Including Young Mothers: Limitations to New Labour’s Strategy for Supporting Teenage Parents

Abstract

As part of its Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, New Labour has focused on ensuring more teenage mothers enter education, training or work, in order that they may avoid ‘long term social exclusion’. This paper argues that this conceptualization of the route to social inclusion is problematic for young mothers in that it ignores the structural and contextual barriers to them gaining inclusion, it discounts full-time mothering as a valid option, and it neglects the social and moral elements of their exclusion, while in fact contributing to this. A broader understanding of social inclusion is therefore advocated, which emphasizes the significance of social belongingness and community participation, along-side economic self-sufficiency. Data are drawn from interviews with 14 young mothers who act as volunteer ‘peer educators’ in school sex education, to illustrate the ways in which this wider conceptualization of social inclusion might be more useful in meeting the needs of this group.