2009). When combined, these factors result in very poor

74 economic prospects. To be fair, many adolescent mothers perceive pregnancy and motherhood as potential avenues of social success. That is, motherhood can offer some women improved status within their communities, a respectable vocation, self-worth and freedom to make decisions about the future.

According to Title IX standards, young women who become mothers while still in school retain the right to equal access to all school programs and extracurricular activities. This means that schools must treat pregnancy like any other temporary disability such as breaking a leg for example. It is my hope that by understanding the challenges young mothers face in more depth this work can be applied to develop programs and curriculum designed to support young mothers both in their activities involving mothering and those activities that involve schooling.

Too often policies surrounding teen parenting are symbolic and designed to placate citizens who believe teenagers should not ever be parents. I posit a new approach, one that seeks to hear the standpoint of young parents and help them tackle their vital challenges.

75 APPENDIX A

ATUS INDEXED VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS

Indexed Variable Descriptions Variable Name Index Measure Description Relevant example The averaged sum of all reported minutes of sleep ALLSLEEP All Sleep time reports the respondent reports each 24 hour day. Sleeping The averaged sum of all reported minutes of self SELFCARE All reports of care of the self grooming each 24 hour day Washing, dressing The sum of all reported minutes of care of the INTERIORHOUSEAll interior house care interior of the home each 24 hour day. Interior cleaning, laundry The averaged sum of all reported minutes of care of EXTERIORHOUSEAll exterior house care the exterior of the home each 24 hour day. Building repair, lawn care The averaged sum of all reported minutes of all food FAMILYFEEDINGAll food preparation for family including clean up preparation for the family Food preparation, kitchen clean-up The averaged sum of all reported maintenance of REPAIRS Household repairs appliances and vehicles appliances and vehicles in a 24 hour day Vehicle repair The averaged sum of all reported planning for the HHPLANNING Financial planning tracking and communication home in a 24 hour day Household organization, personal email The averaged sum of all reported care of household Arts and crafts with children, physical ALLCHILDCARE All time spent in childcare and related childcare activities children in a 24 hour day care for children The averaged sum of all reported time spent working on money making endeavors in a 24 hour Job Search, Working, Income- ALLWORK All activities associated with paid endeavors day generating performances Taking classes for a degree, The averaged sum of all reported time spent in extracurricular club activities, ALLEDUCATIONAll activities associated with completing a degree or certification personal education each 24 hour day homework The averaged sum of all reported time spent Grocery shopping, online purchases, ALLPURCHASESAll shopping including groceries acquiring consumer goods in a 24 hour day purchasing gas The averaged sum of all reported time spent Waiting associated with paid childcare, PROCHILDCAREAll time spent obtaining paid childcare outside the home obtaining paid childcare services in a 24 hour day visiting daycare centers The averaged sum of all reported time spent obtaining professional advice including that of Time spent with a lawyer, financial PROSERVICES Time spent using professional services including government government agencies consultant, or at the tax office The averaged sum of all reported time spent doing activities that require passive attention in a 24 hour Watching television, listening to music, LEISURE Time spent relaxing period going to the movies The averaged sum of all time spent participating in or attending sporting type activities in a 24 hour Playing tennis, dancing, watching ATHLETICS Time spent participating or observing competitive activites period. football The averaged sum of all time spent participating in RELIGION Time spent participating in religious events religious activities in a 24 hour period Attending church services The averaged sum of all time spent in service to the Public safety activities, serving at PUBLICSERVICETime spent in service to the community community in a 24 hour period volunteer events, park cleanups The averaged sum of all time spent making phone Calling the doctor, calling a friend, PHONECALL Time spent making phone calls calls and talking on the phone in a 24 hour period. calling to make an appointment The averaged sum of all time spent driving in the car to and from appointments inside the community - TRAVEL Time spent traveling locally to and from appointments non vacation driving Driving for groceries, driving to school

