Chapter 3: Mothering, Identity Construction, and Visions of the Future Among Low-Income Adolescent Mothers from São Paulo, Brazil

The “moral panic” generated by public response to teenage mothering marginalizes the experiences of young women as mothers, with adolescent pregnancy viewed as catastrophic for young women, their families, and society. In this analysis, focused on the experience of a group of teen women from the city of São Paulo, Brazil, the author explores how the integration of a maternal identity, shaped by Brazilian norms of “good motherhood,” with previously existing identities might lead to new aspirations and ambitions for the future or to hopelessness and despair.

Visions of the future were shaped by individual women’s structural circumstances and fell into four rough groups. Well-established adult women expressed their maternal identity through personal ambition, revealing confidence in their ability to provide “the best” for their children. Some adolescent mothers were fortunate enough to be buffered by family resources so that optimistic objectives for the future that pre-dated the pregnancy remained fairly attainable and were compatible with a “good mother” identity. For teens from less well-off families, motherhood resulted in a new-found determination to succeed in school and work, in line with ideals of Brazilian “good mothering” that focus on working hard to benefit one’s children. Women from the poorest households could or would not conjure a vision of the future, faced with the overwhelming challenges of their circumstances. The detailed, longitudinal qualitative data analyzed here reveal how the construction of maternal identity and visions of the future among adolescent mothers are shaped by the embodied experience of motherhood and pre-existing structural forces.