How does adolescent motherhood affect mother–infant/toddler relationship and emotional availability

Abstract

Background

The present study examined the different aspects of infant–mother relationships in adolescent mothers and compared them in adult mothers.

Methods

Children aged 18–40 months who were referred to our outpatient Infant Mental Health Department were analysed retrospectively. Sociodemographic data, Parent–Infant Relationship Global Assessment Scale (PIR-GAS) scores, and Emotional Availability (EA) Scales scores were analysed. Twenty-nine adolescent mothers being younger than 20 years at the beginning of pregnancy and thirty mothers who were aged at least 25 years were enrolled the same data as adult mother group.

Results

In the adolescent mothers group, the education years of the mothers, the ratio of mothers having professions were significantly lower (p < 0.001); the spousal age gap was significantly higher than among the adult mothers (p < 0.001). It was also found that an underinvolved relationship pattern was seen more frequently among the mother–infant dyads in the adolescent mothers’ group than in the adult mothers group (p = 0.002).

Conclusions

Although there were not found many problems in terms of the relationship of adolescent mothers with their infants/toddlers in the current study this may have been due to a small sample, we would like to emphasise that the problems should be detected and appropriate interventions should be made for adolescent mothers.

Key points

• Our main aim for this study was assesment of the effect of adolescent motherhood in terms of infant\toddler–mother relationship

• Our findings showed that lower education level and being unemployed were higher in adolescent mothers group.

• Higher age gap between spouses was found to be associated with adolescent motherhood. Underinvolved relationship was highly prevalent among adolescent mothers

• Our findings suggest that early motherhood is a risk factor for mother–infant\toddler–relationship and parenthood.

• Intervention and education programs during and after pregnancy for adolescent girls may help them to prepare for motherhood more consciously and form established relationships with their infants.

Keywords:

• Adolescence
• mother–infant interaction
• mothers

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Written consent was obtained from parents and verbal assent was requested from children and adolescents to participate. This investigation was approved by the Ethical Committee of Ankara University, Turkey.

Disclosure statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability statement

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.