76 APPENDIX B

TEEN MOM CODEBOOK

CODING SCHEME

MOTHER Mom Socio economic status M1 - Low M2 - Middle M3 – High

Mom’s Living Arrangements M4 - Lives alone with baby M5 - Lives w/baby and daddy M6 - Lives w/ baby and roommate M7 - Lives w/ baby and parents M8 - Lives w/ parents baby lives other M37 – Lives w/ father, baby lives elsewhere M38 – Lives alone, baby lives elsewhere

Mom’s work status M9 - Full-time M13 - Student M10 - Part-time M14 - Stay at home M11 - Unemployed (partner supports) M12 - Unemployed M15 - Stay at home (govt depend) (parents support)

Mom demonstrates parenting style M16 - Attachment M19 - Tiger Mom M17 - Authoritative M20 - Authoritarian M18 - Indulgent M21 – Neglectful

Mom fits common teen stereotype M22 - Violent M27 - Welfare riding M23 - Disruptive M28 - Obnoxious M24 - Drug addicted M29 - Ignorant M25 - Disrespectful M30 - Drop Out M26 - Hyper-sexed

Actor Hairstyle M31 - Long, unstyled M32 - Long, styled/colored M33 - Medium, unstyled M34 - Medium styled/colored M35 - Short, unstyled

77 M36 - Short, styled/colored

FATHER Father Socio economic status F1 - Low F2 - Middle F3 – High

Father work status F4 - Full-time F7 - Student F5 - Part-time F8 - Unemployed F6 - Unemployed (govt depend)

Father Living Arrangements F9 - Lives alone with baby F10 - Lives with baby and mother F11 - Lives with baby and roommate F12 - Lives with baby and parents F13 - Lives with parents baby lives elsewhere F25 – Lives with mother, baby lives elsewhere F26 – Lives alone

Father fits common teen stereotype F14 - Violent F19 - Welfare riding F15 - Disruptive F20 - Obnoxious F16 - Drug addicted F21 - Ignorant F17 - Disrespectful F22 - Drop Out F18 - Hyper-sexed F23 – Deadbeat dad F24 – Lazy SCENE TIME USE T1 - Primary childcare T11 - Legal affairs T2 - Secondary childcare T12 - Sports activities T3 - household chores T13 - Hobbies T4 - Paid Employment T14 - Religious activities T5 - School Attendance T15 - Time w/ family T6 – Homework T16 - Eating T7 - Driving for child T17 - Self-care T8 - Driving for job T18 - Sleeping T9 - Driving for school T19 - Time w/ friends T10 - Doctor’s office T20 – Other

SCENE Setting and location S1 - Grandparents’ S14 - Bus home S15 - Subway S2 – Childhood S16 - Own Vehicle home S17 - Borrowed

78 S3 - Mother home Vehicle S4 - Father home S18 - Being driven by S5 - Friend’s home someone else S6 – Work S19 – College setting S7 - School S20 - Gym S8 - Doctor’s office S21 - Salon S9 – Daycare S22 - Mall S10 – Car S23 - Prison S11 – Restaurant S24 – Adoption Ctr S12 - Lawyer’s office S25 – Rehab Facility S13 – Park S58 – Courthouse S59 – Airport S60 – Hotel Scene Involves S26 – holiday S42 - argument (phone, S27 - religious event viewer only hears S28 – birthday one side) S29 – dinner S43 - high school S30 – lunch function S31 – breakfast S44 - wedding S32 - high school S45 - job search attendance S46 - high school S33 – college graduation attendance S47 - college S34 - discussion about applications child (calm) S48 - preschool/ S35 - discussion about daycare child support money S49 - vacation S36 - discussion about S50 - contraception S51 - living situation S37 - counseling (parents) S52 - shopping S38 - counseling (family) S53 – playing w/ child S39 - counseling (individual) S54 - date S40 – argument S55 - other (with raised voices) S56 - Money S41 – argument S57 - Relationship (with violence) Mother’s Dress D1 - Traditional Work Attire D2 - Casual (dress, slacks,) D3 - Casual Trendy (skirts, dresses, jeans, brand names, interesting shoes) D4 - Nightclub Style (low-cut, sequins, short skirts, high

