In the pilot episode of MTV’s 16 & Pregnant, which premiered on June 11, 2009, viewers watched Maci Bookout give birth to her son, Bentley Cadence Edwards, the first moments of his life, as he squawked and cried and was toweled off by a nurse, captured by cameras. Each episode that followed in the landmark show — which ran for six seasons and spawned several spinoffs, including Teen Mom, Teen Mom 2, Teen Mom 3, Teen Mom: OG, Teen Mom: Family Reunion, and the currently airing Teen Mom: Next Chapter — followed the lives of a different teenager as they faced impending parenthood, relationship problems, and the disappointment of their parents. Today, 16 years later, MTV’s cameras are still rolling — in the season premiere of Teen Mom: The Next Chapter, Maci celebrated Bentley’s birthday. He’s the 16-year-old now; his parents bought him a blue Jeep to mark the milestone.
Just five months after the premiere of 16 & Pregnant came the first spinoff series, Teen Mom, which followed the lives of four girls from that first season of 16 & Pregnant, including Maci, the southern redhead who had been an overachiever in high school while falling for her bad-boy boyfriend, and Catelynn Lowell who, together with her boyfriend, decided to place their daughter for adoption because of their chaotic home lives. Soon after, Teen Mom 2 joined the family, following four new moms, including Leah Messer, a blonde from West Virginia who gave birth to twins and was constantly on-and-off again with their camo-clad father. The spinoffs promised to pick up where 16 & Pregnant left off and follow the girls as they adjusted to motherhood. As a teenager, I was hooked, transported into lives so far from my own filled with diaper changes, fights with boyfriends, and attempts at balancing school and work and child care. Now the titular teen moms are in their mid-30s and their babies go to high-school dances and get their first cars and fight with their parents. And somehow, millions of us are still watching.
It’s a cold winter’s day in New York when I make the trek to Times Square to meet Maci, Catelynn, and Leah in the Paramount building. When I walk in, Leah stands up to hug me. They’re exhausted, they tell me, from the last few days of sightseeing, photoshoots, and filming the season’s reunion episode. Catelynn asks about my daughter. I almost forget that I’m there to interview them. Though I’ve watched them on TV since we were all in high school, it feels completely normal to be with them now, admitting that I have milk stains on my shirt from pumping on the way to meet them.
Around his 16th birthday, Maci asked Bentley if he could imagine himself expecting a child right now. “He was like, ‘Absolutely not,’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘Exactly.’ I just had to figure it out.” She wasn’t asking as a “scare tactic,” she tells me, more, “You don’t want this for yourself. I don’t want this for you.”
“Parenting a teenager,” Maci says, “you have to learn to let go and let them make decisions and let them deal with the consequences of their own decisions, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. That’s one of the tougher parts, figuring out, When do I step in? How much room do I give him before I say, ‘Hold on, we’re not doing this because it’s not going to work’?”
When you’re starring on a show with Teen Mom in the title there’s a sort of disconnect between where you actually are in adulthood, and what viewers see you as. “I do feel like they still think that I’m 17,” says Maci. “It doesn’t always click.” Maci, whose mother found the casting ad for 16 & Pregnant on Craigslist and urged her to apply, thinks her teenage self would “probably be like, ‘what the fuck?’” that she’s still on TV, half a lifetime later, as a 33-year-old married mother of three.
Was there ever a moment she wanted to step away from the show? Definitely, she says. Sometimes it feels like she has nothing left to give and she just wants to be normal. “But then I quickly realize that just because I wouldn’t be on the show doesn’t mean that everything that comes with the show goes away … if I take the blessing away, the curse doesn’t go away.” Another way of saying this: no matter what she does now, Maci will never not be the Teen Mom girl.
