Teenage Fathers, United Kingdom

Traditionally, teenage fathers have been an underrepresented research group. Defined as young men under the age of 25, a quarter of whom are teenagers, only relatively recently they have become the focus of research. Like teenage mothers, teenage fathers are likely to come from low-income families with experiences of social exclusion and poverty. As the literature on this [Page 1547]subject frequently conflates the terms ‘young father’ and ‘teenage father’, within this entry they are also used interchangeably. Following the accession of the New Labour Government to power in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, a body of research began to emerge in which teenage fathers were socially constructed as a risk to their child and a risk to society. In recent years, however, research has ...