79 heels, heavy makeup) D5 – Casual home

Mother interacts in scene with I1 - employee I8 - friend I2 – teacher I9 - date I3 – doctor I10 – store clerk I4 – parent I11 - nurse I5 - social worker I12 - judge I6 – partner (parent) I13 - lawyer I7 – partner I14 - Mother (not parent) not present I15 – Bank I16 – Child I17 – Sibling

Form of communication involves C1 - Face to face C5 - Twitter C2 – Phone C6 - Instagram C3 - Text C7 - Physical C4 – Facebook displays

Mother emotional state E1 - Happy E6 - Vengeful E2 - Contemplative E7 - Content E3 - Angry E8 - Learning E4 - Scared E9 – Under E5 – Frustrated standing E10 - Combative E11 – Hopeful E12 – Sad E13 - Anxious

Mother support available? U1 - financial U7 - friend U2 - emotional availability U3 - physical U8 - books U4 - child care U9 - internet U5 - parental U10 - older siblings U6 – support U11 – younger group siblings U12 - None

Reference to teenage “normalcy” N1 - dating N7 - athletics N2 - nights out N8 - dance N3 - movies N9 -volunteerism N4 - family N10 - participation in

80 N5 - school politics/gov’t N6 - extracurricular N11 - help other activity young parents N12 - Body

References to age and ability A1 - life is over A4 - inability A2 - never A5 - immaturity accomplish goals A6 - exchange A3 - unfulfilled dreams Where is the baby? W1 - Not Present W7 - Bassinet W2 - Present but W8 - Carrier off screen W9 - Floor W3 – Held W10 – Playing alone W4 - Seat W11 – Playing outside W5 - Carseat W12 – Playing at park W6 – Crib W13 – Bath W14 – Playing w/ parent

If baby in apparatus, is status apparent R1 – designer R5 - dirty R2 - character brand R6 - color match R3 – new sex of baby R4 – used R7 – broken

Baby dress B1 - Name brand B5 - diaper only fully dressed B6 – clothing does B2 - Name brand not match partially dressed weather B3 – Generic B7 – clothing does fully dressed not match B4 – Generic activity partially dressed

Child demeanor B8 - Content (awake) B9 – Sleeping B10 - Distressed (crying loudly, screaming) B11 - Needy (fussy, clingy, demands attention) B12 - Playful (silly, using toys) B13 – Talkative B14 - Excited (dancing, jumping moving arms and legs)

81 B15 – Tantrum (throwing themselves on the floor, crying, hold breath)

If being held, by whom? H1 – Mother H6 - Sister H2 – Father H7 - Brother H3 – Grandmother H8 - Doctor H4 - Grandfather H9 – Social Worker H5 – Friend H10 - Teacher

Soothing Methods O1 – rocking O5 - bouncing O2 - pacifying O6 - soft touch O3 - cry it out O7 - soft words O4 – holding O8 - swaddling Traditional parenting methods P1 - breastfeeding P2 - co-sleeping P3 - cooking baby food P4 - use of cloth carriers P5 - amber necklaces P6 - use of herbs P7 - at home care

Contemporary parenting methods P8 - bottle feeding formula P9 - bottle feeding breastmilk P10 - disposable diapers P11 - use of carseat carriers P12 - crib sleeping P13 -daycare P14 - strollering P15 - prepared baby food

82 APPENDIX C

TEEN MOM TIME USE

TimeUse * Mom Crosstabulation Count Mom Time Use AMBER CATELYNN FARRAH MACI TOTAL Primary Childcare 52 7 47 69 175 Doctor/Therapist Visit 2 4 8 6 20 Legal Affairs 23 9 13 10 55 Athletic Activities 1 2 1 0 4 Hobbies 0 1 0 0 1 Family time 36 91 34 24 185 Eating 9 16 18 18 61 Self-care 30 29 17 2 78 Sleeping 0 1 1 1 3 Time Spent with Friends 26 22 31 40 119 Secondary Childcare 4 0 6 6 16 Other 9 15 6 2 32 Household Chores/Moving Home 11 8 14 14 47 Paid Employment 3 9 11 2 25 High School/College Attendance 12 15 7 23 57 High School/College Homework 1 0 5 2 8 Driving for Child/Child Drop Off 6 4 4 18 32 Driving for Job 1 1 1 0 3 Driving for School 2 0 0 1 3 Total 228 235 224 238 925

83 APPENDIX E

IRB APPROVAL LETTER

84 REFERENCES

Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender & society, 4(2), 139-158.

