“I Lost My Sense of How to Mother": How Child Welfare Involvement Shapes Young Mothers’ Parenting and Wellbeing

Background and Purpose: Young motherhood can be deeply impacted by child welfare involvement, where intervention practices include both heightened surveillance and expectations of resilience. Despite this, limited research has examined how these system-level dynamics impact young mothers’ parenting and wellbeing. This study begins to address this gap by exploring the lived experiences of young mothers involved with child welfare services in Ontario, Canada, with attention to how these interactions reflect broader structural inequities and shape parenting under conditions of monitoring and risk.

Methods: Participants included twenty-one young mothers who experienced child welfare involvement (including investigations, ongoing child welfare supervision, or having a child removed from their care) when they were under age 25 and pregnant or parenting. Participants completed an online demographic questionnaire and were interviewed by members of the research team who were young mothers themselves, via video conference or telephone. The sample was racially and ethnically diverse (29% identified as white, 29% as First Nations, Métis, or Inuit, 24% as Black, and 19% as East Asian, South Asian, or Latin American). The majority (86%) reported struggling with mental health concerns, 90% were primary caregivers for their children, and 62% indicated they relied on government assistance as their primary income or reported no income. We used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to examine their experiences and perspectives of the impact of child welfare involvement on parenting and wellbeing.

Results: Three themes related to the reverberating impact of child welfare were identified. First, young mothers described how child welfare intervention practices negatively affected their emotional wellbeing, triggering new trauma or exacerbating existing mental health struggles, and indirectly impacted their children. Second, young mothers internalized system surveillance, leading to heightened self-surveillance and self-doubt about their competence as parents. Lastly, young mothers experienced a double bind in which child welfare constructed them as risks while simultaneously denying them adequate supports to mitigate those risks.

Conclusions and Implications: Young mothers with child welfare involvement in Ontario described the harmful nature of current interventions and policies that disregard their emotional wellbeing, parenting rights, and reproductive agency, and prioritize surveillance over support. These findings highlight the need to improve the ways in which the system supports, rather than penalizes, young mothers to parent effectively and to reduce their children’s potential vulnerability. It calls for reinvestment in resources that promote young mothers’ dignity and improves parent and child wellbeing. This study also contributes to critical reflections on how research can inform more effective child welfare systems by centering young mothers lived experiences.