Supporting Adolescent Mothers: A Journey Through Policies, Programs, and Research

Abstract

Several months ago, during a routine office visit, a patient I’ll call Brittany told me she was getting married to her boyfriend of five years. Her adolescent daughter, whose health care I have provided since birth, was to be her maid of honor. Would I come to her wedding, she asked? With satisfaction, I considered how our 17-year journey together began when Brittany was a pregnant 15-year-old girl in our BRIDGES program, funded by an Adolescent Family Life (AFL) Care Demonstration Grant. Back then she was a diffident, troubled adolescent living in a blighted Baltimore, Maryland, neighborhood with her siblings and single mother. We provided Brittany with school-based prenatal care, guided her parenting with a tailored curriculum, encouraged her to delay additional pregnancies until she was older, and supported her to remain in school. Today, she is a confident, productively employed 30- something in a committed healthy relationship and has successfully raised a smart, well-adjusted 17-year-old daughter about to enter college on a scholarship. I thought back to Brittany’s pregnancy and the early years following her daughter’s birth. At that time, there was little published research to help guide the development of support programs for pregnant and parenting adolescents. What role, I wondered, did our AFL program play in her success as a parent and in her own life course?