Acker, J. (1998). The future of ‘gender and organizations’: connections and boundaries. Gender, Work & Organization, 5(4), 195-206.

Adams, G., Adams-Taylor, S. and Pittman, K. (1989). "Adolescent Pregnancy and Parenthood: A Review of the Problem, Solutions, and Resources." Family Relations 38(2):pp. 223-229.

Akay, A. P., Kurul, S. H., Ozek, H., Cengizhan, S., Emiroglu, N., & Ellidokuz, H. (2011). Maternal reactions to a child with epilepsy: depression, anxiety, parental attitudes and family functions. Epilepsy research, 95(3), 213-220.

Allen, K. & Osgood, J. (2009). Young women negotiating maternal subjectivities: the siginicance of social class. Studies in the Maternal, 1 (2), www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk

Altheide, D.L. (1996). Qualitative Media Analysis / David L. Altheide.Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications.

Astone, N.M. and Upchurch, D.M.. (1994). "Forming a Family, Leaving School Early, and Earning a GED: A Racial and Cohort Comparison." Journal of and Family 56(3):pp. 759-771.

Aubrey, J.S., Behm-Morawitz, E., & Kim, K. (2014) Understanding the Effects of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant on Adolescent Girls’ Beliefs, Attitudes, and Behavioral Intentions Toward Teen Pregnancy. Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives. 19 (10) 1145-1160.

Bagdikian, B. H. (1980). Conglomeration, concentration, and the media. Journal of communication, 30(2), 59-64.

Bailey, N., Brown, G., & Wilson, C. (2002). “The baby brigade”: Teenage mothers and sexuality. Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, 4(1), 101-110.

Baker, J. (2010). Great expectations and post feminist accountability: young women living up to the ‘successful girls’ discourse. Gender and Education, 22(1), 1-15. ‐ Barcelos, C. A., & Gubrium, A. C. (2014). Reproducing stories: Strategic narratives of teen pregnancy and motherhood. Social Problems, 61(3), 466-481.

Barratt, M., Stevenson, M.A. Roach and Colbert, K.K.. 1991. "Single Mothers and Their Infants: Factors Associated with Optimal Parenting." Family Relations 40(4):pp. 448-454.

Berger, P.L., & Luckmann, T. 1966. The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

85

Beutel, A.M. (2000). The Relationship Between Adolescent Nonmarital Childbearing and Educational Expectations: A cohort and period comparison

Black, M. M., Papas, M. A., Hussey, J. M., Dubowitz, H., Kotch, J. B., & Starr, R. H. (2002). Behavior problems among preschool children born to adolescent mothers: Effects of maternal depression and perceptions of partner relationships. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 31(1), 16-26.

Bobel, C. (2002). The Paradox of Natural Mothering / Chris Bobel. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Broadbear, J. T., & Broadbear, B. C. (2012). Online Discussion about Sexuality Education in Schools. International Electronic Journal of Health Education, 15, 16.

Burns, G.. Thompson, R. (1989). Television Studies: Textual Analysis. New York: Praeger.

Bute, J. J., & Russell, L. D. (2012). Public discourses about teenage pregnancy: Disruption, restoration, and ideology. Health communication, 27(7), 712-722.

Butler, J. (2006). Imitation and Gender Insubordination. Cultural theory and popular culture: A reader, 1, 255.

Cameron, S.V., Heckman, J.J. (1993) The nonequivalence of high school equivalents. Journal of Labor Economics, 11 (1) 1-47.

