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
 UMI Number: 3705936

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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 family 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 parents, 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. TEEN MOM 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, etcis 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 extended family 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 adoption) 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 mothers 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 16 and Pregnant, 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 1950s 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 parenting. 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 shows 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 1970s, 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 possibly a combination of both. Guttmachers policy
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 generations 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 womens 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

womans 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 1990s 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 marriages,

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, Im

doing it for my son or I knew I couldnt support my son if I didnt 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 (Oconnor, 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 mothers 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 bedtime. 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 parent 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 moms

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, Ripleys

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

Mysteries, Americas Most Wanted, The Bachelor, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The Swan,

Supernanny, The Osbournes, Worlds 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 Teen Mom 2. 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 hasnt 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, MTVs

reality television content partners with The Kaiser Family Foundations Its 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 play 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 1970s,

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 individuals chosen category.

Building on Goffmans 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 individuals 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

mothers 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 parenting styles 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 1970s 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 families, 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 seasons 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 more on the influence of expert counselors on the show see Marina Thomas critical analysis
Pathological Motherhood, Parental Relationships, Expert Counseling, and Heteronormativity: A
Framework of Anxiety and Reassurance through MTVs Teen Mom

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

mothers 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 Ambers

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 child care, 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 seasons 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

shows 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. Catelynns 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

familys 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 mothers 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 Catelynns 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 associates degree, move to another state, and begin working on her

bachelors degree by shows 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.

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 Childcare Self Care Friends Family Eating

Amber Catelynn
25 30
20
15 20
10 10
5
0 0
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

Farrah Maci
20 30
15
20
10
10
5
0 0
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

Figure 3

Top 5 Time Uses by Mom

The mothers do not breastfeed, rock, or respond to their childrens 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 mothers 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.

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 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. Catelynns 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. Ambers 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 shows 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 sons 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, Macis emotional displays and the mother who chose adoption, Catelynns emotional

displays are further evidence that the shows 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 characters 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)

Farrahs 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, Macis 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

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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

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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 teenagers 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

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persuade young people that parenting is challenging and to dissuade them from making parenting

part of their lives before their schooling is complete.

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 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

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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

drivers 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

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the mothers 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. Farrahs 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

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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 babys 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, Catelynns 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

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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 Associates degree and begin working on her Bachelors

degree. Farrahs parents take an active role in primary child care so that Farrah is able to take

and complete her courses. Ambers 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 wouldnt have to worry about a babysitter, and now Im the

babysitter so I dont 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

its on the computer you click on one thing and you dont see one thing you miss it.

After enrolling in and dropping semester after semesters 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

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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 Associates 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, etcIn 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. Farrahs 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 daughters paternity. The father of Farrahs daughter, Derek, died in

a car wreck when she was 8 months pregnant. Dereks mother refused to acknowledge his

paternity for social security benefits but later sued for visitation. Maci has the most common

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struggles with child support and custody requiring multiple interactions with lawyers and

government officials. Finally, Catelynns relationship with her daughter, Carly, and the family

she chose for her is mediated by a social worker at an adoption agency. In addition, Catelynns

step father, Tylers 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 Butlers 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

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 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

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 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

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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:

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 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

Moms 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

Moms 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 - Doctors 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 - Friends home someone else
S6 Work S19 College setting
S7 - School S20 - Gym
S8 - Doctors office S21 - Salon
S9 Daycare S22 - Mall
S10 Car S23 - Prison
S11 Restaurant S24 Adoption Ctr
S12 - Lawyers 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
child custody 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)
Mothers 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/govt
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
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 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.

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