Family life stories among teenage mothers: Qualitative study conducted at Hospital Engativá ESE in Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

Objective: To get an insight into the structure and dynamics of the original families of five teenage mothers through their life stories and their own experiences. Materials and methods: Qualitative study with a narrative approach based on the life stories of 5 teenage girls delivered at Engativá Hospital. Semistructured interviews were used to gain insight into the organization and structure of their original families. Emerging categories were identified by means of text hermeneutics, and results were validated using triangulation across researchers. Results: The nuclear families of the pregnant women interviewed were characterized by the inability to deal with conflict appropriately, separations, structuring of new homes, confusion regarding roles, and matriarchal authority; reconstituted homes where the girls lived their own lives on the edge, where little value was attached to education, and where sexual and affective education were ambiguous and contradictory; families with expulsive dynamics where the teenage mother had to experience a world of survival. Conclusions: Our pregnant adolescents live in the midst of families with unfavorable structure and dynamics that prevent the nuclear family from responding appropriately to teenage pregnancy. Consequently, pregnancy is an unplanned and rarely desired outcome, and a situation in which the family just normalizes the pregnancy when it occurs. In this context, pregnant adolescents are the result of a chain of inequities, where schooling is not valued and competencies for coping with life cannot grow fully to become an input for development. The resilience of one of the participants is highlighted as a driver for undertaking new studies that focus on identifying those traits of the individual, the family and the couple that increase their ability to adapt to this new situation.