Chua-Rubenfeld, S. O. P. H. I. A., & Mom, D. T. 2011. Why I love my strict Chinese mom. New York Post.

Collins, P. H. (1994). Shifting the center: Race, class, and feminist theorizing about motherhood. In E. N. Glenn, G. Chang, & L. N. Forcey (Eds.), Mothering: Ideology, experience, and agency (pp. 45-64). New York: Routledge.

Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity rethinking the concept. Gender & society, 19(6), 829-859.

Coontz, S. (1992) The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. Basic Books, NY.

Coontz, S. (2008). American Families. Abingdong, Oxon: Routledge

Cox, J. E., Buman, M., Valenzuela, J., Joseph, N. P., Mitchell, A., & Woods, E. R. (2008). Depression, parenting attributes, and social support among adolescent mothers attending a teen tot program. Journal of pediatric and adolescent gynecology, 21(5), 275-281.

86 Craig, L. & Mullan, K. (2011). How mothers and fathers share childcare: A cross-national time use comparison. American Sociological Review, 76 (6) 834-861.

Deaux K. (1999). An overview of research on gender: Four themes from 3 decades. In Swann W. B. Jr., Langlois J. H., Gilbert L. A. (Eds.), Sexism and stereotypes in modern society: The gender science of Janet Taylor Spence (pp. 11–34). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Druckerman, P. 2012. Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. Penguin.

Dunfee, J. N. (2012). The “New Teen Momism”: 16 & Pregnant and the new teen mom identity. (Doctoral dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University).

Edin, Kathryn. (2000). "What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage?" Social problems 47(1):pp. 112-133.

Edin, Kathryn 1. (2005). Promises I can Keep : Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage / Kathryn Edin, Maria Kefalas.Berkeley, Calif. ; : University of California Press.

Edin, Kathryn, Maria J. Kefalas and Joanna M. Reed. (2004). "A Peek inside the Black Box: What Marriage Means for Poor Unmarried Parents." Journal of Marriage and Family 66(4):pp. 1007-1014.

Ellison, K. (2005). The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter / Katherine Ellison.New York: Basic Books.

Edwards, Leigh H. (2013). The Triumph of Reality TV: The Revolution in American Television. Praeger, California

Fenstermaker, A. W. S., West, C., & Ker, S. F. (1995). Doing difference. Gender & Society. Fine, Gary A. and Kent L. Sandstrom. 1988. Knowing Children : Participant Observation with Minors / Gary Alan Fine and Kent L. Sandstrom.Newbury Park, Calif: Sage Publications.

Finer, L.B., Frohwirth, L.F., Dauphinee, L.A., Singh, S., Moore, A.M. (2005). Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 37 (3) 110-118.

Fisher, J. R., Rowe, H., & Hammarberg, K. (2012). Admissions for early parenting difficulties among women with infants conceived by assisted reproductive technologies: a prospective cohort study. Fertility and sterility,97(6), 1410-1416.

Fancher, R. E. (2000). Snapshots of Freud in American, 1899–1999. American Psychologist, 55(9), 1025.

87 Furstenberg, Frank F. 1. (2007). Destinies of the Disadvantaged : The Politics of Teenage Childbearing / Frank F. Furstenberg.New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Gamson, W. A., Croteau, D., Hoynes, W., & Sasson, T. (1992). Media images and the social construction of reality. Annual review of sociology, 373-393.

Gans, H. J. (1979). Deciding what’s news: story suitability. Society, 16(3), 65-77.

Garrett, S. & Tidwell, R. (1999) Differences between adolescent mothers and nonmothers: An interview study. Adolescence, 34(133), 91-105

Gay, C.L., Lee, K.A., & Lee, S,. (2004) Sleep Patters and Fatigue in New Mothers and Fathers. Biological Research for Nursing. 5 (4) 311-318.

Gergen, K. J. 1991. The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. Basic books.

