Introduction:

the students under study experienced direct and indirect emotional neglect by their parents within a context of social and cultural deprivation. Teenage pregnancy also involves disadvantages described by the students: loss of freedom, engagement in parental responsibilities and exclusion from the peer group, as the adolescent mother is devoted to the care of the baby.

Objectives:

the aim of this study was to establish the risk factors that play a role in teenage pregnancy from the perspective of pregnant students.

Material and methods:

we conducted a qualitative study from a phenomenological perspective. We performed semi-structured interviews with 6 pregnant students aged 16 to 19 years from a rural area in Chile.

Results:

most participants did not drop out of the school system, but they did not live adolescence like their peers that had no children, as they focused on their role as mothers and not as daughters dependent on their parents, which generated inner conflicts, anxiety, fear, feelings of guilt and frustration, drastically changing their reaction or responses to events in everyday life, accelerating the cognitive maturation process relative to their age, and changing their behaviour, needs and priorities.

Conclusions:

the results of our study raise a red flag and call for the revision and promotion of strategies for the prevention of teenage pregnancy.

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