Okay but seriously, what makes an older mom any more qualified at being a mother than me? Is it that they may or may not have more knowledge in one area of life than I have in that particular area of life? Or is it an idea that people who become mothers at a young age are still children themselves? As far as I’m concerned a woman who becomes a mother at thirty-five years old has no more experience at being a mother than I did when I became a mother at nineteen years old. Any first time mother is just that, a first time mother. Meaning they have zero experience going into the world of motherhood, just as I did when I was only eighteen and pregnant. 

I get it alright, the idea that a woman who becomes a mother at an older age may have more wisdom in one particular area of life than a woman who becomes a mother before she’s even of the legal drinking age. Of course a woman who is forty years old has experienced way more in their life than your average teenager, but that’s not what I’m trying to get at here. What I’m trying to get at is that knowledge comes from experience, right? So how in the world can people place a stigma on young mothers, or mothers in general, when we all start in the same place? Where do you pull the idea that a young mother is going to be bad mother compared to an older mother?

In todays society there are many five year olds that know more about how to navigate an iPad than there are adults that know how to navigate an iPad. The average age of a first year physician is twenty-nine, yeah, you read that right. Twenty-nine. Thats only eight years older than me, which means that a mother who didn’t have children till she was in her late twenties would most likely be taking her children to a doctor whom is younger than her. But if we place the same stigma that is placed on young moms on everyone else, including doctors, that would mean that a thirty year old mother who has never even taken a health class outside of high school would have more knowledge than a doctor. 

You see where the flaw lies in the stigma that young mothers could never be as great of mothers as older women can be? I graduated from high school in three and a half years. Normally an average high school student spends at least four years on their high school diploma. So, in half a year less than the average student, I learned the same curriculum and gained the same knowledge that the student who spent four years on their diploma did. Knowledge comes to people in their own time, no one person has the same knowledge package that the next person has.  

My lessened experience of life, simply because I am younger, does in no way affect the amount of knowledge I have of being a mother. I started off the same as any other mother did, with no experience, and by that I mean zero experience in being a parent. Many parents/mothers babysat at least one child before they became a mother, but babysitting is a whole other ballgame. You cannot know motherhood until you have experienced it yourself. 

I take my children to many activities where I see no other young mothers, many of the mothers at these activities have one or two kids and are in their late twenties or early thirties. Now that’s not to say that most young mothers don’t take their children out to public events, its simply to point out that number one; there are not as many young mothers as there are average aged mothers. Number two; many young mothers that are put into the stigma are nervous to go out and participate in these activities. 

The stigma is vicious, although I don’t think that you should become a mother until you are ready, no matter what age you may be. I also don’t believe that any one group of a certain age of mothers should be qualified as any less of mothers than another group of different aged mothers. We are all mothers, no matter our age. We all change dirty diapers, wipe sticky hands, and read thousands of bedtime stories. A mother is a mother, no matter her age. Stop the stigma and just support each other in the crazy world of motherhood that absolutely NONE of us were ready for.