"I Want to be Better Than You:” Exploring Experiences of Teen Mothers in Foster Care Working to Break the Cycle of Child Maltreatment

Background and Purpose: Children of teen parents are at risk of a range of serious medical, social, and economic consequences, including low birth-weight, infant death, poor academic performance, and an increased likelihood of becoming a teen parent themselves, effectively repeating the cycle of risk. These children are also overrepresented in the child welfare system, being more than twice as likely to be placed in foster care as their peers born to older mothers. In addition, the children of teen parents in foster care are at compounded risk due to having a parent who has experienced child maltreatment. Despite this, teenage mothers in foster care describe their experience of motherhood in much more complex terms, offering a critical perspective that can be leveraged to enhance opportunity and mitigate risk in these vulnerable families. This presentation discusses findings from an innovative phenomenological study exploring how teen mothers in foster care experience working to break the cycle of child maltreatment.

Method: Using an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach, eighteen in-depth interviews were conducted to explore the meaning and experience of motherhood among foster youth. Six young women aged 19-22 years who became mothers while in foster care were each interviewed three times. The sample size allowed for both an in-depth, case-based examination as well as a detailed comparison across participants. The participants were nearly all homeless, had 1-3 children, and described extensive childhood and adolescent experiences of abuse and neglect. Participants came into care at 3-18 years old, and had experienced 2-17 foster care placements. Qualitative data were collected in the community, audio-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. Data analysis followed a six-step process, beginning with immersion into one participant’s story at a time, line-by-line initial noting, grouping of emergent themes and (slightly broader) super-ordinate themes, and a comparison of each participant’s set of emergent and super-ordinate themes in order to find a final set of themes across participants.

Results:  IPA revealed two themes key to participants’ experience of working to break the cycle of child maltreatment: 1) Treating Children Well/Parenting Differently and Avoiding the System, and 2) Reducing Isolation and Enhancing Support. Participants simultaneously expressed a sincere desire to do things differently than had happened in their own families, an intense fear of their children being removed, and mixed experiences of knowing how to be a “good enough” mother.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest teen mothers in foster care need support to maximize their desire to do things differently with their own children by bolstering their skills and hands-on knowledge of how to parent differently. They would benefit from nonjudgmental opportunities for frank discussions about substance abuse and access to a variety of therapeutic options for mental health services. Teen mothers in foster care should always be placed with their infants (unless they have perpetrated maltreatment against them) to give an opportunity for development of secure mother-infant attachment. Future research on the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment among this population and supportive intervention to decrease maltreatment risk is indicated.