Being on reality television has changed the lives of women in the Teen Mom-multiverse — in some cases, lifting them out of generational poverty; for all, providing opportunities and a level of financial stability that would not have otherwise been available to them — but it’s also frozen the moms in amber. Forever linked, for audiences, to the scared, pregnant teen versions of themselves. For half their lives, the moms have made their living through relentless broadcasting and examination of their personal lives. (Though MTV declined to comment on their salaries, tabloids like In Touch Weekly have guesstimated them to be in the six figures per season.) Imagine forever being defined by a decision you made at 16 — then, imagine if your job was to not only constantly relive any missteps but also the trauma that grew out of them. In one way, Teen Mom has propelled the moms forward, and in another, it’s left them forever stuck in the quicksand of their teenage decisions, unable to move forward.
And the audience for those decisions is still growing as 16 & Pregnant and its spinoffs experience a renaissance of sorts on TikTok. Catelynn, 32, sometimes scrolls across clips of the most difficult moments of her life, like the minutes before she placed her daughter with her adoptive parents or a fight during which her mother called her a bitch. “It’s weird to see yourself on different platforms at different ages,” she says, “I don’t think it’s something anybody ever gets used to.” Catelynn has actually never watched the episode that introduced her to the world. It’s a particularly heartbreaking one, as Catelynn and her then-boyfriend, now-husband Tyler (and one-time step-sibling, during the few years Catelynn’s mom was married to Tyler’s dad) consider adoption, their parents push back, resulting in screaming fights. By the end of the 41-minute-long episode, Catelynn’s mother won’t sign the adoption papers, which leaves Catelynn and Tyler having to hand their daughter to her adoptive parents in a parking lot off hospital grounds. “She’s just kind of, like, gone now,” Catelynn cries as her daughter’s adoptive parents pull out of the parking lot. Tyler holds Catelynn as he tells her that their daughter is off to a better life.
“It’s very triggering,” Catelynn tells me. “I think the only time I’m ever going to be able to watch it is when my children ask to watch it.” So much time — and life — has gone by that Catelynn says she barely notices the cameras following her around anymore. She’s filmed through miscarriages, suicidal ideation, postpartum depression, and the births of all of her children, even the time she bought a pig on a whim (“which I don’t think I’ll ever live down”). “It’s like a documentary that has gone on for what feels like a lifetime,” she says. Since Catelynn placed her first child for adoption, she has married Tyler and they’ve had three daughters but the adoption is a continuous presence in almost every scene they film. Though the relationship between birth parents and adoptive parents is inherently complicated, this one has undoubtedly been changed by the near-constant presence of cameras. Their daughter’s parents have long chafed against Catelynn and Tyler’s predilection for sharing information about their daughter on the show and social media, asking back in 2016 that their relationship not be a topic of conversation while filming. But, as Tyler pointed out back then, this is what the couple does — they share their lives with viewers.
But the line between sharing their lives and what the act of sharing does to their lives continues to blur. On the second episode of the new season, Catelynn and Tyler suspect their eldest daughter’s parents have blocked Catelynn’s phone number. The couple also discuss their decision to share messages on social media about their feelings regarding what they see as the lack of relationship they’ve been allowed to have with their eldest daughter. (In 16 & Pregnant, the teens eagerly look forward to visits that they believe will be once yearly. As of the filming of the latest season, it had been several years since they had seen their daughter.) “I wouldn’t even call it blocking,” Tyler says in the new episode. “You’re closing the adoption.”
If Catelynn and Tyler weren’t on TV, would their relationship with their daughter’s parents be less fraught? It’s something Catelynn thinks about, she says, though she tries not to ruminate on the possibility. “I try not to sit in those too much,” she says, “because that will drive me insane.”
For some of the moms though, filming has accelerated, or at least encouraged the healing of fractured relationships. Much of Maci’s storyline over the years has focused on her ex-fiancé Ryan’s struggles with addiction and the ensuing havoc on both his relationship with their son and his ability to coparent, at one point resulting in a restraining order filed in 2018. Today, Maci doesn’t think her relationship with Ryan — which seems to have become genuinely warm in the latest season — would be the same if MTV hadn’t been there to push the two together. Two years of silence between Maci and Ryan had gone by — they didn’t even have each other’s phone numbers — when they were seated next to each other at a reunion special, encouraged to discuss their troubles. The two hashed it out onstage and haven’t looked back since. It’s not that they reconciled for the show as much as that the show had a hand in their reconciliation, Maci explains. When I tell Maci that it seems like she and Ryan are finally friends in the latest season, she laughs. While Maci says she is friends with Ryan’s pregnant fiancée, Amanda Conner, it’s more that she and Ryan aren’t holding their breath around each other anymore.