Giallo, R., Rose, N., Cooklin, A., & McCormack, D. (2013). In survival mode: mothers and fathers’ experiences of fatigue in the early parenting period.Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, 31(1), 31-45.

Gibson-Davis, C.M., Edin, K. and McLanahan, S. (2005). "High Hopes but Even Higher Expectations: The Retreat from Marriage among Low-Income Couples." Journal of Marriage and Family 67(5):pp. 1301-1312.

Gill, R. 2011. Sexism Reloaded, or, it's Time to get Angry Again!. Feminist media studies, 11(01), 61-71.

Gill, R. 2012. Media, empowerment and the ‘sexualization of culture debates. Sex Roles, 66(11- 12), 736-745.

Glaser, B.G., (1965). The Constant Comparative Method of Qualitative Analysis. Social problems 12(4):pp. 436-445.

Glenn, E. N. (1994). Social constructions of mothering: A thematic overview. In E. N. Glenn, G. Chang, & L. N. Forcey (Eds.), Mothering: Ideology, experience, and agency (pp. 1-29). New York: Routledge.

Gregson, J. (2009). The Culture of Teenage Mothers / Joanna Gregson.Albany: SUNY Press.

Hayes, C. D. (1987). Risking the future. National Academy of Sciences Press, Washington, DC.

Herrman, J. W., Moore, C. C., & Anthony, B. (2012). Using film clips to teach teen pregnancy prevention: The Gloucester 18 at a teen summit. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 7(3), 198-211.

88 Hoffman, S. D., & Maynard, R. A. (Eds.). (2008). Kids having kids: Economic costs & social consequences of teen pregnancy. The Urban Institute.

Horowitz, R. (1995). Teen Mothers--Citizens Or Dependents?Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart. Berkeley. CA: The University of.

Hotz, V.J., McElroy, S.W., & Sanders, S.G. (2005). Teenage childbearing and its life cycle consequences. Journal of Human Resources, 40, 683-715.

Ireland, M.S. (1993). Reconceiving Women : Separating Motherhood from Female Identity / Mardy S. Ireland.New York: Guilford Press.

Jacques, H., Radtke, H.L. (2012) Constrained by choice: Young women negotiate the discourses of marriage and motherhood. Feminism & Psychology, 22 (4) 443-461.

Kaplan, E.B. (1997). Not our Kind of Girl: Unraveling the Myths of Black Teenage Motherhood with a Foreword by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kearney, M. S., & Levine, P. B. (2014). Media influences on social outcomes: the impact of MTV's 16 and pregnant on teen childbearing (No. w19795). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kirkman, M., Harrison, L, Hillier, L., & Pyett, P. (2001). 'I Know I'm doing a Good Job': Canonical and Autobiographical Narratives of Teenage Mothers. Culture, Health & Sexuality 3(3):pp. 279-294.

Jonsson, P. (2010). A force behind the lower teen birthrate: MTV’s ‘16 and Pregnant.’. Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved from LexisNexis.

Lofland, John and Lyn H. Lofland. 1995. Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis / John Lofland, Lyn H. Lofland.Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth.

Maier, M., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (1998). Commonalities, Conflicts and Contradictions in Organizational Masculinities: Exploring the Gendered Genesis of the Challenger Disaster*. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 35(3), 325-344.

Marshall, E. J. and Thompson, A. P. (2014), Shedding Light on the Difficulties and Challenges Experienced by Mothers of Infants. Australian Psychologist, 49: 44–53.

Martin, P.Y. (2004). "Gender as Social Institution." Social Forces 82(4):pp. 1249-1273.

Martin, P. Y. (2003). “Said and done” versus “saying and doing” gendering practices, practicing gender at work. Gender & society, 17(3), 342-366.

89 Martins, N. & Jensen, R.E. (2014) The relationship between “Teen Mom” Reality Programming and Teenagers Beliefs about Teen Parenthood. Mass Communication and Society, 10.1080/15205436.2013.851701.

McRobbie, A. 2004. Post feminism and popular culture. Feminist media studies, 4(3), 255-264.

