A mid-teenage girl living out an adolescence in which her family, friends and teachers are not providing sufficient positive support to enable her to manage the challenges of changing has both the motive and the opportunity to escape. The opportunity is provided by the facts a) that she is sexually mature enough to become a mother, and b) that mothers are socially defined as independent adults, with a right to considerable autonomy and support in discharging their maternal responsibilities. The motive arises out of the difficulties of being an adolescent girl in the oxbow scheme, an environment with little in the way of support mechanisms for managing the mid-teenage transition. In a culture which has difficulties respecting and responding to adolescents, the tension inherent in hanging in there so as to ‘do’ adolescence properly becomes all but unmanageable. Teenage girls from areas of advanced marginality ‘keep their babies’ more often than better-off teenagers because the baby is a cultural asset: it promotes her to ‘the sisterhood of mothers’ (Wilkinson 1998), where everybody has to take her seriously in her own right. Rather than ‘interrupting’ her life, becoming a mother re-starts it, but at a higher level of social recognition than received by the ‘slappers’ of the week-end parties [96] or the girls who get kicked to bruising outside the corner shop. With her all-new clothed baby in a bonny pram she feels some pride, perhaps for the first time in her life. In developmental terms, the need to escape the tensions of an unsupported adolescent transition pushes individuals towards being either an adult or a child. In a culture which cannot get children self-sufficient early enough, regressing towards childhood is not a possible escape. This is also not a culture which provides much in the way of eriksonian psychosocial moratoria. Adulthood appears to be the only way out. But the full, socially approved path to modern adulthood is obstructed by her lack of qualifications and the area’s lack of second-chance opportunities for her to mastery-learn the world. When forward motion is blocked, escape on a tangent. Many young mothers appear to be on an adulthood-seeking tangent out of adolescence.
From this a question arises with respect to young mothers from deprived areas. If adolescence in the classic parsonian nuclear family [97] evolved as a psychosocial development stage in which highly complex feelings, knowledges and behaviours could be safely developed and become an integral part of a new young adult, allowing her the individually differentiated selfhood with which she could enter any part of modern society, is to truncate adolescence to forgo developing those feelings, knowledges and behaviours to the required level? And thus to forgo the social mobility opportunities which today are open only to differentiated selves, the ‘personalities’ whom Parsons saw as the functional product of the nuclear family? In other words, rather than simply running together her anticipated young adulthood with her late adolescence, such a young mother may actually be terminating her adolescence with its tasks (according to Erikson, largely concerned with identity) only partially completed. So if there really is a functional prerequisite-type logic underlying the development of adolescence in modern society, there may be penalties to pay for non-completion, not only economically (exclusion from primary labour markets), but also psychologically in the form of insufficient individuation to survive independently of close supportive relationships, typically (for Scottish working class women), the relationship with her mum [98].
On this understanding, dropping out of school may be double jeopardy for teenage mothers. Not only do they lose the paper qualifications, cognitive tools and social skills with which to break into the primary labour market, they also foreclose on their own developmental opportunities in the cultural play-and-practice space we call adolescence. So, drop out of school, lose out on adolescence – and fall out of the psychosocial developmental mainstream.
The young mother’s solution, therefore, is the wider society’s problem – not because of what the baby ‘costs’ society in benefits in the short term, but because of what the mother pays in her own development in the long term. Investing her energies in her baby rather than in herself may be more fulfilling for her, but it is less progressive for society. This is because the anticipated reproduction of individuals in the form of babies is in contradiction with the ever-extending resocialization and reproduction of society through education. In so far as British society is mediating a postindustrial resocialization process to its younger members through the school system, having a baby when very young takes the mother out of that process. As an adult she therefore is ‘pre-mature’, semi-finished; as a socialising parent she will likely form socially incompletely absorbable children. How can she give them what she never got herself? In a community with a critical mass of such mothers, the post-industrial resocialization opportunities mandated by the national political elite largely pass the youth of the community by, with knock-on effects into the next generation. And this in a manner analogous to the way in which the older adults of the community have been passed by by the income opportunities attached to the global economy. Beyond the high banks of the ox-bow scheme the revivifying river of worldly understanding flows inaccessibly by, in the same way as the global river of wealth.
To understand the full extent of society’s problem, we need to see this reproduction system at all its levels. At one and the same time a new birth reproduces:
- an individual who will have to overcome many obstacles to individuate and find personal acceptance and fulfilment;
- a family which can with difficulty produce adults complex enough for the challenges of post-industrial society; and
- a community crippled by dependency.
We have claimed that the price the ‘anticipated mother’ pays for her pram-pride is foreclosing on the cultural development required to engage with the modern economy and to profit from its opportunities – a cultural development that is now adolescence-specific. This is so not just because that developmental phase coincides with secondary school, but also because one of the developmental tasks of modern adolescence is the development of a more highly elaborated form of gender relationship, a beyond-the-body form of gender relationship whose precondition is more highly elaborated personalities. ‘Boy meets girl, boy talks with girl, boy and girl become friends’ (Ingham & Van Zessen 1998) is a more evolved interaction pattern than the drunken arelational couplings of ‘slappers’ and boys whose ‘whole world is ruled by their testicles’. It is also a kind of gender culture which is evolutionarily adapted to both the labour market patterns and the communicational demands of post-industrial society. But it is a culture which requires its semi-isolated safe niche if it is to develop. With school and college being two key niches, becoming a young mother, as one above has ruefully acknowledged, is to select herself out of the niche and its educational opportunities, both in the sense of labour market qualifications and in the sense of personal development. Double jeopardy.
But there is triple jeopardy. The price the anticipated mother pays is not the whole of the cost. She is not only losing out in her own long term, she is also setting up her child(ren) to lose out. For she is set on a course of reproducing, because of her dependence on the female family, a pattern of motherhood and a culture of family which, for all its virtues, is becoming ill-adapted, even anachronistic. Together with others like her, she is also reproducing the community – but as it is and has been, not as it needs to be if it is to re-establish productive linkages with the global economy. Anticipated motherhood thus extends the life of functionless communities which are historically marked for extinction, populating them with children more and more extraneous to the mainstream culture.
So, to say that the young mother’s solution is society’s problem is to point to the way in which anticipated motherhood forecloses on the socially mandated stage of cultural capital building in favour of a socially discrepant trajectory of constructing a mutant form of family, the management of which will usually exclude mothers from completing their own psychosocial development and can sometimes push them into the functional pathologies of mental ill-health, unhealthy consumption, and copelessness. These metathetelic adults are then responsible for managing the development of a new generation of children from birth to adulthood – but to which adulthood? The full post-industrial version (socially adapted, for all its limitations)? Or the ox-bow scheme version?
