Abstract
Web and social media have reshaped how parents can face difficulties that arise during and after pregnancy. Not only these new technologies are used to gather information, but also as a way to find social and emotional support. This is particularly important for the vulnerable category of teen mothers; due to the social stigma they are left alone in facing common issues such as anxiety, stress and postpartum depression, in addition to be forced to drop out from school or leave work. During the years, several scholars have studied how technology - with a particular focus on social networking and blogging - helps mothers during and after pregnancy, but, to the best of our knowledge, little to none attention has been given to teen mothers. For this reason, in this paper we study the particular case of tienermoeders.nl, a Dutch website created for teen single mothers, on which they can meet and discuss problems, issues and experiences.
About the author
Andrea Mauri is a postdoctoral researcher at the Web Information Systems group of the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS/EWI), Delft University of Technology. For the Centre for BOLD Cities, he is involved in the Big Data for Youth Policy project.