The title of this volume, When children become parents, is deliberately provocative. Indeed, in the US, this slogan has been used to render teenage pregnancy a key social concern (Pearce, 1993; Maynard, 1997). The phrase implicitly denies teenagers the capacity to make autonomous choices since young people are not considered as adults (Pearce, 1993, p 46). The main reason why this phenomenon has become a public issue is because successive governments, regardless of their political orientations, have portrayed it as a social problem since the early 1980s. As delayed childbearing is becoming the norm in Western societies, teenage pregnancy is being portrayed as a socially deviant phenomenon called ‘early motherhood’. Young people who have children while they are still financially dependent can thus be referred to as ‘children having children’, an expression that reflects a moral judgement made on their behaviour. They are stigmatised because they are seen as socially deviant. Indeed, in industrialised countries the average age at first birth has increased while births to teenagers have more than halved since the early 1970s (see Table A1 in Statistical Appendix at p 244). Moreover, the births to younger teenagers (aged 15-17) are a very small proportion of all teenage births. As early motherhood is declining and as births to older teenagers (aged 17-19) represent the vast majority of teenage births, the concern with teenage pregnancy in industrialised nations might seem paradoxical. This concern reflects a change in social attitudes. According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), ‘the reason for this change is that teenage parenthood has come to be regarded as a significant disadvantage in a world which increasingly demands an extended education, and in which delayed childbearing, smaller families, two-income households, and careers for women are increasingly becoming the norm’ (UNICEF, 2001a, pp 5-6). According to the report, teenage births represent between 6 and 14 per 1,000 in Continental Western European countries, between 18 and 31 per 1,000 in the UK and some other English-speaking countries and as high as 52 per 1,000 in the US (see Statistical Appendix, Figure A1 at p 241 for more recent data).