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#SBIB:39A9 --- #SBIB:39A73 --- Medische antropologie / gezondheid / handicaps --- Etnografie: Afrika --- Rites and ceremonies --- Traditional medicine --- Ethnic medicine --- Ethnomedicine --- Folk medicine --- Home cures --- Home medicine --- Home remedies --- Indigenous medicine --- Medical folklore --- Medicine, Primitive --- Primitive medicine --- Surgery, Primitive --- Ceremonies --- Cult --- Cultus --- Ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies --- Religious ceremonies --- Religious rites --- Rites of passage --- Traditions --- Africa, Southern --- Politics and government. --- Social conditions. --- Alternative medicine --- Folklore --- Medical anthropology --- Ethnopharmacology --- Ritualism --- Manners and customs --- Mysteries, Religious --- Ritual

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Adolescents make up 16.4% of first-time mothers in Peru and this rate continues to increase. Most of them come from the poorest areas. Although this sociological evolution is a risk factor, government policies in Peru have seldom addressed the issue of adolescent motherhood. There very few intervention programs for this sector of the population. Therefore, more in-depth studies are required to show the needs of these young mothers. This is the context in which our study was carried out. Our psychological study explores the content of maternal representations of adolescent mothers living in poverty, and examines the quality of the interactions of these adolescent mothers with their babies. We compared maternal representations of 30 adolescent mothers (aged 13-17 years) with 30 non-adolescent mothers (aged 20-24 years) by carrying out the Maternal Representations Interview that was specially developed for the purpose of our study. Next, we compared the observed mother/infant interactions in both groups, using the Global Ratings of Mother-Infant Interaction at two and four months. We found major differences between adolescent and older mothers in a few specific aspects. Adolescent mothers seem to be more involved with their parents and are struggling with issues of dependence and independence. This makes them more ambivalent, less realistic, with a tendency to idealize more than non-adolescent mothers. Regarding the representations of the baby and of themselves as mothers, adolescents are aware that they do not want their children to make the same «mistakes» as they did, such as early pregnancy, dropping out of school and/or abandoning professional goals compared to non-adolescent mothers. At the same time, the intergenerational transmission of adolescent motherhood seems to be an important reality too. Furthermore, adolescents represent themselves as mothers who lose patience with the baby more easily and have more intense feelings of anger compared to older mothers. The differences between the two groups concerning the representations about the baby’s father basically have to do with the type and quality of this relationship. Adolescent mothers tend to have more unstable and conflictive relationships, and, in some cases, the baby’s father is not their partner anymore by the time the child is born. On the contrary, older mothers tend to live with their partners in more or less stable relations. Regarding the mother-infant interactions, differences in maternal intrusiveness and in infant liveliness are the main results: children of adolescent mothers are less lively in their interaction; adolescent mothers themselves are more intrusive in a video-typed motherchild play fragment. We conclude our study expressing the need of adolescent mothers to have protective circles surrounding them, enabling them to modify the risk factors of early motherhood and to engage in favorable trajectories of early motherhood and child rearing. We encourage early (preventive) intervention that is sensitive to the developmental needs and the socioeconomical and socio-cultural context of these adolescent mothers.