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The group for teenage mothers is held once-weekly at the Brandon Centre, a walk-in centre for adolescents. The mothers meet in one room with Tessa Baradon and Viviane Green (staff members of the Anna Freud Centre), while the children are looked after by two of ourstudents, Gemma Rocco and Caroline Essenhigh in a nearby room set up as a crèche.
We began the workshop discussion by giving a resumé of the referral procedure and went on to talk about the composition of the teenage mothers’ group, individual histories and group processes. Of the initial 9 who came for the interviews, 6 attended the group at some point, with varying degrees of regularity, and 3 formed a more stable core. The drop-outs included one young woman who was severely depressed. Another was a girl who had made a number of recent suicide attempts and was expecting her first child. The young women who did attend the group found it difficult to do so regularly. Besides other engagements such as hairdressing appointments which were perceived as being of greater importance, for some sporadic attendance was an expression of a general pattern of disorganization, and for others it reflected their anxieties about commitment and involvement. Issues raised in the group touched mainly upon their situation as single parents: housing, state benefits, child-care, etc. Feelings associated with this were often ‘politicized’, although there was also a shared experience of feeling helpless and uncared-for. It was difficult, in the group situation, for them to get in touch with more basic anxieties, but each young woman had occasion to meet alone with the authors, which gave the opportunity for them to share their problems such as depression and their feelings about their bodies.
The two students described vividly for the workshop group the children's experience of being separated from their mothers during these meetings, and how each child handled this. It was apparent that the mothers’ difficulties in responding appro