Montoya, D. Y., & Scott, ‐M. L. (2013). The Effect of Lifestyle-Based Depletion on Teen Consumer Behavior. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 32(1), 82-96.

Paskiewicz, L. S. (2001). Pregnant adolescents and their mothers: A shared experience of teen mothering. MCN: The American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing, 26(1), 33-38.

Prokos, A., & Padavic, I. (2002). ‘There oughtta be a law against bitches’: masculinity lessons in police academy training. Gender, Work & Organization,9(4), 439-459.

Russo, N. F. 1976. The motherhood mandate. Journal of Social Issues, 32(3), 143-153.

Schmidt, R.M., Wiemann, C.M., Rickert, V.I., & Smith, E.O.B. (2006). Moderate to severe depressive symptoms among adolescent mothers followed four years postpartum. Journal of Adolescent Health, 38, pp. 712-718.

Schrock, D., Reid, L., & Boyd, E. M. (2005). Transsexuals’ embodiment of womanhood. Gender & Society, 19(3), 317-335.

Scott, L. M. 2006. Fresh lipstick: Redressing fashion and feminism. Macmillan.

Sears, W., & Sears, M. 2001. The book: A commonsense guide to understanding and nurturing your baby. Hachette Digital, Inc..

Singhal, A. & Rogers, E.M. (1999) Entertainment Education: A communication strategy for social change. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Skenazy, L. (2010). Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children without going nuts with worry. Jossey-Bass.

Sood, S. (2002) Audience involvement and entertainment-education. Communication Theory, 12, 153-172.

Stone, P. (2008). Opting Out? Why women really quit careers and head home. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Thompson, P. J., Powell, M. J., Patterson, R. J. and Ellerbee, S. M. (1995), Adolescent Parenting: Outcomes and Maternal Perceptions. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing, 24: 713–718. doi: 10.1111/j.1552-6909.1995.tb02555.x

90 Trad, P.V., (1995). Mental health concerns of adolescent mothers. Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 34, pp. 130-142.

Vaccaro, C. A., Schrock, D. P., & McCabe, J. M. (2011). Managing Emotional Manhood Fighting and Fostering Fear in Mixed Martial Arts. Quarterly, 74(4), 414-437.

Wayland, J., & Rawlins, R. (1997). African American teen mothers' perceptions of parenting. Journal of pediatric nursing, 12(1), 13-20.

Westall, C., & Liamputtong, P. (2011). Mothering Alone: The Adjustment to Motherhood. In Motherhood and Postnatal Depression (pp. 69-100). Springer Netherlands.

Wilson, H. (2006). Deviant (M)others: The Construction of Teenage Motherhood in Contemporary Discourse. Journal of social policy 35(01):59-76.

Wolfson, A.R., Crowley, S.J., Answer, U., Bassett, J.L., (2010). Changes in Sleep Patterns and Depressive Symptoms in First-Time Mothers: Last Trimester to 1-Year Postpartum. Behavioral Sleep Medicine, 1 (1) 54-67.

Wright, P. J., Randall, A. K., & Arroyo, A. (2013). Father–daughter communication about sex moderates the association between exposure to MTV’s 16 and Pregnant/Teen Mom and female students’ pregnancy-risk behavior. Sexuality & Culture, 17(1), 50-66.

91 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Tara Mantovani Stamm is a native of Tampa, Florida. After high school she completed her A.A. at Hillsborough Community College. She then moved to Jacksonville, Florida and earned a BA in Literature and an MA in Practical Philosophy and Applied Ethics. After marrying Jason Stamm in 2007, she began graduate school at Florida State University. She earned her MS in 2012 and her PhD in 2015, both in Sociology. She is also the mother of two children, Geneva and Carlin, born while in graduate school in January of 2012 and October of

2013. Her dissertation spotlights the experiences and depictions of young mothers, the importance of emerging mixed-methodological techniques, and intersection between gender, education, and media in popular culture. She will move with her family to Richmond, Virginia to begin a full time faculty position at Virginia Commonwealth University in the fall of 2015.

92