This paper describes the writer’s experience of carrying out doctoral research exploring links between childhood relationships and adolescent motherhood. It presents some of the findings from the study - ‘What can young mothers’ accounts of their childhood relationships tell us about why they become parents? An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis study of mothers aged 16–19 supported by the Family Nurse Partnership’, which was conducted through a psychoanalytic lens. Some of the relational dynamics uncovered in the young mothers’ accounts were unanticipated and striking, and may help clinically with understanding adolescent psychotherapy patients’ losses and longings. These include the absolute dominance of adolescent mothers’ mothers (extending even to maternal grandmothers and great-grandmothers) in the interview data, participants’ excessive experiences of being projected into, and the psychic difficulties caused by a fragile relationship between their parents.