< Previous Map

Teenage Mothers

Map No. 136

Open PDF poster

Next Map >

A teenage mother, as mapped here, is a girl / woman aged between 15 and 19 years old who has at least one child. A map of teenage fathers might look similar to this.

A third of all the teenage mothers in the world live in India. There are three times more teenage mothers living in Southern Asia than live in any other region. The fewest recorded teenage mothers live in Japan.

Being a young parent is normal in some parts of the world, whilst in other parts teenage parenthood is a rarity. Where it is a rarity mothers tend to be considerably older - but internationally comparable data on older mothers does not yet exist.

"Attitudes towards young mothers … shift in relation to prevailing moral values, and also to some extent reflect economic conditions." Debbie A. Lawlor, 2002

Territory size shows the proportion of all teenage (15-19 year old) mothers that live there.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page