Drawing on in-depth interviews, I analyze how teen fathers talk about the responsibility for having a baby at a young age. In addition to negotiating the stigma often associated with teen pregnancy, teen fathers also confront stereotypes that label them as selfish and uncaring. In telling their stories of “what happened,” they utilize three gendered discourses to deny responsibility for the pregnancy: the feminization of birth control, a discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire, and love. Their narratives also reveal the (...) ways in which gendered norms can solve some problems while creating others. Aligning themselves with certain notions of masculinity can serve as a resource for denying responsibility for the pregnancy while also signifying their manhood, but these same discourses are also constraining in that they reinforce stereotypes of teen fathers as selfish, even predatory. While these approaches may allow teen fathers to claim masculine identities, they also stigmatize them as the wrong kind of men. In short, teen fathers are not only negotiating the potential stigma of teen pregnancy, they are also negotiating their identities as men. (shrink)

This article presents a genealogical examination of the emergence of governmental concern with ‘children having children’, focusing on the work of the London County Council and local voluntary organizations in the 1950s and 1960s. The article explores the moral-Christian discourse shaping governmental work with ‘unwed mothers’ and identifies the discursive shifts associated with the ascent of the problematization of ‘teenage motherhood’. It is argued that within the moral-Christian discourse, a woman’s subjectivity was delineated primarily according to her ‘character’ not her (...) age or her ‘maturity’. Furthermore, the prospect that a young unwed mother will raise her child was viewed positively as it was seen to contribute to the desired transformation of her character. The shift to a concern with ‘children having children’ was linked with a rise in the influence of psychological discourse on government work. Two psychological notions were particularly important: the proposition that teenagers are emotionally immature and the assertion that inadequate mothering has a lasting effect on the health of a child. The article concludes that unless contemporary scientific claims regarding young people’s psychological and physiological maturity are challenged, the ‘problem’ of teenage parenthood will persist in the years to come. (shrink)