When the MTV crew first showed up to film, no one knew then what the show would become: a cultural phenomenon that, sure, prompted mockery and accusations of the glamorization of teen pregnancy, but also, one that seemed to affect actual change. One study showed a 5.7 percent reduction in teen births in the 18 months after 16 & Pregnant premiered and another found that the franchise had a “sizable impact” on falling teen birth rates in the U.S. That’s why Leah, 32, who was on the second season of 16 & Pregnant before starring on Teen Mom 2, would let cameras capture it all — her struggles with opioid addiction, two marriages and divorces, and her heart-wrenching efforts to get a diagnosis and care for her daughter Aliannah, who has a rare form of muscular dystrophy — again. “If I could prevent other girls from going through a similar situation and not being able to pursue their education or their purpose and what they’re passionate about,” she says, “I would do it over again a million times.”
Studies have shown that a child born to a teen mother is more likely to become a teen parent themselves and the moms are evidence of this statistic — Leah’s, Maci’s, and Catelynn’s mothers were all teen mothers. When I mention the fan theory — posited by anonymous users on one of several Teen Mom snark sub-Reddits and where hundreds of thousands of users gather to dissect every move of any mom who has ever appeared on the franchise’s shows — that MTV is holding out until one of the kids born on the show becomes a teen parent themselves, unlocking a new generation to film, they blanch, understandably. They’re focused on breaking the generational cycle of teen parenthood, they insist, and they want you to stop judging their kids based on their mothers. “They are a part of us, but they’re so much better than we ever were,” Leah says, her face glowing the way it does when she talks about her daughters. “Stop putting them in the same box as us. Let them grow. Let them be who they are.”
As popular culture reckons with the ethical and privacy concerns of involving children in monetized momfluencing and family vlogging, those same questions apply to children who are born into reality stardom. We’ve watched these kids have tantrums and get potty-trained and grow into themselves. For what it’s worth, the moms do tell me there are boundaries around filming their kids — the cameras aren’t allowed in their rooms, for example, and if they don’t feel like filming on a certain day, they don’t have to. But mostly and perhaps because they were born with a camera watching, the kids don’t mind filming, the moms say. This season marks the first time the camera is following the kids without their moms present: in the first episode, Leah’s twin daughters are each given their own segments as they hang out with their friends.
Leah can’t imagine what her life would look like without MTV, but she knows that one day, she’ll have to figure that out. Which is why, a couple of years ago, she got her real-estate license. She’s had trouble finding work, though, which she attributes to her participation on the show. “You’re not 17 anymore, but if that’s been documented, that’s forever out there,” she says. “It’s almost like you’re having to fight to regain the trust of everyone around you because they don’t really know you.” To not be allowed to move on from her teenage self, Leah tells me, feels like being a hamster stuck on a wheel. “It’s like you can’t get ahead.” For Maci, that’s the cursed side of being on Teen Mom. “I have to prove things double-time,” she says. “There’s the lack of respect which already comes from being a teen mom.” Add a reality-television show on top and the act of proving yourself becomes that much harder.
The struggles of being a teen parent don’t go away when you age out of teenagehood, Maci says. There are the immediate struggles — deciding whether to place your child for adoption and trying to finish high school and breaking up with your boyfriend. “Those are the initial things,” Maci says. “But then there’s the aftermath from the decisions … and then there’s what comes next.” She’s right. This is why we’re still watching.
Teen motherhood was the rock thrown into the water. Sixteen years later, we still can’t stop watching the ripples.